Trails of Cold Steel 2 : Fascinatingly Bad

Previously, in my journey through hell the Kiseki series, we covered the first game in the third arc of this now cult classic series and I concluded rather harshly and in length that it was indeed one of the worst JRPG that I’ve ever played.

In response to such vitriolic hatred for what is essentially a very mediocre bargain bin RPG of the week, my friends quickly responded to me with the following statement : “If you think CS1 is bad, I can’t wait for you to try the 2nd one, it’ll make you think it was actually a masterpiece” which instead of dissuading me from continuing on with the franchise actually got me curious about what that might entail.

You see, Trails of Cold Steel 2 had a bit of a rocky development history. Around 2012, the PS Vita was slowly but surely put on the front as the successor to the PSP, Falcom just went through what could be considered their 2nd golden age with the PSP with a wide variety of titles across both PSP and PC a lot of action-rpg of course since it was until recently their main activity as game devs but also the Trails series which was picking up some speed, so much so that the fabled “Zwei 3” was instead released as “Nayuta No Kiseki” to profit off of the Kiseki brand (a fruitless effort since it was one of the last RPG on the PSP and by that point people have already moved on to other things).

This transitional period was a bit rough for Falcom which had two big projects for the PS Vita, the first one was “Ys : Memories of Celceta” a (bad) remake of Ys IV and of course the next entry in the Kiseki series aka “Trails of Cold Steel”. However, in a moment of extreme “lucidity”, Toshihiro Kondo asked the team at Falcom to develop the game for both the PS Vita and the Playstation 3, marking the first time Falcom has worked on a a game for home console since the mid 2000’s (if you can count porting Ys VI on PS2 as making a console game).

This of course lead to a lot of undesired results, the game was a buggy mess on release with tons of issues running on both platforms and on top of that they had to cut corner everywhere because Cold Steel was simply becoming too ambitious for the studio to reasonably finish it in time, but no worries because they just decided to cut the last hours of the game and release it later as its own standalone experience. What was supposed to be one game probably followed by one more sequel like the Crossbell saga became a 4 game long epic separated into 2 sub-arc each, of which Cold Steel 2 was the second half of that first arc (yeah it’s a bit complicated to follow, I swear I’m trying my best here).

So what exactly is Trails of Cold Steel 2 ? Well imagine if you took the second half of Final Fantasy VI and made it an entire 70h game instead because for some reasons Falcom decided that it would be a brilliant idea to do the “Search for your friends'' bit from FFVI again making it the third time this has happened in the series and I really must ask myself.

“Does Falcom think we wouldn’t notice they’re just shamelessly recycling ideas from other titles AND themselves ?” Well perhaps.

But I don’t really mind, if it’s done well, it could still save itself from the plagiarism allegations and besides the series has its own set of quirks to compensate (for better or for worse).
I’m sorry in advance if this review is gonna be shorter than the previous one (post edit note : this is a lie) because honestly my thoughts on this game are not nearly as intense, most of what was bad about CS1 still carries over from CS2 there’s very little change between the two titles, it is for the most part a straight continuation of what was done previously and that’s gonna be the main bulk of the issue.

Because the foundations that CS1 established were so weak to begin with, it was really hard to get invested into what CS2 wanted to tell me with its story. One thing that I will say CS2 has over CS1 is that the story is a bit more “engaging”, it’s less about experiencing slice-of-life moments between the most boring RPG party you’ve ever interacted with and more so about following a terrible mess of a story that would make Nomura’s writing seem sensible in comparison.

I guess I’ll get the gameplay out of the way first since there’s a few new additions, the battle system remains almost exactly the same as CS1 with the little addition of the “overdrive” gauge, if you’ve read my review of Azure I’ve explained that this game had something called a “burst” gauge which could unleash a massive boost on your characters abilities, getting them priority moves, let them cast spell cost-free and acting as an emergency heal button on top of that, pretty much the “fuck shit up button”. Well overdrive is more or less the same except instead of acting for the entire party, it acts only for the two characters that are linked together on the field and also only acts for three turns instead of dropping down based on your actions.

