Earthbound : A Masterful and Deceptively Modern Classic


When you look at my account, you might think that it seems like my prolific gaming career means I’ve played almost all of the games most people consider “classic must play video games” and that couldn’t be further from the truth and that’s actually something I’ve been meaning to repair since I have massive gaps in my gaming culture that I never got the chance to fill and the Mother Series was one of those.

A week before finishing Earthbound I went through Mother 1 which I only did a short review on as despite the game being surprising in a few areas, I didn’t have much to say but don’t think it means I don’t respect the fuck out of Mother 1, it’s a janky mess of an early 80’s RPG in which the jank was cleverly integrated into a subtle but terribly effective narrative throughline which lead to yes a lot of frustration but also one of the best ludo-narrative experience on the NES alongside another long-time favorite game of mine : Dragon Quest III (which is the smartest JRPG on the planet and if you haven’t played it yet, what the fuck are you even doing with your life ?)

But now’s the time to talk about the real meat and potatoes as I enter the realm of cult-classic beloved RPG’s with Mother 2 aka Earthbound (and sorry if I bounce back between the 2 names during this review).

Now playing Earthbound in 2023 is kind of wild, I had some history with trying to get into the game, I always started it, played the first few hours up until the first sanctuary and then I always kinda just forgot to continue or push forward perhaps because my attention span is indeed terrible or because some things I was more interested in came up while I was trying to play it.

But what I meant mostly is that Earthbound is pretty much the precursor of an entire memetic genre of games, the so-called “Quirky Earthbound-Inspired Indie RPG with horror elements (optionally about depression)” which I’ve experienced and some of which became some of my all-time favorite games of all time, games like Undertale, Lisa or Yume Nikki which and others that I’ve also quite liked such as Off, To the Moon, Oneshot and others I found depressingly overhyped (might say it but it’s Omori, sorry).

So my experience with Earthbound was a bit odd because being the basis and the foundation of something that was expanded upon for years by other people meant that I didn’t know if I was going to be thoroughly enthralled by the experience.

And yeah ngl, the start of the game was about the same as the other time around, the start of Earthbound much like Mother 1 is a bit rough, just getting past Frank and his robot was a pain in the ass and I didn’t really have any incentive to continue the game as it was fairly basic from the outset but… the true brilliance of this game is that it hides its best content past those relatively basic and tedious first couple of hours.

Because as soon as you enter Twoson, shit start getting crazy, freaking hobos starts attacking you at the flea market, you have to stop a cult that’s a parody of the Ku Klux Klan but who wants to paint everything blue and it only get crazier and crazier from there.
One thing that’s actually pretty impressive with Earthbound is how much it still holds up in comparison to many of its modern clones, the humor of this game and the situation you find yourself feels like they don’t belong in a game from 1994, the game feels like it came out yesterday on Steam and people went crazy about it from its biting commentary on American culture to how bizarre and hypnotizing some of the setting and situation you find yourself in can be, Earthbound is a weird game but it’s a game with lots of charm and most of all a true sense of adventure as you go far and wide to fulfill the prophecy and defeat Giygas, I actually love how little we know about the guy until we meet him, he is an ever-present overwhelming force but he hides himself cowardly in his lair and you a simple little kid represent the biggest threat to his existence as he shits himself.

Heck even by the end of it, you still don’t know what Giygas is supposed to be, sadly I knew what Giygas looks like from years of exposure to meme about this game and cultural osmosis but I have no doubt that if I had met him an earlier age after going through the numerous wacky antics of the story, I would’ve deadass shat my pant and much like Ness, I would’ve probably called my mom crying because what is this legitimately, what is this entire endgame even it’s so fucked up !!!

The game has a very earnest almost candid like approach to RPG that feels completely different for its time period and the weird part is that it’s not just wacky for the sake of being wacky or wasting your time, your goal is set from the start and everything you do stems from that goal, heck the game even split up into multiple path like the original, while I was playing through this game I actually skipped straight from Melody IV to Melody VII without even noticing and without the game holding me back on my decision to do so.

It’s a game all about wonder and surprise, it’s a sincere piece of art that captures the heart of the small children that lives inside your head and it even managed to speak to you as an adult, some lines in this game actually hitted me deeply with how right they hit with my current circumstances and as someone who’s not really living his best life right now being far from being the children I used to be and craving a simpler time through simpler games with lower stakes, I think Earthbound came right into my life at the best possible time, no wonder I couldn’t get into it before, having the right mindset going into this game is essential to appreciate its beauty.

It’s avant-garde without being pretentious

It’s post-modern without being cynical

It’s childish and naive but without taking you for an idiot or insulting your intelligence

And even manage to be a somewhat decent RPG with competent and unique dungeon design, resource management and even some unique novelty in its main mechanics to not make it completely basic beyond the aesthetic of it all.

However I will say that inventory management is awful and the game has perhaps some of the most obnoxious implementation of "enemies on the map" that I've seen yet but it hardly ever matter, you get used to it after a while since the game is still thoroughly engaging at every turn.

Earthbound is a one of a kind game, it was one of a kind in 1994 and still today I find it at times more touching, more sincere and better executed than a lot of its clones who often come up as pretty tryhard. The game is funny as shit too like I didn’t expect to actually laugh out loud but this is amazing. What can I say except, just play it ! You might find yourself a new favorite

ill post my ramblings with terrible grammar here while waiting for the DLC
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In DeS you trick the environment,
In DS you adapt to the environment
In DS2 you interact with the environment
In DS3 you speedrun the environment
In ER you discover the environment

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"Heresy is not native to the world; It is but a contrivance. All things can be conjoined."
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so first thing I notice in the game is that you do not really choose gender at all, you only choose body types and they just so happen to be feminine, masculine and such. Which is something you do in Monster Hunter and probably a lot of other games too. But more I played more I went back on that idea and it felt ludonarratively important.

when you explore the world, clashing identities are recurring in main bosses, which are allegorical beings to how lashing out against fundamentalism caused several ways of life, all still 'rooted' (pun intended) in fundamentalism and its divisioning perspective - people being mistreated has made them to internalize as to how world is supposed to be made and then it reflects on their external beliefs or whatever they are doing. A lot of them have several identities and none of their identities are ever really established/highlighted for being the real one (the correct one, if you will) - or how they came to be. For all I care the possibility of having several identities is not even highlighted textually or at least not in memorable enough manner for me to recall - connecting the dots and understanding is completely on you, immediately after you come face to face to such individuals.

anti-divisioning is not only regarding individuals but at the very least in-game items too. When I first started collecting items that give you souls or whatevers the currency in Dark Souls 7, first thing that caught my eye was how they are not really named in varied manner like they were in other Soulsborne games, but now you can see that I managed to overthink its narrative importance.

Main trio are main character, marika and miquella I think.

Miquella is referred as a man but also has identity of a saint which is a female, (but only formally) going away from fundamentalism and golden order and wants to create shelter for literally everyone. Its never really confirmed whether Miquella's body is a male or female or intersex though, which may happen in the DLC.

Marika is also Radagon and they both are trying to do different things, reflected on how Marika wanted to shatter the ring and how Radagon wanted to repair it. we don't know which one is the real one of course. If either one of them is, at this point of their existence.

then there is Elden Beast that controls them and maybe even some higher gods dictating its fate, almost as if a foil to the player itself who controls the main character.

Since the very beginning (of the game) value is given to being embraced, remembering, learning and whatnot, hence the need to be given comfort and affection, that which cannot be physically attained by Marika (or alike) since these identities can't really touch one another and are being isolated from their alleged loved ones (Godfrey, who can barely contain his civilized pretense and mentally melted Renala)

One thing about Elden Beast, though, is how it does not really have any identity that can be divisioned, establishing as a figure that completely contradicts the fundamentalism despite being its very inventor.

main character of course has no clashing identities whatsoever, main character will be whatever you want to be, self-insert is everything, serving as a force of nature that optionally could overrun all of these old ways of living and accumulate it all into identity of their own. More importantly, our self-insert could also gain knowledge from their encounters and direct experiences completely on their own volition, reflected on gathering spells and delivering them to masters/teachers - foiled by Gideon who mostly just gets intel from everyone else and gives up, using said research against you if you were to overshare said information on your own. After all you are the only one in the world who has not lost the taste of the grace.

If you merely finish the game and get its basic endings, you only get endings that feel like afterthoughts and are anti-climactic - of course, the ones you get by collecting runes of old that you continue to follow. Actual endings, however, come from the exploration and end by the evaporation of the world and its ways, finally freeing the world from divisioning all things, an ending towards which Marika has been guiding all of Tarnished all along.

This subverts the expectations of the 'old ways' of playing Souls titles, where it all started from 'David and Goliath' type of gameplay and degenerated into 'git gud' mentality by the end of Dark Souls 3, where people castrate themselves into spearheading entire game instead of trying out different things. Here, like in Dark Souls 2, you shall liberate yourself from the one-dimensional playstyle and keep trying out different things - and by the end of the story, instead of choosing whether to run away or get swallowed or whatever like in other Souls games, you need to discover different endings and may even give up on the throne that has always been meant as a systematic trap to misdirect your ambitions.

(the way I interpret, Marika in her madness could only lash out by guiding you towards Frenzied Flame ending, but Melina grew to gaining her own agency, so that you would choose something else)

after this I read how the world of Elden Ring is alchemy conceptualized as a fantasy world (not really sure where does the concept of homunculus fit in here) to make a commentary on how artificially divisioning the world through both faith (religion) and reason (intellectualism) severes the connection between (wo)men and causes both internal and external identity issues and throws the whole world into the state of perpetual stagnation.

I think final boss in itself is not to be seen as individual entities but they in unity represent a traditional marriage into one allegorical being. in alchemy elden beast would be something like Rebis (explained in elden beast trivia on the wiki) which is sort of an angellike figure, in itself a hermaphrodite, but Elden Beast also is a parasite of a traditional woman and a man (or rather, they represent what is an ideal of a woman and a man in the world) and I think they all influence each others mind as Radagon and Marika can swap with one another and Elden Beast resides there all the same, so its not like Elden Beast has more control over Radagon than Marika. So a hermaphrodite divides itself into a man and a woman

but an irony is that all of the off spring (I think all) are born as queers, with these identity issues where they can't be a traditional person fitting to order's understanding, all of them are impure, with or without incest involved.

instead the only one that comes out as 'unalloyed', as in pure, is Miquella, who may or may not be intersex themselves (could be a nice reveal in DLC), but despite going away from the order, he/she still divides themselves into identities of a man and a woman, unable to free themselves from the deeply rooted, conditioned mindset. After all, whatever discontent you feel, or your wish to change the world - all futile - as unless the very root is burned down, it will always grow the same fruit.

so 'elden RING' in itself is a symbol of marriage and that symbol of marriage transforms itself into a BEAST (could be a religious beast akin to son father and holy spirit), revealing that marriage in itself is animalistic and a woman is a pray while a man is a weapon, a tool of the order itself. While the order itself is non-divisioned being, it still uses divisionment on purpose to control sentient beings and their nature.

which is foiled by another marriage and countered by an Age of Stars ending where MC and Ranni have a queer relationship and companionship where they venture on adventure of discovery instead of being stuck as a lonely existence the way Marika did. Instead of burning down the world, you make use of everything you have learned to creatse something anew, something completely alien to the concept of divisionment, whatever it may be. Radagon could have been entirely different being, or one made by Elden Beast to fulfil the role as the intellect was required rather than Houx being a representor of brutal age that could only pretend to be civilized (as Godfrey failed to live up the standard of being an ideal man as it has always been an unnatural pretense generally speaking, so did Radahn, failed to live up to self-imposed standard that was Godfrey and became an actual animal, incapable of being human and got forever prisoned to massacre his own beloved men - or rather, he did, in fact, became what he aspired to, without learning what he was wishing for as he never knew who Godfrey was in reality and as dream turned real, it was his worst nightmare). Or could have been created by Marika's conflicting thoughts and desires. not sure if its ever stated objectively since identity matters are not even stated or rather, are rarely (if at all) stated in unreliable manner by unreliable narrators.

Bunch of characters and bosses you encounter naturally are also foils to your path, but that's the case in every above average story anyway so I won't bother recounting them.
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I feel like game itself could greatly benefit from not having such tame encounters throughout the entire game, where you keep only meeting 2-3 monsters piled together even in the endgame, which is actually pretty easy so long you level vigor (there is not much to even level tbh, its not Dark Souls 2, and yet you can obtain almost as much levels by the end of the ER - I think I was around 130 level in around 50 hours). But I guess game is just not optimized well enough for that.

despite the big size I think levels themselves are a bit too short, but unlike what they did with DS3, the world actually feels lived in with how you can randomly keep meeting praying monsters, or maybe even singing (this is dragged down by how reskinned monsters are scattered around the world, serving as a reminder of artificiality, but there are barely any games without repetitiveness around so I can forgive it) and playing on instruments and in general its as if they tried to make the world with set-pieces that feel like paintings, you can feel the how these things were in the concept arts themselves and access them all in a single ride from different angles. Although that does take a hit on how generally levels were meant to be built up in Souls formula so that the gameplay with its encounters could feel methodical, making Elden Ring a lot less concerned to be 'a game' in comparison.

On one hand, bosses (naturally excluding mini-bosses) are easily the best among any Souls games, despite just being a base game - but mostly as duels, since game is was not really concerned to make fights that are more than just a duel in open-field(ish) arenas. So on the other hand, you can clearly see game is not really experimental in some of the aspects - it does not feel like you can play around bosses like you can in DeS for instance (where you can get silent walking ring so that blind bosses won't ever be able to see you) as they do not have much gimmicks beyond getting an item to stun them or block one of their attacks and you can't weaponize environment against them to my knowledge, since locations also pale in comparison to, say, DS2's Zelda-like levels. They also are not really 'obstacles' which was making certain bosses interesting in previous games, but nonetheless their destruction in this game happens on your volition.

But, as I said, game is moreso focused on discovery, to the point of the most of the game being pretty much optional. One of the sections of the open world is technically hidden level, complementing the narrative and roads and shortcuts in-between these levels also need to be discovered on their own right. Needless to say, my appreciation of the game skyrocketed here. People blasting through the game with walkthrough open may not be into it, but I dig it quite a lot. If we were not be living in the age of internet, discovery of Elden Ring would not feel like a checklist, but an actually amazing effort. I hear how people talking about the discovery losing its magic in 20 hours, but its exactly these post 20 hours of gameplay sections are where you start discovering actually interesting, exciting areas, start discovering the secrets and how the world functions in hiding to further make use of what you have learned in another parts of the world (which was the intention all along) - even if catacombs and such feel rather cheap, they still adhere to this very ludonarrative - and discover an entirely hidden continent thats also the best section of the game and is not even a repetition.

Miyazaki I believe has said how specific creatures being in specific areas and not being repeated has always been part of environment story-telling in his mind and I can understand people who criticize the repetition in Elden Ring likely have that older perspective, but I believe this time repetition itself is also environmental story-telling and benefits the idea of the world (namely its lowest common denominators) losing (or never even attaining) the semblance of individuality they may or may not ever have had.

I have also seen people complaining about how collecting souls and stopping the process of being a hollow have always had meaning in Souls games and apparently its not the case for Elden Ring but I beg to differ - Runes are the world you are supposed to understand through which you understand yourself and give your own meaning. All in all, completely subverting the age expectations and conventions of Souls games and further evolving them (alongside the way bosses fight you by reading your inputs and all)

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Unfortunately, day and night system does not have much substantial additions to the gameplay, unlike, say, Dragon's Dogma.

You can also feel how Souls formula was not really made to be open-world be it how you can just skip through everything since enemies can't gang on you so hostility of the environment goes out of the window and theres not much really to do after killing everything aside from collecting materials or whatever), so I mostly see it as an atmospheric build-up to good old dungeons, rather than game's main appeal. It's polar opposite to Demon's Souls (where you just choose and teleport to whichever level-line you wish) and the culmination of its structure - there you needed to at least kill the final boss of any other level-line and then you could turn DeS into a linear game and head straight to Allant. Whereas in Elden Ring you can kill any of the two bosses after going through their respective dungeons (whether you 100% their dungeons or not, as they hide a lot of secret sections) and then turn ER, too, into linear experience by heading towards Elden Beast.

(though I still believe Demon's Souls is the most interesting Souls game mechanically)

ER of course also grants you freedom to go anywhere you want, anytime you wish and even if the game admittedly gets patterned, most of the time game compensates on itself by upgrading said patterns. Fortunately I have not even met most of the double bosses, which brings me to what makes me appreciate it openness - I do not 100% games, at least on my first run, so replayability comes from how each time I can just take different paths in the game instead of burning myself out on the first one, which I think is the same for most of the players, as well as how developers intended to create the game.

Mickey: Hey everybody! It's me. Mickey Mouse! Say, you wanna come inside my clubhouse? (pause) Well, all right! Let's go! Aw, I almost forgot. To make the clubhouse appear, we get to say the magic words -- Meeska Mooska Mickey Mouse! Say it with me. Meeska Mooska Mickey Mouse!

Chorus: M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e

Mickey: That's me!

Chorus: M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e

They Might Be Giants: It's the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
Come inside, it's fun inside
It's the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse

Man: Roll call! Donald!

Donald: Present!

Man: Daisy!

Daisy: Here!

Man: Goofy!

Goofy: A-hyuck! Here!

Man: Pluto!

Pluto: (barks)

Man: Minnie!

Minnie: (giggles) Here!

Man: Mickey!

Mickey: Right here!

They Might Be Giants: It's the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
Come inside, it's fun inside

Chorus: M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e

Trails of Cold Steel 3 : The Troubles of Continuity


As I’m playing through this series and writing these reviews, I came to actually question my own sanity.

Why do I keep up with this ? “This makes no sense” I ask myself, there’s so many games out there, so many experiences that I’d rather be having than playing through these titles. Some of my friends who have followed my journey and have shown much more appreciation than me towards this franchise all told me to stop.

“You’re simply not getting it” they say, “You nitpick every aspect and don’t let the games enthrall you by its simple yet sophisticated beauty” they say, “It was never about class warfare but rather imperialism, you literally have reading comprehension issue you fat fuck” some of the more virulent people said.