This small addition is welcome and definitely make battles a little bit more dynamic but it still a very feeble addition with the only real strategic use being to buff your party very very quickly (and the main reason why I used Jusis way more often this time around) during boss fight to more quickly dispatch of them in one hit thanks to Laura aka “What if we turned One Punch Man into a party member” s-craft.

Because yeah, unsurprisingly, the game balance here is even more awful than it was in CS1. Again, I've played the game on normal like with all the other entries but here it almost felt like I was cheating the game and I probably should’ve upped the difficulty to give the game any semblance of challenge. The reason why the game balance is so bad here is because you retain most of your broken crafts and stats from the previous game, since this game acts more like a 2nd disc than a sequel. This means that you start the early game with what were end-game abilities.

It’s nothing new in the series mind you but here since the game is so craft-centric and they didn’t even bother to nerf your crafts like Azure did coming off of Zero, it makes the early, mid and endgame stupidly easy, heck the second you obtain the “Domination” quartz which doubles the damage output of any attack/crafts/s-craft first used in battle, you can pretty much destroy any bosses in one-hit with a turboboosted Laura.

Which further emphasizes how the changes made to the orbment system to make it more accessible/straightforward only made the game battle system a complete mess and while it is fun to break the game in half, it doesn’t necessarily make for an engaging combat system for more than 70 or so hours. Some fights required a bit more strategy like the cryptids which are superbosses scattered across the map but even then, it’s often not that deep either.
But now on top of the regular battle system, you have GIANT MECH FIGHTS !

Those were already featured in the last 20 minutes or so of CS1 but here they are more present, punctuating or sometimes concluding big stretches of the main story for spectacle purposes and while they definitely do a good job at making me hype thanks to the music and the presence of giant robots and all of the implications surrounding their existences on the battlefield, the actual gameplay is a bit rough… but if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve rarely seen any RPG 100% nailing mech combats so I’m not gonna hold it against the game for not perfecting the formula.

The fights are just a guessing game where you have to hit your target in specific areas of their body, that part changing depending on the stance they’re having, a pretty interesting concept bogged down by the fact it’s never obvious what part of the body becomes the weak point and that even if you do hit the weak point, you don’t have a 100% chance of breaking the opponents guards, meaning the best strategy to win most fight is to put yourself in counter stance and let the game break the guards for you. There’s definitely room to improve those fights, they’re a nice little distraction from the mundanity of the main combat system but they definitely need some tweaking to be more engaging and less gimmicky.

Now that we got the most minimal change out of the way first, let’s talk about the actual big ass elephant in the room which is, you guessed it, the story !

CS1 was meant to be an introduction to the world of Erebonia but if you go back and read my review of it, you will quickly notice that this introduction was not only lackluster but also presented in the least engaging way possible. From long drawn-out info dumps dropped in the worst places, the repetitive, dull and predictable structure of its chapter based narrative, its bland and shallow characters I ended up having little to no attachment to by the end of the game and of course a confused mess of a main political conflict backed up by Kondo’s new weird obsession with centrism and faux gray morality and complete misunderstanding of basic concept such as class warfare and the separation of power.

Out of all the 90+ hours it took me to finish CS1 only the ending portion was of any significant interest because that’s where the game started to have an heavier atmosphere with soon to be child soldiers dreading the very real possibility to be drafted and of course the introduction of the big giant mechs introduced earlier as well as the heel turn of one of our party member Crow who is somewhat of a rival to Rean in this game in a kinda Amuro-Char kinda way (which is equally as gay but not equally as good as that aforementioned dynamic).

We start the story in the mountain range separated from all of our comrades with an understandably distraught Rean crying over the potential loss of his friends and after a quick walk in the area, you get saved by your sister Elise who welcomes you to your hometown of Ymir.

Ymir which by the way is a place the team have already visited in CS1 and even fought an Ouroboros member one time, don't you remember it ? Of course you don’t because it was a chapter that was completely absent from the original game instead being repurposed as a freaking Drama CD and let’s be frank, nobody ever in the history of forever listens to those.
After an altercation with the local Ouroboros super bad guy working for the newly established “Noble Alliance” who acts as the main antagonistic force in this game, your sister and the princess of the country gets kidnapped so now Rean has to gather all of his comrades thanks to his giant robots convenient teleportation magic ability.