And yet, here I am, still on the grind, still trying to find out the appeal of this admittedly niche RPG series made by the video game company equivalent of your local Pakistani Store Clerk selling you its finest expired bottle of room temperature sangria for you and your friends at 1am on a Tuesday. If this wasn’t apparent on the tone of my previous two reviews as well as my admittedly less vitriolic but similarly mixed reviews on other titles in the series (“Trails the 3rd” aside), I don’t particularly hold this one close to my heart and by that I mean that despite this being the 8th entry in the series, I never became a “fan” of Trails.

“Fan” is a strong word to describe my relationship to this game series. I appreciate a lot of what the series tries to establish though. The scope and ambition on such a multi-generational scale is something almost never before seen in the history of Japanese Role-Playing games. The only 2 exemple that comes to mind is the Suikoden series that I’ve mentioned countless time in my reviews (and I still advise many Trails fans who haven’t got the chance to try it out to do so expeditiously) and the Rance series that I’ve also mentioned in my previous post and which you can even get to see a review of its ninth episode on this very account (and this one is a bit touchy to fully recommend unless you are really as open-minded and shameless as myself).

But these 2 cases never really reached quasi-mainstream appeal, Suikoden is appreciated by many people in the old-school JRPG community but less so people who grew up on more modern hardware and even so, the Suikoden franchise got discontinued by its own developer Konami because they’re still in the top 3 worst gaming company in history. As for Rance, well, after 30 years of services it finally ended its run in 2018 in one finale conclusive episode that has yet to be translated (and which I’m extremely excited for) and even then the franchise had to pretty much reboot itself in the early 2000’s to reach a wider audience and recalibrate its lore (which is mostly contained outside of the games themselves).

Trails for now has existed since 2004 meaning that next year, the series will celebrate its 20th anniversary and ever since the release of the first title, they’ve pretty much been super consistent on releasing these games to the point that starting with Cold Steel 3, the games will release on an almost yearly basis.
No other JRPG series has this much potential for quasi-autistic level of brain rot. It’s also interesting to note that all of the franchise's thorough worldbuilding and lore is contained entirely within the games themselves. Each games comes with its set of NPC’s who changes dialogues for every minor advancement in the plot, there’s an almost nuclear level of attention to detail and little easter eggs to find (some of them missable through pretty cryptic conditions), entire Skyrim book size novels you can gather as collectibles in each titles to get the characters final weapons and which foreshadows events to come.

Other franchises would make you do extra-homework to get the juice out of that stuff but here all of that extra-homework is integrated into the actual gameplay loop, you don’t usually have to reach for an obscure novel or interview where the author says all elves are gay or something like this to get juicy tidbits on the world around you and it helps those games feel more lived in and fleshed out than any other setting in the history of RPG. And at the core of it all, it’s a human story, it’s called “Legends of Heroes” not because you play as heroes but because you hear about them constantly, you just play as the random little people who yes are going to save the world from impending doom but you’re never going to be on the same level as the heroes of old.

In Sky FC, all of that game is spent running around the world and hearing how much of a badass your dad is, how much good he has done for people and how inspiring such a person is and yet he’s a military general. To some he probably is a war criminal but to his people, he’s a hero and you’re just playing as his kids. It’s a very Dragon Quest V approach although that game was more thorough on one’s journey to adulthood.

And yet, I never found myself to be attached to the point of autistic obsession (and for context, I’m literally autistic, I swear I’m not just using that term as a meter for how addicting fictional crack can be) and it’s weird isn’t it ? I should be all over a series like this, I should be celebrating its ideas and hailing those games as an example for JRPG’s to follow like it seems to be the case with most of the people who play these games but for the most part I don’t and I can’t really explain myself why.

The lore and on-going mysteries of the universe are only marginally interesting to me as they are attached to some elements I’m not super crazy about (aka : Ouroboros and their “plan” more on that later). The themes the series explores can be fascinating in spurt but the actual execution always finds itself lacking and I guess most importantly it’s the general package that I find to be a tiring drag at best and a grind at worst.

Many hail these titles as hidden gems or even must-play masterpieces of the genre but I don’t see it myself and for cause, I think they’re lacking in several areas where most other RPG franchises or individual games don’t. Trails is so derivative of the trend of its different eras and not always to the series benefit. I know the JRPG genre is a big hodgepodge of mutual influences that keeps bouncing from another but that still doesn’t mean a series can’t have a solid identity on top of it all and Trails definitely has one… and then immediately abandons it to follow the next popular trends and causing the series to lose its sense of consistency.


At times, it’s hard to imagine CS1 and CS2 were either planned or thought out by the same minds who imagined the Sky or Crossbell saga and yet here we are. I guess this is also due to the fact that the series main head lead Toshihiro Kondo doesn't actually have much control or hold over the actual development of these games, perhaps due to the fact he’s too busy running the company than actually working on titles himself. So this series despite being this long sprawling tapestry of ideas that are meant to fit into one another don’t actually have anything resembling a true solid artistic vision.

And that’s what happens usually when a series goes for so long, people change, people get older, teams are reformed, priorities and aims get rethought and eventually you end up with something that divides people rather than unite them under a common front.

There’s a reason why many enduring franchises in the history of JRPG don’t usually do the whole continuity thing or when they do, it’s very sparse and almost a non-factor. It’s because titles such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tales Of, Shin Megami Tensei always try to reinvent their wheel, proposing new settings, new universes, new lore so that everyone can jump on any titles and get a fully complete experience and also allowing new creative leads to put their spin on them without compromising the sanctity of other titles.

Yes of course, some of the game in the Final Fantasy series had sequels but most people agrees that their often times inferior and an hindrance on the original game legacy (hi collection of FF VII) but Trails is different because unlike those franchise it decides to stick to its gun and have this continuity play a big part of its development history and that means that this game series more than any other JRPG franchise need a strong vision to hold itself together.

You can say that despite me not being a fan of Trails, I’m still somewhat fascinated by its ever-growing popularity and the sheer praise all across the board the series get (even for Cold Steel believe it or not), if anything it’s fun to discuss about these games, to theorize about them, to talk about what they did wrong, what they did right. For how much vitriol I gave the first 2 Cold Steel games, they still occupied a masochistic part of my brain, I couldn’t think about anything else.

More than anything, when I dislike something beloved by many, I find myself questioning “why can’t I like this ?” Especially something like Trails that literally has almost all of the ingredients to make for the perfect blend of JRPG goodness because I really want to like Trails. I'm jealous that I can’t be a part of this cultural effervescence, being a Trails fan is like a commitment, it’s a promise, it’s like being a part of something.

This franchise somehow has put a curse in my brain that forces me to desire more, even when I know I’m going to probably end up frustrated or disappointed. If anything, the promise of Trails is a beautiful one ! It’s the promise of being a part of something bigger than yourself, something that will follow you for how much longer it wants to be, even running to the grave. It’s grand, it’s infinite, even at its worst it's presented with such confidence that you can’t help but want it to succeed and you want it to be at its best because I know it can work, I know how good these games can be when they actually try and by god… I WANT TO LIKE TRAILS AND IT FRUSTRATES ME THAT I CAN’T ! IT’S LIKE BEING A KH FAN ALL OVER AGAIN FOR ME ! IT’S A ROAD PAVED OF GOOD INTENTIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS !
Trails is like a toxic relationship, it hurts but somehow you can’t get away from it, it’s a slow acting poison that hurts your brain and every Trails fan, as cult-like as they are, feel like crypto-scammers pulling off a successful rugpull. I don’t know why I keep going with this franchise but I sure am too deep into this to back down, I should’ve probably done so years ago.

Do I think the Trails promise is fulfilled or is it a promise filled with lies and self-sabotage ?

Today, I want this review to be less of a review and more of a thought piece on my troubled yet loving relationship to this beloved series.

Because if anything, Trails of Cold Steel III finds itself in an interesting spot when it comes to the history of its own franchise and in many ways feels like a turning point that the franchise will have trouble ever coming back from.

Trails of Cold Steel III was released 3 years after the end of the previous episode, funnily enough that’s also the length of the time separating the event of CS2 to the event of that game in canon. Yes ladies and gentlemen this game is a timeskip arc much like One Piece did midway through its run. As such Trails of Cold Steel 3 had the time to actually think about ways to actually improve its formula and also its presentation and in many ways let me put it briefly, I did actually enjoy Cold Steel III more than its two predecessors at least on some of its more frivolous elements.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, CS3 is the first game in the series to be entirely designed for home consoles, specifically the PS4, while the game isn’t winning any medals in technical prowess, the game is overall kinda pretty and has an overall nice art direction. Some people might write the entire thing off as generic anime bullshit and they’ll be right, but at least it doesn’t look like a PS Vita game with “cutscenes” that looks like a puppet show by the world's worst puppeteer. The environment design allows itself to be much more detailed and creative, most of Western Erebonia’s location are far more striking visually and more memorable as a result than any town or cities from the first 2 games and while the dungeon design can be up to discussion, I’d say the roads and the more “natural” environment definitely are more pretty to look at.

CS1/CS2 had awful direction when it comes to its many cutscenes or extended dialogue section which wasn’t helped by the absolutely colossal size of the character roster which didn’t help setting up these scenes especially with the limited budget and that problem definitely carries over in the late game of CS3 when the party is fully complete and you get an especially hilarious scene where Rean enters an hotel room followed by 14 character model slowly walking and trying to fit somewhere onto the screen. Here most of the scenes actually have proper stage direction and feel more cinematic which is what one could expect from a 3D video game from the year 2017 and is probably the results of Falcom’s experimentation on their previous title (and most successful title in their line-up) “Ys VIII : Lacrimosa of Dana”, which already significantly improved the presentation from that series.



The action segment are hype, there’s multiple camera angle and some pretty creative use of direction to convey certain feelings or emotions even during the more intimate moments and while we’re not reaching Square’s level of cinematography (this ain’t this series forte anyway) it’s definitely cool to see that Falcom is finally coming into their own to match the rest of the industry instead of falling behind as their status as a double AA studio would’ve suggested (even if the most technically impressive thing about that upgrade is the addition of bouncing physics on the ladies which were… certainly an interesting priority from the studio to say the least…). Another cool thing I could mention about the presentation is how seamless the battle transition are, previously in the series you’d be teleported to a different area entirely here Trails decide to take on the more standardly modern approach of having the battles take place directly on the field and while it doesn’t really matter from a strategic perspective (or at least very little) it’s a pretty cool thing to see and speaking of battles.

A lot of things actually changed between CS2 and CS3 when it comes to the battle system, in my review of Cold Steel 1, I’ve mentioned that while the general fluidity of the battles has improved I still felt like the game was a significant downgrade compared to the series earlier output because of how it streamlined the customisation process to an almost baffling degree making for a less fun and engaging battle system (definitely not helped by the series jump to 3D) that was easily breakable and rendered many of the series core mechanic (namely its magic system) completely obsolete. CS2 in particular was a broken mess of a game, thanks to this game being balanced around late game abilities which made most of that game an easily breakable one even by accident.

CS3’s takes a lot of the more solid elements of the battle and progression system of its two predecessors and expands on them in surprising and interesting ways. First off, the battle UI has changed from a circular menu system to something similar to Super Mario RPG or Persona 5 where each button corresponds to a menu. It needs a little getting used to after so many games of using a similar UI but the change really is welcome and greatly improves the fluidity of battle. Links and Brave points are back and better than ever. First off, Links aren’t tied to bonding points anymore and while it removes the gameplay reward of bonding events I don’t think it really matters because it’s definitely an improvement. Now links levels ups by having the characters linked to one another which was already the case in the previous two games but here it grows much faster and makes it so that pairing any characters with one another instead of just Rean a much more viable option.

But now chaining link attack to obtain brave point actually is more interesting this time around, in the previous game chaining attack had two purposes :

-Triggering passive abilities to help you in battle
-Gaining brave points that could be used to unleash a small combo attack known as “rush attack” for the price of 3 BP or an all-out attack known as a “Burst” which makes the entire attack the opposing team.

While these mechanics are still present, they’re now counterbalanced by the addition of a second use for Brave Points : Brave Orders. Brave Orders are instant buffs that can be applied for a set number of turns and stays active for the remainder of those turns and are only canceled out by the end of that order or the activation of another.

A mechanic quite reminiscent of Master Arts from Trails to Azure which sadly were not all that relevant as they were tied to the rather slow growth rate of Master Quartz in that game and were as such an entire mechanic relegated to the endgame (and even then, more so the final dungeon).

Brave Orders are a fantastic addition to the game battle system as it makes them more dynamic and offers new options to approach fights or get yourself out of tough situations and this game has plenty of those especially early on to make their usage more than necessary to bypass some of the game's tougher challenges. In fact, due to some nerf to crafts (especially support ones mostly replaced by an equivalent in Brave Order) and the addition of some brave orders encouraging that playstyle, Arts are now more relevant than they used to with some brave orders outright removing casting time or boosting magical damage output to absurd degrees. Arts were always presented as the best option to deal huge damage but because of the way CS1 and CS2 were balanced more in favor of crafts (which were plenty in that game with most of Class VII being absolute beast on that front), arts became completely irrelevant and the way the orbment system was changed as to give you less flexibility when it comes to getting spells and the available pool of spell selections, literally there was no real reason to give a shit about it.

In fact, Orbment have also been slightly touched up to go in that direction, now instead of one master quartz, each characters can equip up to two master quartz and stacking their effects to one another, you can even set another character main master quartz as its sub-MQ in order to do interesting combo builds which greatly improves the flexibility that was lost with the orbment system. Unfortunately this means a lot of Quartz who are simply giving out spells (most of the time the ones you get early on in the game) becomes complete filler as 2 MQ fully leveled Master Quartz on one character is more than enough to give you a full kit of Offensive and Support Crafts at your leisure.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean than sticking to a strict craft-centric playstyle isn’t viable (especially on normal difficulty which is how I’ve played the game) but it’s really cool to see Arts make such a comeback which also ties to a new combat mechanic in this game known as “break”. If you’ve played FFXIII (or any JRPG released since 2009 who seem to have ripped off that mechanic) then you’re probably familiar with this. On top of having a HP bar, enemies now have a break gauge that you need to deplete in order to “break” their stance which cancels out any buffs they might have, delay their turn as well as skipping it when reached and of course making them more vulnerable to attack and receive extra damages.

So now the objective is less going to be about strictly depleting the enemies HP’s and debuffing them when necessary (since debuffs unfortunately still doesn’t work on most enemies sadly) but breaking their gauge to then chain their asses with your most powerful abilities by combining all of your tools to make tons of damage and even not make them play at all (by the end of the game, it becomes quite ridiculous when some bosses just straight up did NOT attack me for the entire duration of the fight).

Some enemies such as bosses can enter a “enhanced” state that makes them stronger encouraging you to break them as fast as possible as to not get your ass kicked and it’s overall a pretty fun system that keep each encounter engaging and the customization aspect being put in the front of the battle system once again truly makes it a really fun game to play.
Unfortunately, some elements within the game kinda ruins the fun of such a system and I’m going to cite them for good measure :

The boss design in CS3 is noticeably god awful in more ways than none, almost all boss encounters have the tendency to have an instantaneous un-cancellable healing spell (which also acts as an all-encompassing stat buff) they just randomly spam whenever they feel the need to, that’s pretty much true of 80% of the numerous boss encounters in this game and it becomes so tiring that eventually most of the boss-fight will make you want to cheese them rather than engage with this rather annoying mechanic.

On the topic of boss fights, there’s definitely some weird power creep when it comes to the speed stat of most of the game major bosses, what I mean by this is that for some reasons a lot of bosses have an insane amount of speed and can just play for multiple turn without letting you play at all. One of the bosses late into the game (the Dark Dragon) on top of having annoying healing spells, also summons a shit load of minions which are all faster than you but worst than that, all of his attack are meant to delay your turn or force you into a state of slow agonizing death as your turn gets skipped because of a random status effect which forced me to just endlessly tank hit with damage resistance order and spam S-Craft for survival and it wasn’t fun at all. A non-negligible number of bosses and even regular encounters operate on the same logic, so if you’re willing to play these games, I suggest finding ways to upgrade the speed of your characters as soon as possible as it is perhaps the single most important stat in the game.

I also said the game was more focused on giving priorities to Arts but for a good chunk of the early game all the way to almost the end of the second chapter is pretty stingy when it comes to giving you Sepith the currency that allows you to upgrade your orbment and customize your characters more. This makes a lot of the early game encounter stupidly difficult because of a clear lack of option rather than because it’s a fair challenge and on the opposite side, the late game gives you an over-abundance of options thanks to the roster of playable characters growing exponentially to eventually attain a number of playable character that’s somehow higher than what Trails the 3rd gave you and that game was built around the idea of having so many party member to switch from whenever necessary.

I say this because the initial cast of characters, namely New Class VII, are overall pretty well-balanced and work in pretty good synergy with one another. Their brave orders are not too stupidly broken and encourages you to make strategic use of all of your available option but rather quickly in some segment of the story and during almost the entirety of the end-game, you will be joined by several characters most of which have absolutely stupidly unbalanced battle orders that completely nullify any semblance of challenge in the last few hours of the game sometimes to a ridiculous degree as it’s simply going against established power-gap between some characters inside of its own lore (namely McBurn who is always claimed to be the strongest baddest motherfucker around but melts when Laura equipped with the domination quartz does little as to breathe in his general direction).

On that last point, the game does mitigate that issue a little bit by having many fights where the requirement to finish them is not to beat the enemy but to reduce its health to a certain percentage. It’s kind of an artificial way to keep the consistency between gameplay and lore power-level but the game completely forgets about it by the end which makes it pointless.
Lastly and coming back from CS2 are the mech battles and this time around they’ve been vastly expanded upon than its original incarnation and as such feels like proper boss fights with actual strategy involved. For starters, Valimar isn’t the only playable unit during those fights and you can be joined by two other characters with their own mechs and their own playstyle. The game keeps a lot of the fundamentals of the original system where it’s a guessing game of touching the enemy in certain area of their body to unbalance them and chaining attacks but it’s definitely less arbitrary and with more characters on the field, some of those encounters become much more strategic and the system also incorporate the burst and break system from regular fights which makes them much more dynamic.