One thing I appreciate about CS2 compared to CS1 is how the game decides to shake up the core structure of a Trails game, not by much of course but enough to be noticeable. Instead of the game being separated in chapters, this time the game is separated into 3 acts, meaning the narration and overall game structure can be little more free form and if the first act is pretty straightforward (gathering your friends by revisiting previous areas), the 2nd act decides to do something that is in part interesting from a game design aspect but also terrible from a story pacing perspective.

See CS2 was originally meant to be the last 10 hours of the original game, this game’s final act and the entire game pretty much feels like one drawn out quest to gather up your forces and take on the bad guy which I guess is fine if like for Azure it’s the last arc of an otherwise pretty long and substantial game but here, you quickly come to realize that CS2 really struggles to fill its gametime with meaningful story content somehow even more so than the original game which was mostly about nothing.

But the few story bits there are, are in fact a bit more substantial, I just wish that they were actually good.

Starting with the character writing.

It’s no surprise that I value good characters in my stories and the first game completely failed at making me care about the massive cast of playable characters it had. But the Kiseki series is a long series of games with a solid sense of continuity and usually can surprise me with the way they shake things up and manage to make me care about characters I didn’t truly have any reason to give a shit about in the sequel.

But sadly, CS2 manages to somehow fuck up that aspect beyond belief, none and I mean NONE of the characters aside from the main protagonist goes through any form of development, arcs or anything of the sort during the course of the main story. The only character in this game that approaches something even resembling a character arc is Jusis and it just isn’t a good arc whatsoever. It’s an arc about having to come to terms with his family's shitty actions and fight for himself and what he believes in, pretty standard stuff and honestly not handled super well because of something about this game story I will develop in a minute.

Any semblance of characterization or even minuscule amount of development these characters are contained almost exclusively within their bonding events which means that for some reason, the developers thought that something as basic as character writing should be given to the discretion of the player and be completely optional and missable contents !



Alisa or Machias could be the most 10/10 characters to ever grace the medium and I will still have nothing to say about them because I didn’t focus on them at all when allocating bonding points and I certainly wasn’t going to save scum to see all character events which often times can be up to fucking FIFTEEN AT EACH CHAPTER TRANSITIONS. This design philosophy is not only completely asinine but also completely antithetical to the idea of good character writing or just good writing in a video game in general.

Since my love for these characters have been almost non-existent, I had little to no desire to learn more about them and if they wanted me to care, they should’ve given me something to chew on outside of this pathetic excuse of a social link system which completely misunderstood the appeal of such a system from a game which itself already had issues balancing it correctly, but at least Persona feels somewhat competent in the uses of such mechanics, CS1 and even more so CS2 are embarrassingly bad with their take on it.

It’s not even like the bonding events are all that good either, the ones I’ve focused on mostly for gameplay reasons (focusing on characters I actively use in battle for stat boosting rather than because I’m interested in them) have been for the most part barebones, bland and uninteresting.

How come a character like Laura even get past the conceptualization process, all of her bonding events involves her either talking about swords, swinging a sword or philosophizing about… you guessed it SWORDS. Her entire personality and arc revolves around the idea that she’s a swordswoman like she’s a knight class character from some 80’s RPG on the freaking NES and those usually didn’t TALK about their job so goddamn much.

And you can apply this to pretty much any characters in your party, somehow the development team sat at a table and probably pinned drawings of the characters on a white board and then glued sticky notes on them with random words and said “yeup that’s going to be the whole character !”.

Millium is a literal super-spy working for the government but all of your interactions with her will be about cooking stuff and generally be the resident pedo-bait character because this is yet again a very self-indulgent japanese RPG aimed at teenagers or creepy weirdos with reprehensible fetishes.