Most of the mech fights in these games aren’t particularly difficult tho and much like CS2 mostly serves as some sort of victory lap to conclude certain key point of the story but it’s also terribly badass to get to fight the 3 Aions from Trails to Azure in giant mech fights when they didn’t have the luxury to have those in the game they originally came from which makes for some nice bit of fanservice in a game already filled to the brim with it.

In fact let’s segway into my next segment right away and talk about CS3’s approach to storytelling, worldbuilding, exploration, game structure and fanservice and the reason why I think CS3 is both a return to form for the series who chooses to heavily embrace its legacy and an unfortunate turnover that may as well stopped me from being fully engaged with its main proposition.

CS3 is a game which is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its own arc and even the whole series as whole. On the surface CS3 is both a continuation of what came before it and some sort of a soft reboot of its own arc bouncing off of new foundation and re-focusing on establishing a new story arc within the Cold Steel Saga. What this entails is that unlike the other arcs in the series which were constructed in a “Build-Up” and a “Pay-Off” game similarly to how old PS1 games divided their stories on multiple discs due to space limitation except each disc is its own fully complete game experience.

In the case of the Sky Arc this resulted in a trilogy in which its first 2 games constituted the main bulk of the story they wanted to tell and the appropriately titled “Sky the 3rd” was an isolated story set in more or less the same premise and served more the purpose of an anthology title expanding on minor plotlines and characters from the previous two game while preparing the terrain for the future (and despite its very derivative, experimental and budget direct to dvd nature is arguably the best game in the entire series but you’ll have to check my review on Sky the 3rd that I probably plan to re-write at some point to truly understand my position). The Crossbell Arc stuck to a duology format and skipped the anthological third game in favor of a more tight and complete experience (even if Azure ends on a pretty sour note which obviously sets up the events to come in the Cold Steel series regarding Crossbell).

Cold Steel on the other hand is 4 games long and instead of being a huge game divided in 4 discs, it’s rather 2 games both with different aims and themes which are loosely connected by the throughline of Osborne Shenanigans and Rean Schwarzer doing some Rean Schwarzing. What that means is that CS3 is less a sequel to CS2 than it is a second intro game in the middle of the arc (which creates some issues down the line, more on that later).

This can be explained by 2 factors, Falcom troublesome development cycle when it comes to these titles and an excess of ambition due to the scope of the region presented in the arc (Erebonia is a much bigger territory with a long running history draught in different war, conflicts and different cults and even other races running the place, Erebonia being “the land of fairytales” as the game says at some point). Initially Cold Steel should’ve been 2 games one focusing on the eastern part and one focusing on the western part but due to the games becoming too long for their own good and Falcom having trouble transitioning to the HD era like most of their contemporaries (which hit them even bigger due to the company smaller size) both of these titles were separated into four rather than 2 and we already see how that became an issue with Cold Steel 2 which had very little to say with its plot in comparison to the actual length of the game (which was filled with countless hours of fetch questing in a quest hub in the mid-point of the game reminiscent of FF VI’s World of Ruin).

As such CS3 being an intro game feels somewhat like a repeat of CS1 both in its ambition but also its story structure. We go back to the rigid chapter based structure of CS1 and the rest of the series ditching the three act structure of CS2 and we also go back to a very similar repetitive routine of “Fetch questing at school then fetch questing on road trips” with all the same stop of “old school house, free day, practical exam day and train trip” that made CS1 a drag to play for most of its runtime but this time around CS3 has less chapter and as such less places we actually go to, you could think this would mean that the game would be much shorter and you’d be wrong because each of the game 4 main chapters last for an ungodly amount of hours and could each constitute and entire SNES RPG length by themselves and I mean that both for the better and for the worst.

So all of the ingredient were there to make this game a terribly boring and mindless experience, the mandatory spinach to go for the desert and while it is true on some level and we’ll develop that in a bit, I can say that this game at least make an actual effort in an area Cold Steel traditionally spectacularly failed at and its : The Characters.

I can’t believe I have to state this as a major improvement because you’d assume than any games of that length would at least put some effort in its characters but the first 2 Cold Steel might as well had the worst cast of characters of any RPG that I’ve played and that’s saying something when I played some pretty heavy stinker. In many RPG’s, there would usually be a few weak link or some characters you simply can’t fucking stand, for CS1 and CS2, if you go back to my review of those games, you’d realize ALL and I mean ALL of them were underwhelming, annoying or outright bad to the point that the side characters (like my sweet and beloved Towa who actually gets to play a bigger role in this game and I’m happy for it) and even the fucking NPC’s were miles more likeable and interesting despite not being the main focus of the story. It was a failure on all levels and even the sequel couldn’t elevate them to anything other than a nuisance to the story and this was also not helped by how Rean was characterized in CS2 which ended up killing all the interest I had in the character and gave me a lot of disdain for him.

In comparison New Class VII looks like they came from a completely different dimension and had a completely different narrative design philosophy behind their writing to the point that I’m actually shocked they belong into the same series as characters such as Machias or fucking Laura of all thing. Let me put it simply, I love New Class VII and I love them to bits. It's not my favorite cast in the series but they definitely reach the same standard as the SSS.
Probably in response to the criticism made to the cast of the first two entries as well as other technical difficulties of having such a large roster from the get go, the initial cast of CS3 is composed of only 4 characters (Rean included) later joined down the line by two other additional party members during the midway point of the game (and which aren’t really a surprise since they show up in the opening) for a total of 6 characters, a far cry from the 9 initial party members of the party that evolves into 11 by the second game. What that means is that unlike CS1, there’s no real necessity to separate the team for balancing issues or to procedurally introduce their gameplay style over the course of multiple hours and that’s great because that means that New Class VII can have something the original never actually had : An actual group dynamic.

New Class VII actually talk to each others, take actions together sometimes without needing Rean’s approval on everything, not all of their relationship involves sucking Rean’s dick off (well outside of Musse that is but that’s because she’s an horndog which is set on making Rean fired) and they even develop relationship with one another. There’s even a slight hint at a potential romantic pairing with Juna and Kurt and while I’m not especially crazy about it, it’s been a while in this series where romance was allowed to exist outside of the main character in the available vagina equipped individual breathing in their general direction for more than 5 seconds. The interactions between these characters are really nice, they have cool back and forth with one another, they feel like an actual group of friends and you get to actually see their relationship form and grow unlike Class VII which they tell you these characters care for each others but really they just all collectively care about Rean and that’s about it.

They also are much more nuanced and fleshed out characters than their senior counterpart, you feel like these characters weren’t just made with one word making up their entire personality this time around. Juna is definitely the outlier of the bunch in my opinion, she’s probably my favorite character in this game (probably because she’s literally Lloyd with tits and more personality woops) and some of the scenes later on definitely cements her as one of my favorite character in the series, she could’ve easily taken the protagonist seat instead of Rean and I wouldn’t have minded. The only unfortunate thing about Juna is that her entire existence is a retcon, she feels like Graggle from the Simpson when they talk about how she’s super buddies with the SSS (but really only with Randy tbf) when she wasn’t even a playable character or even an existing one in some version of the Crossbell arc. I would’ve much preferred if Juna was just an SSS super fan and a Lloyd Larper trying to find an identity of their own to carry on the fight that the SSS couldn’t continue themselves as a real passing of the torch moment, it’s a missed opportunity but she’s still an amazing character nonetheless.

The other cast members are also nothing to shy on about, Ash is a punk with attitude who constantly disobey the rules, gambles and partake in underage drinking while still having a soft spot from time to time, he’s definitely the most entertaining character and his problematic behavior contrast well with Rean’s new position as a teacher trying to set him straight and speaking of setting thing straight let’s talk about Musse.



Musse is not the most well appreciated character in the game simply because the entire schtick about her is that she’s a 16 year old temptress trying to bait Rean into the dark side of Discord moderation. Personally, I like Musse, they could’ve made a character like this much more awkward if they wanted but thankfully Rean’s newfound maturity allows him to quickly set boundaries between him and her which creates a somewhat fun dynamic of playful one sided flirting between the two that got a few chuckle out of me since Rean is trying really hard not to get fired and I just kinda like her mischievous little devil attitude which actually hides her real identity as this game version of Lelouch VI Britannia funnily enough that I’m curious to see more developed in the upcoming game (actually one of the only thing I’m excited to see developed in the sequel… because… well we’re not there yet so let’s move on).

Altina is a daughter type character, in this game you learn that her and Millium are artificial beings known as homunculus and while Milium is this peppy little girl who jumps around everywhere and feels a wide array of emotion, Altina is closer to a robot and is only learning through being around her classmate and Rean that she’s more than just a tool for war and she can be an actual human being with feeling. Some people might say that she’s just Tio again and yeah, she kinda is a K-Mart brand Tio but I don’t really mind it as much as her arc differs in some areas and since she’s also the closest character to Rean by that point, it makes for some interesting retroactive commentaries on what happened in the first two games (and probably the only relevant connective tissue from 2 to 3 aside from the late game revelations of CS2).

Lastly there’s Kurt…

Kurt…

Well…

He… exists I guess ?