Emma literally is a walking plot device, her entire character can be summed up as “I knew about it but I didn’t tell you because of my secret mission as a witch” and then bla bla bla exposition and self-pitying about having to hide shit from us, weirdly enough that makes her the most relevant character in the story because she’s pretty much the spokesperson for all of the random lore shit the game plot gravitates around during certain key point of the narrative and she’s also related directly to one of the main antagonist and resident Team Galaxy Admin : Vita Clotilde, a witch that can manipulate people through her singing.

I could go on and on about the characters in this game but really who cares, if the game doesn’t even make the bare minimum to make them interesting or likable, why should I make efforts trying to analyze and discuss them in the first place.

They had two 70-90 hours worth of gametime to do so and they failed miserably so fuck it fr.
HECK EVEN TOWA, THE ONE CHARACTER I LIKE IN THIS DUOLOGY DOESN’T HAVE ANY MEAT TO HER BONES IN THIS ONE, I’ve still defaulted to her for continuity reasons (which further emphasize how dumb that bonding system is in a game series with a supposed one true canon) and because I like her the most but Jesus Christ they even managed to not make me care as much about the only character I had even the slightest of attachment to in this cast.

Which leaves us with our homeboy, our hero, our guy, our light at the end of the tunnel, our shining beacon of hope and righteousness ! Our Protagonist, Rean Schwarzer !

In the original game, Rean was… not that interesting, he was a rather bland, uninteresting character that I didn’t have much attachment or even strong opinion about, he was generic but I guess that in a world full of walking anime clichés passing off as real human being, he fitted in as a player stand-in and blank slate.

That’s not to say he had nothing to his name in the original, we saw the beginning of his self doubt and self-pity linked to an ever consuming desire to protect others oftentimes prioritizing the well-being of others before his own. We also had some hints about his inner powers, like how he can go beast-mode sometimes and have cool white-hair like the dude from Tokyo Ghoul (do people still care about Tokyo Ghoul ?). And lastly, he’s an awakener, one of seven chosen ones (to which we only see 2 of them) who can control the fabled Divine Knights, powerful ancient machines that can do cool magic robot things (and I’ll admit that Valimar’s design is pretty sick !).

But it’s in this game that Rean finally come into his own as a proper character and let me tell you, I wish he kept his mouth shut because Rean went from a character I was completely indifferent towards in the first game to one I actively fucking despise and perhaps one of the worst protagonist I’ve had the displeasure of playing in a JRPG.

Rean is a whiny insufferable little centrist who believes in literally nothing, wants to get involved with nothing in the story and just accepts whatever comes his way like a good little dog without thinking about his actions or developing a single thought or philosophy of his own… NOT A SINGLE FUCKING TIME. Rean lives in a world drought in conflicts and injustice. A world with a rigid class-system that divides the country he lives in. A country where an elite of people can decide on a whim to start a war on its own people in an attempt to push their domination. A world where a minority of its population have nothing but contempt for the people below and will literally sacrifice civilians to prove their superiority.

And yet, the game insists on painting a morally gray framework on such a basic class-warfare type of conflict with the noble alliance presented as “not entirely in the wrong” except the Noble Alliance does absolutely nothing commendable or justifiable for the entire duration of the game, if anything most of them are random cartoon villains who commits atrocious crimes (that you never get to actually see aside from that ONE time but we’ll get back to that) because of their pettiness and need to push their domination on the masses not just through propaganda but also through literal honest to god warfare !


You can’t get more nazi than the noble alliance and yet Rean will still be like : “Yeah but we shouldn’t interfere, we shouldn’t take a side tho, not all nobles are bad people” and I get that being a noble himself, he doesn’t have the perspective to really refute that status-quo but that’s what character development is for, it’s to make him see the injustice of the world and change his vision and work towards making the world a better place. That ideological nonchalance and hypocrisy isn’t just shared by Rean though, it’s shared by all of his comrades of Class VII who are too busy stroking his One Leaf Blade when they’re not busy being drones with no thoughts or personalities of their own.

Which brings me to my next problem with CS2 storytelling, it’s over-confidence in thinking you care about things. See, in most stories you have a build-up and a pay-off and ideally you’d want both of the ends of that rope to be equally as solid to create a good memorable piece of work. CS2 sadly doesn’t have that luxury and as such needs to ride on the very little highs left by CS1 which they weren’t many. What I mean by this is that CS2 being a sequel is normally a game all about pay-offs.

The entire first act is about reuniting with your long-lost friends and seeing what they’re up to in the turmoil of the war, these moments are meant to be filled with joy and relief at the sight of our friends being ok and fending off for themselves pretty well which on paper is great but since CS1 failed to deliver on any reason to care about these characters you just end up sighing when Machias becomes the first party member to join your party in this game because out of any character you wanted back in your crew, that dude should’ve been left to rot inside his freaking windmill.

And the thing is that the entire game has this sort of warm atmosphere to it but since the characterization was so poor in the first game and also didn’t get better with this sequel and at points even got worse, there’s tons of moments that just fall flat !

For example, there’s a scene in between Act 1 and Act 2 where Rean is having a little moment of self-pity, now that’s also something about Rean that just simply doesn’t work, his inner “demons”. During that scene, which is the culmination of hours of character build-up for the guy and a significant character growth moment, we learn that the reason why Rean protects others to the point of self-sacrifice is because of that one time he killed a bear as a child to save his sister Elise. Since then, he swore to be the baddest, strongest motherfucker around to protect others and … really ?

That’s the reason Rean is such a whiny piss baby boy sometimes because he feels weak for… killing a bear as a child ? Either I’m completely media illiterate and feel free to shit on me in the comment for this or the writers had absolutely no idea how to add flaws to the guy to make him feel more human or relatable. The conclusion to that scene is Alfin (Olivier’s adorable but slightly pedo-baity sister) telling Rean that you know… he’s not just the one protecting others, his friends also protect him because they love him. And then Rean takes that information as a completely shocking turnover realization followed by a text box telling you that you can now transform into Kaneki mode in battle at will now in one of the lamest directed and worst written “character realization” scenes you’ve ever witnessed.



Are you fucking serious ? Are we talking about the guy who is disliked by nobody to the point that any vagina equipped individual in a 100 miles radius of him wants his divine blade inside their baby room going “wait a minute… people … like and care about me ???”. I swear on christ that this isn’t a fucking joke, I’m not making a bit here. It’s been a while since I’ve read or watched any of those “Light Novel” related media but oh my god, I love anime but fucking hell it’s stories like these that make me remember that yeah… anime can also be… that bad.

If you really wanna play on a real flaw the character has, why not play out of the fact that the dude is an indecisive fuck who has so little awareness of himself and the world surrounding him that he can’t pick a side or form a single thought of his own that isn’t “let’s go class vii, we’re gonna do it!” and it could potentially lead to some catastrophic situation down the line.

Rean is such a nothing character such a bland power fantasy schmuck for teenagers to project themselves onto that they relied on the oldest trick in the book by sticking a good old “trauma” to the guy to make him somewhat more relatable, because every kids these days have self-doubt so it’s cool and relatable you know ! It’s cool when the character that exists to be my ideal fantasy also has doubts about himself, he really is just like me ! A random whiny zoomer with no thoughts and no real conflict in their life but still want to pretend they’re making a difference while the only thing they’re good at is changing nothing at all and being a pretentious little shit that need to stay the fuck out of adult space because they have nothing to add to society aside from their ADHD riven rant on basic morality while never acting for the good of anything but the small little problems that only concerns them and them alone.

A problem which is even made worse by the fact Rean has a rivalry with another character, Crow ! Crow in the previous game was revealed to be a terrorist dead-set on killing off Osborne for some misdeed he did to the people of Erebonia and while his reasons for living a life of terror and danger is somewhat justified by his circ…

Wait…

What did you say to me ?

They’re not ?

Oh but of course what did I think, that this was a good game with a good inside political, ideological or philosophical conflict ?