Yeah sorry, I got nothing on Kurt, all JRPG parties need to have a few weak links and he’s definitely one of them. His entire deal is trying to live up to his family’s legacy and … yeah his existence makes you wish Mueller wasn’t completely shafted by the developers of the game honestly, I don’t know Kurt is kinda there, he’s inoffensive and has a few cool moment but he’s as basic as a “boy with sword” archetype could get.

BUT WHAT ABOUT REAN THOUGHT ????

In the last episode of my Kiseki journey, I said that Rean went from a character I was neutral about to one who actively grinded my gears for the entirety of CS2. I still don’t really care much about Rean, I still think he’s one of the weakest aspects of this arc and since he’s the main protagonist so much of the element in the story revolves around him. However, I will say that the premise of his character in this game at least makes him more tolerable. Rean is now a teacher at Thors Academy instead of being a student, this new position of power alongside his experience in the first two games at least makes him somewhat wiser and is a more interesting foundation for his character and the relation he’ll have with the rest of the cast.
Rean is also directly punished for his lack of decision making and spine in the original game, so he’s now pretty much tied on a leash by Osborne who uses him to do his bidding. Rean, of course being the little bitch that he is, agrees to play into the Ironbloods game and is forced to do shit against his will. That lack of agency coupled with Rean not really knowing what Osborne is cooking is going to be the main hook of CS3 and I’d say that for once it’s a good thing. Rean being forced to do stuff that he doesn’t want to do well… Actively forces him to take a position and do stuff rather than bitching about not doing stuff and bullshitting his way into acting up anyway without really thinking about the consequences of his action and when you know how Rean is when he actually HAS agency over his actions, you can’t help but think that it’s a better outcome for his character rather than the contrary.

That doesn’t stop Rean from being spectacularly flat in this game, not helped by the plot tendency not to clues us in or develop what’s the deal with him and Osborne in this episode and only playing cat and mouse with your expectations once again to make you excited for the sequel (as all of those Intro games tend to do just be gigantic teaser for their sequel anyway).

The plot also completely gave up on Rean being a nuanced character whatsoever, he seems to have troubles due to some events that happened in North Ambria and some level of trauma from losing Crow in the previous game but much like CS2 these elements are not strong enough to counterbalance how much of an absolute unstoppable giga chad he is at any occasion, in fact because Rean is an instructor now, everyone thinks he’s this real badass mf that can’t do no wrong and multiple time within the narrative are meant to show just how strong Rean has become and how heroic he is. There’s a hilariously out of touch scene rushing at super speed to stop some soldiers from killing themselves and I’m sorry but it’s so over the top and corny that it makes it impossible for me to take this seriously. I’m also pretty sure that Rean is slowly but surely repeating his self-doubt arc from the previous two game on the pretense that his traumas are lil bit more believable than killing a bear as a child but since the game never expands on what happened in North Ambria and all dialogs points out to him having done nothing wrong because god forbid Rean doing war crimes while actually killing people in war to actually affect his mind and give him PTSD, what do you think this is a mature video game ?

But I think that’s enough about talking positively about the game here, I’ve promised a thought piece, not a review and I just wanted to get most of the positives out of the way first to prove to you that while I’m on the side of the game being a general improvement over the first two Cold Steel games, it doesn’t mean that the game was a success in delivering on all of its ideas and that’s probably why CS3 won’t end up joining its brethren in keeping the series afloat and bring back the standard of quality brought by the older entries as the shadow of Falcom’s wacky game and narrative design philosophy come creeping its way back on the soup no matter how fresh the ingredients are.

CS3 has a bit of an identity crisis because it's both a sequel to what came before it but also seems to want to wipe the slate clean and build off on new foundations. We already stated how CS1 was a game designed for a new generation of players who wants to be introduced to the wonderful world of Kiseki and as such it kept most of the reference to earlier entry to a minimal and didn’t really dare involve elements from older title too much (sometimes very inelegantly, such as Ouroboros being first introduced in a throwaway line in the mid-game).
What I mean by that is that the game isn’t really a sequel to Cold Steel 1 or Cold Steel 2 and the main conflict that was the central piece of these two games (the class warfare between commoners and nobles) is only a foot-note within the story. The Civil war did happen and is mentioned at several points throughout the game but the actual main conflict which started the whole thing and how it affected the country is completely glossed over and never mentioned again. CS3 doesn’t seem to be interested in bouncing back from how poorly it handled its political themes in the original two games and it’s really strange how little CS2 and the events that transpired in that game actually matters in the plot of CS3.

Perhaps Falcom realized how poorly it handled the entire thing and seem to want to sweep all of it under the rug but it’s nonetheless very bizarre that the game never actually properly addresses the consequences of the civil war and how it could’ve probably affected the public's perception on nobility and how the noble faction got punished from such careless action and seems to only want to pretend that the very existence of the noble alliance and its action wasn’t the result of some deeply rooted systemic issue but rather the folly of a couple of bad apples within the noble faction namely Duke Cayenne and Lord Albarea (which btw, CS2 explicitly said was the bad apple of the noble alliance and the noble alliance didn’t claim and actively wanted to stop this man from committing the atrocities he committed in Celdic so that’s even fucking crazier).

Heck one of the first character you meet in CS3 is Aurelia Le Guin, a former general of the Noble Alliance and a pretty minor character from CS2 who has been appointed as the principal of the branch campus and was even said to be a major player in the annexation of North Ambria a couple of years prior to the events of the game. The game will rarely if ever explain how Aurelia never got punished for her crimes, if she still believes in the ideals of the noble alliance, if she has some resentment for Rean (she seems to have none) for stealing the glory of the alliance, none of that shit is explored, Aurelia just seems to exist to be badass and steals the character arc Laura should’ve had in this game.

Another thing that CS2 spectacularly fucked over is how it portrayed the civil war and by that I mean that it didn’t portray it at all since most of the action took place in the western region and what part of Erebonia are you visiting in this game ? Well of course, it’s the western region ! And yet, the civil war is only a passing thought, everything seems to be normal, no citizens seems to have been harmed by the situation, no citizens seems to hold resentment towards the nobles, no citizens seems to try and heal from potential traumas or loss brought forth by this seemingly pointless conflict. Absolutely none of that thing is explored even when you are actually visiting the Province who belonged to Duke Cayenne himself (remember ? The Antagonist of the previous game ?) where the only thing that seems to matter is to try and elect a new Duke Cayenne (in fact Musse later reveals herself to be Duke Cayenne’s niece like what is going on with the world ?!?!) and trying to gain the favors of the population.

This is such a bizarre turn over and seemingly makes CS2 an even bigger waste of time than it actually was since it seems to matter very little into the plot of this game. In fact the only conflicts that seems to matter for the game’s plot is the annexation of North Ambria, a war that isn’t explored or explained to you at all unless you’re reaching for an optional book found in Towa’s house and was only ever shown in an anime released 6 WHOLE DAMN YEARS after the release of Cold Steel 3 and it’s weird as shit since it seems that it was a pretty big deal. But the game does not really care and wants to start over on new foundation.
I must ask myself how did they plan out this scenario sometimes because making it so none of the important stuff from the previous 2 games actually matters into its third entry is pretty wild, you could literally be skipping CS1 and CS2 and just read a summary of them and you will have almost the same level of comprehension as someone who actually got through the games. WHAT IS GOING ON ?

A friend of mine who actually like these games (and we’re still in good contact despite his dubious taste in video games) was constantly repeating to me that I was looking at the Cold Steel arc wrong and that it really wasn’t a story about the division of social class and how these dynamics affects and changes society, but rather about the “fear of imperialism and how to act against it” which is represented by the Osborne faction. And while he’s definitely right on some level (because I don’t think CS3’s handling of this topic is particularly stellar either but I’ll develop this further down this already long essay)

You may think that maybe Falcom did this as to make this entry more accessible to newcomers who might want to start the series with this one in spite of this being the third entry in the series or to focus on the new conflict of this new sub-arc without having to deal with the dust left by their failure at delivering anything of substance for 2 whole damn games but surprisingly and that’s the whole paradox of this episode, despite wanting to act as a soft-reboot of its own arc and a potential new jumping point to the series for newcomers, this game more so than any other entry in the series hinges heavily on the series everlasting continuity and constantly referencing past events from older entry in the franchise and in fact the main conflict of the narrative this time around is definitely more focus on the lore of the franchise rather than a singular theme or even political stakes like it was the case with Azure and the first Cold Steel duology.

You see many returning faces, you get to visit places that were mentioned previously in the franchise and heck one chapter takes place entirely within a new 3D rendition of Crossbell which despite how dumb that’s going to sound made me smile despite this being just an obvious overly expanded technical flex by the developers but hell if it didn’t work on me.

These moments are also treated with the utmost respect for their legacy, at one point you visit Hamel a place where one of the most tragic event in the series happened and you get to visit the grave of Loewe the second main antagonist of Sky SC and the most memorable character from that game and its treated as this solemn quiet moment like you’ve just stepped into sacred ground and as a somber melancholic rendition of Silver Will plays over flashbacks from SC, you feel some level of faint nostalgia mixed with uncertainty as you walk towards that gravestone and it’s probably one of the best story segment in the series.

At one point, you get a boss fight with Arianrodh in a setting similar to the moment you fight her in Azure complete with the same theme song from that game and an equally high step in difficulty and it’s literally so freaking hype it’s insane.

So yeah, I think that on average, I didn’t completely loose any kind of attachment to the series continuity since literally all of these moments made me enjoy the game significantly more than its predecessors and made me happy I stuck with the series despite it all but here lies another issue of … what do you even do between these member berries moments that are obviously meant to please old time fans of the series ?
Well…

That’s something we’re going to discuss now to observe how Falcom pretty much lost control of their own ambition once again and ended a game that could’ve been the long awaited return to form the series needed into pretty much its death sentence.

Cold Steel 3 suffers from what I will refer to as “Tales of Syndrome” (and please don’t see a criticism of that franchise as I happen to have a lot of sympathy for it). Like I mentioned in my first review of CS1, “Tales of” tend to compensate a passable/mediocre story with other things such as a great combat system, some technically impressive stuff for their time (I’m still blown the fuck away by Tales of Phantasia technical flexes like what the shit) and most importantly, incredible cast of characters and amazing characterization which its “skits” system is no stranger too. Oftentimes, it’s not surprising to see a “Tales Of” story fumble near the end or heck even in the middle of it, Vesperia is an amazing game up until its last 10h or so which completely annihilate any credibility the story had left.

However, the “Tales Of” series is different in one key element : It’s standalone. It’s easier to forgive a Tales Of game for not delivering because at least it’s not going to ruin your enjoyment of other entries in the series (“Graces F” corny ass writing ain’t going to ruin how stellar “Abyss” was for exemple.) and more generally it’s not going to feel like all the hours you’ve spent playing these titles weren’t worth it. “Trails” on the other hand and especially the one puts a higher emphasis on its world building and its different geopolitical stakes. Trails will always go in excruciating detail about how almost every facet of its universe works (I mean for fuck sake, how many JRPG series will stop you to infodump you on freaking Tax laws) and as such, you expect the series to do something with all of the stuff it’s setting up and as such expect nothing but excellence from it (and with this series, excellence is always close but never reached).

You can’t just disguise yourself as Yasumi Matsuno to be Yasumi Matsuno, Cold Steel and the Trails series has a whole has a rich universe but for the most part I feel like the franchise likes to use all of that as a carrot at the end of a stick to make you keep playing rather than something that truly wants to say anything and what is a rich detailed universe if it’s wasted on shitty character trope and weak stories.

Cold Steel 3 abandons the main conflict it desperately tries to establish for over 2 games in favor of another more lore-centric conflict. Instead of Noble and Commoners, the story revolves around Ironbloods vs Ouroboros which is less risky but also not as interesting because… well… if you think about it for a second… What does the game even want to say with this conflict ?

For the first time since Trails in the Sky SC, Ouroboros take center stages in the narrative of Cold Steel 3, I’ve ranted multiple times about how I don’t care much for Ouroboros but I think in this particular case since they’re in the forefront of the narrative, I will probably make my position a little more clearer on them.

I think Ouroboros is a hindrance to the series' ability to tell intriguing and interesting stories with its universe since their very first appearance.

First introduced in Sky SC, Ouroboros has quickly been presented as the main antagonistic force of that game but the ending of SC and some elements from Sky 3rd showed that Ouroboros are not done yet and they’re here to stay. Trails in the Sky FC had probably what is in my opinion the only good villain that the series ever had : Richard. Richard’s motivations in that game were believable, understandable and worked in tandem with the kind of setting the original Trails in the Sky wanted to portray. In fact, Richard is a character that only gets better with time because all of the stuff he warned us about and the very reason why he did the things that he did pretty much became true as the series moved forward.

However, Richard’s much like many other similar villains in the series (all of varying quality : Dieter was pretty much like Richard but was robbed due to Azure’s obsession with introducing a bigger fish to raise the stakes even when those were already pretty high and it wasn’t necessary to do so) was used as a pawn for Ouroboros which were the people who helped but most importantly used and manipulated Richard to further their own agenda.

What agenda you may ask ?

Well wouldn't you like to know ? Haha…

Ouroroboros to me is a complete enigma, it’s like their very presence exist solely to make the story worse and it’s not helped that most of the lore surrounding the more supernatural aspect of the universe (and thus what the villains will eventually seek to further their goals) are sought after by them too. Ouroboros introduction in Sky SC was dubious at best, they forced the game into a repetitive sluggish structure for most of its run and their saturday morning cartoon personality which only existed to prop up other characters in your party didn’t really help. And whether or not you like Weissman, I also think it was a mistake to make him the first big shot of Organization XIII since apparently according to the game, he was a renegade to the cause and to the plan.

But what plan ? What cause ?

Well… wouldn’t you like to know ? Haha…

Ouroboros are, for lack of a better term, annoying. Falcom really wants you to think of them as this chaotic organization with people of all horizon working together towards a certain goal but then it also wants most of its members to be a free atom that can do and think whatever they want and even temporarily or permanently leave them without any consequences especially for its enforcers since the Anguis (Team Magma Admins type of beat) seems to be all obedient to their grandmaster. A lot of fans told me that I’ve always misread Ouroboros as just “mustache twirling villains” but to be frank… there’s not much elements pointing to the contrary so far in the series ? And even if they want us to think that their cause and their cause is just… maybe a hint towards that cause would help.

But Falcom refuses to let us know, Falcom will just forcefully put them inside of a game’s plot and since they’re the main antagonistic force driving the overall plot forward that means that they’re always going to be the bigger fish in the room, the only antagonist that matter because in the end any new villains no matter their motivations or how elaborate their plans are will always end up as a new pawn for Ourobozos, they’re not interesting villains to me.
Ouroboros are just cryptic and bizarre, they’re just chaotic for the sake of being chaotic. Sometimes they will help you defeat the local bad guy, sometimes they will join them, sometimes they will oppose the villain or join them when they don’t fit their agenda anymore. And it’s really hard to take them for anything but random villain of the week when that’s exactly how they behave and present themselves for most of the series only for them to make you go : “WHAT IS THE SOCIETY UP TO” and the answer always being something like….

Well… wouldn’t you like to know ?

These villains have far outstayed their welcome for me and I’m just tired of their existence and their continued influence on the franchise. It’s impossible to take any stake, any other villains seriously when they are in the middle of the arena selling you on empty promises and “mysteries” which aren’t even that interesting to begin with. In SC at least, there were personal stakes in going against them but in CS3, you only fight Ouroboros because Rean is forced to by Osborne… but other than that… this conflict is pointless and meaningless and worst of all… actually wants to tell nothing.

CS3 has the same repetitive plot structure for all of its chapters, some people say that CS3 isn’t boring because a lot of stuff happens this time around but does it really ?

You still do a lot of pointless stuff that end up accomplishing nothing not just on a micro-level but also on a macro-level. Stopping Ouroboros isn’t an inherently interesting thing to center your plot around and it feels like a distraction at best, CS3 legitimately has nothing to say and nothing interesting to either tell or make us experience with everything that we’re doing in its main plot aside from some carrots at the end of a stick based on complete “trust the plan” rhetoric that leads to more frustration and some nostalgia bait to keep old time fans from snoozing too much at everything happening here.

I don’t know why they felt that the third game in a quadrilogy must be so light in actual substance, heck making this another intro game is also kind of an ass backward narrative choice because there’s not many things left to introduce so they need to pad the story out with the same boring structure as CS1 (which feels even less justified here than it did in that game) and new characters which, yes, are more interesting but feels like a band-aid on an open wound.

And even then, this identity crisis continues, between wanting to be a fresh start and hinging on its continuity.

At some key points in the narrative, some of your old squadmates from the first two games will get you out of a tough situation and temporarily join your party. This reunion with old characters is the emotional core of some of the game's more intimate moment but it hinges heavily on you buying into Class VII as a group and as we stated in the first two games, these titles did nothing to make me care about them in the first place and when they’re put in contrast to the new characters in this game, it’s even worse because despite some dubious attempt at making them more interesting (like Gaius being a Gralsritter which is just ???), they never get any better than what they were before and continue to be a weak narrative element of the story and steal the show of characters I’d rather be playing as.
A friend of mine insisted on telling me this game is supposedly about “the fear of imperialism and how to act against it” but for a game about imperialism, the game really doesn’t seem to want to make any sort of deep thoughtful commentary on the subject or even address it heck most of the time it tries to lowball the issues in multiple ways. Osborne is said to be an expansionist but yet all of the wars he launched to annex neighboring countries have been explicitly stated to have happened without bloodshed which to me is just a strange fact to put in the forefront of the narrative. While Trails has often been afraid to kill off important characters (to the point of extreme absurdity cf : Illya in Azure) it wasn’t really afraid to portray death of civilians or even main characters committing or being the victims of atrocious crime.

But here, you have a seemingly fascist dictator who… conquers the world…pacifically … and makes decisions who… benefits most people ? And make the old nobility fold ? And reducing taxes ? And make Rean do things against his will like… stopping random terrorists from doing terrorist shit ?

Wow that man is awful… I wonder how Crossbell is doing in the ending of Azure. It looked kinda dire and… wait… what do you mean it’s doing better than it ever did on its own ? And what do you mean everything about the ending of Azure was retconned and they didn’t respect continuity just to have Randy chill in a giant robot and Tio being an important searcher ? Weren’t they supposed to be fugitives ?

Oh wait only Lloyd, KeA and … ARIOS ??? Are ?

I mean what about Rean, he seems to be pretty troubled to have lost the control of his abilities and that’s like a main theme of this new arc about him and… wait… what do you mean he just lost control of himself for 5 seconds and didn’t actually kill anyone ? Wait but… huh ?

Hey if this is a story about imperialism, maybe they’re going to finally address why we haven’t seen the emperor yet and why he let his chancellor and the nobles do a bunch of shit while he’s supposed to be ruling the country and …

Oh… you mean he read a bunch of books that predict the future and decided… not to do anything about it and just let things burn ? Because what … What do you mean ?

“There is something in Erebonia”

Oh no

…

Can you hear it ?

The trumpets of the bullshit writing apocalypse are ringing ! The deads are rising from their graves and pretend to have a secret identity, an ancient dragon is awakening out of nowhere and forces you to do a dungeon that looks like the final dungeon but will later be revealed to have nothing to do with the actual main threat of the plot… and… oh no… are these…
GNOMES ???

GNOMES…. GNOMES…. GNOMES…

Nobody’s going to read this fucking review this far so might as well just fucking lashes out. So there’s actually a third faction in this Ironbloods vs Ouroboros thing the plot has going for it and these are…

God…

The Gnomes…

So huh… the gnomes (yes the fucking gnomes, not the dwarves, not the elven, not the any potentially cooler pick for a villain faction just FUCKING GNOMES) are this MyStErIoUs faction working in the shadow of everything with their black workshop, they do all sort of cray thing like bringing people back from the dead and killing all tension and stakes in the narrative, have incredibly obvious secret identity like…

Man…

GEORGE NOME

THEY MADE THE DOINKY SPLOINKY FAT GUY FROM THE FIRST TWO GAMES A VILLAIN BUT NOT JUST A VILLAIN HE’S A GNOME AND HIS FUCKING NAME IS GEORGE NOME GET IT BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME AND HE HAS A GUN AND KILLS ANGELICA (I hope she stays dead) BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME !

BUT WAIT THAT’S NOT IT !

DING DONG

Hey ! It’s me ! Kondo-San !

You wanna come inside my clubhouse ?

KINDA KONDA KONDO-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57oU-xqiXek

Suddenly the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse rises from the grounds and nothing starts to make sense anymore. The game lore dumps you on a bunch of shit that it already info dumped you on if you read most of the book in the game like I did so thanks… collecting these was pointless I guess. You fought a dragon ? It Does not matter there’s an eviler bigger dragon now, all the villains who've been fighting against each other start teaming up for no reason. People start switching allegiance left and right, Ash is now the secret 3rd Hamel child and HE SHOT THE EMPEROR WHAT THE HELL LET’S GO TO WAR BUT FIRST YOU GOTTA GO DOWN THE LAMEST FINAL DUNGEON IN HISTORY AND ONE-SHOTTING EVERYONE BECAUSE POWER-SCALING ? CREDIBLE THREATS ? NOT IN MY JRPG !
And…

As you enter the door to the final boss…

You prepare yourself…

For the shittiest

Most brain melting succession of events you’ve ever seen.

Put on the music : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3G5IXn0K7A&t

Ok so get this, there was a hobo looking scholar who showed up regularly so of course the guy is a villain because that’s like the 4th time they did this in this series already. His name is actually

BLACK ALBERICH CHIEF OF THE GNOMES (I’m not even kidding, that's his full name and title) and he’s also Alisa’s Seemingly Dead Father who came back from the dead OH BUT GET THIS !

This random guy who hasn’t existed in the series until this episode, he was actually the one behind EVERYTHING, that’s right EVERYTHING, he looks at the camera and tell you to your face “Hamel ? I did that shit, the Orbal shutdown ? I did that shit, EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN CROSSBELL AND THE CIVIL WAR ! I DID THAT SHIT”

THE GNOMES MANIPULATED EVERYONE FROM THE SHADOWS ! THEY EVEN MANIPULATED THE MASTERMINDS OUROBOROS AND OSBORNE AND ALL THE EVIL PEOPLE IN THE SERIES OH AND GUESS WHAT

REFILL YOUR POPCORN YOU’RE GONNA LOVE THIS NEXT PART

FLASH NEWS :

DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE’S NO REAL REASON FOR WAR HAPPENING ? DID YOU KNOW THAT PEOPLE AREN’T EVIL ? THEY’RE JUST DRIVEN TO DO EVIL THINGS AND KILL EACH OTHERS BECAUSE … wait what do you mean clearly established and believable reasons according to the series clearly established geopolitical stakes ?

NO SILLY ! IT’S BECAUSE OF THE CURSE !

WHAT’S THE CURSE ?

WELL IT’S A TOXIC GAZ THAT WAS FARTED BY THIS ANCIENT GUNDAM WHO ALSO MANIPULATED EVERYONE BTW AND WHICH TURN PEOPLE EVIL AND RACIST !

EVEN THE CAT TURNS RACIST ! OH NO REAN HAS TURNED INTO SUPER RACISM WHAT THE FUCK QUICK EVERYONE STOPS HIM ALSO OOMFIE IS DEAD NO CLIFFHANGER “THIS STORY IS AS DARK AS INK, SEE YOU NEXT TIME IN CS4”
COLD STEEL 3

IS A SCAM

THIS FRANCHISE

IS A SCAM

THEY SHOWED YOU IMPROVEMENTS BUT IT WAS ALL A LIE !

FUCK AND I WROTE 21 PAGES FOR WHAT

FOR THIS

OH MY GOD

This is amazing…

I…

I need to play CS4…

This is fraud writing, the kind you only see once every 15 billion years when the planet aligns !

I was supposed to have like a conclusion about how Trails doesn’t deliver on its promises and I’ve tried to approach these games in good faith but holy shit…

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMES

(Towa is still really cute tho)

I really wanted to come out of the ending satisfied, being able to find it within myself to fully accept the way FF16 executed its vision and say "despite its flaws it's very well done". But as the dust has settled, I find that while I still feel like its messages are extremely palpable and powerful, I didn't come out of the experience feeling wholly confident that FF16 executed itself to the best of its ability.

It's no secret now that this game is not actually a game of thrones politics heavy Final Fantasy game, but is actually just your typical JRPG romp. Make friends, save world, defy fate, etc etc. It's this first element especially that is essentially the lynchpin of the entire narrative, and it is the center of its focus on every level. From the plot, to the thematics, to the characters, to the game design YoshiP and Maehiro STRESS deeply the communities you've come to be a part of, as well as the power of the found family you’ve come to create. And I think through the sidequests this is done super well, but I don't love how these elements at times can take away from the main scenario experience. From the literal times which the plot halts completely and has you fill time by going around the hideaway, or how everytime you enter a new area you have to learn about its local town and the secret leaders who run them. While I find the former egregious, the latter isn't inherently problematic. I am a 14 fan after all, but the difference between 14 and 16 in this department is the potency of their writing and worldbuilding. I don't mind helping people do random BS in Shadowbringers cause Norvrandt is one of the richest worlds out there and Ishikawa writes with such charm and turn that random NPC's can really have an impact on how you view the world. Maehiro in 16 just really doesn't have the charm in his writing to consistently make his NPC's pop and Valisthea is just not an interesting enough setting to carry these more mundane sections. There is a lot of focus in trying to make some of the more significant NPC’s notable characters and I really appreciate that approach, but there really is only so far you can go with an NPC in terms of character writing.

It really ends up being a double edged sword, where while I do think it ultimately contributes to this holistic vision that can be satisfying (see the conclusions to many of the side quests), it at the same time draws focus away from things that definitely could've really used it like better exploration of the politics within Valisthea. This is something really made apparent by the fact that there’s literally a character who’s entire job is to explain to you the political state of the world on the handful of occasions Clive actually ships out on a mission.

I feel like every day I'd hop on 16 I'd feel different about it, more or less confident with its vision at each step, one day content and another quizzical. Funnily enough this is exactly like how I was with Endwalker, and I probably have it within myself nowadays to admit that Shadowbringers/Endwalker are my de facto top 1 fiction, but the difference here is I just don't think the quality of the writing is ever strong enough to really make my confliction ever bloom into deep appreciation and love.

That being said, I do really enjoy a lot of the game. I've been very critical of it simply because I think there is a lot to say about 16 as an experience, but ultimately there are still a lot of positives to remark on. The boss fights and setpieces are awesome, the cast is way better than I'd ever thought it'd be, Maehiro wrote his first truly great antagonist, the cutscene direction/general visuals are incredible, and I think in general the story has a really great sense of thematic cohesion which makes a lot of the moments land especially hard. This game is good, without a doubt in my mind do I think it's good but before I had first played it I said something to myself, which was I'd be content if it was at least better then Heavensward. And I haven't played Heavensward in so long, so it's hard for me to even make this judgment properly, but it's the fact that I can't be confident about it that gives me pause.