Silly me, I almost thought I could develop empathy for an antagonist in this freaking series. Nah, Crow’s backstory is that his home country got annexed by Chancellor Osborne, not because of a violent cold raid but simply through a simple business manipulation tactic that he won fair and square. His grandpa wasn’t even killed by Osborne directly or indirectly nor did he kill himself off of the guilt of losing their territory to the hands of the Empire. His grandpa simply had to retire and live the rest of his life in regret sure but he simply died of old age at least. Heck, Crow even says it himself, he doesn’t think Osborne is that bad of a guy, he simply killed because he got involved with the wrong people in a moment of his life where he was lost, afraid and unsure about how to live his life… YOU’RE THE LEADER OF A TERRORIST GROUP MY MAN HAVE SOME FUCKING SPINE WOULD YOU ????
He even warns us before dropping his backstory that “his story is just yet another sappy story, don’t mock me please” like Falcom themselves are excusing this sorry attempt at character motivation and backstory.

In fact, why the fuck does Crow and his crew still hang out with the noble alliance and helping them committing atrocious war-crimes, his goals and motivation doesn’t seem to align with the noble alliance and he has already accomplished the goal he set for himself by teaming up with the noble alliance so why the fuck does he still commit warcrimes on account of the Alliance… oh yeah probably to fulfill some dumb prophecy about the war of the lions that the people at Phantom Brigade reject are looking to activate for their stupid anime villain plan.

Kingdom Hearts has a better ambiguously homo-erortic rivalry relationship between an MC and his lover rival and if you’re worse than freaking Kingdom Hearts writing, there’s something severely wrong with you as an author.

But could Crow be any better than this ? Yes of course he could, if he had a rival who actually believed in something but since Rean doesn’t believe in anything but solving only the issues that affect him and his friends I guess we’ll never have the Amuro-Char of the zoomer generation but oh well.

Cold Steel has this tendency to try and make you pretend that you care, it doesn’t actually make you care through clever writing or proper scene direction and good dialogues, it only does it in clichés and a complete lack of talent, that whole section I just mentioned took place during the time where the game literally forces to go talk to every single person on the Noble Alliance ship to try and see the other side and understand their point of view. They never actually show you anything, they just tell you stuff in hopes that you would feel even an ounce of empathy for the people on board except for the fact that the noble alliance has really nothing for them aside from either “Osborne did some mildly bad shit to me back in the day”, being literally hired mercenaries or being Ourobozos which might as well be hired mercenaries but see, they’re only helping because of “THE PLAN” ya know, can’t wait to wait another 30 years or so for these chaotic neutral fucker to boast about how strong and powerful they are and how cool and intriguing their “plan” is… (can you tell I’m just tired of Ouroboros at this point, this game as some new members showing up and I’m not even giving a damn… Oh well… I guess Duvalie is cool).

The game always fails at making you feel for anything in its story, world or characters. The game takes place in the middle of an actual honest to god civil war but you never get to see any of it, the world is mostly unchanged, cities and towns are running pretty much the same as usual except you see a soldier from time to time to remind you that this is a war.

Act 2 of the game in general is this gigantic narrative void where the story goes to a halt and turns into a fetch quest hub of epic proportions where you fly around in your airship left and right to do side-quests, explore the world and kill some superbosses. Pretty much doing anything but progressing the story or exploring the consequences of the war (which aren’t even shown since most cities are just kinda… fine and NPC are not all that bothered by the situation either), nah instead you’ll be finding someone’s horse or find ores to craft a neat sword for your cool robots in a McGuffin hunt that only pads out the game story even more.
Act 2 is neat in concept, having a more open structure inside of a Trails game isn’t something this series is known for but the actual content and things you do in those fetch quest are just boring and doesn’t change from the typical mmo-type shit you’d expect from a shitty modern JRPG and the length of that second act is freaking absurd too which only further emphasize how little actual story the game has when out of a potential 70h game at least 30 of those hours are dedicated to… literally nothing !

Most of the action is taking place on the western front but since Rean and his crew doesn’t wanna fuck with the war, they never actually go there and only take back random places because a friend of them was conveniently placed their to be kidnapped and making Centrist Che Guevera intervene.

Yeah isn’t it strange how Rean and his crew is all about not picking a side and not intervening but all they do since the start of the game is infiltrate military bases, do sabotage and other stuff to mess with the noble alliance which just helps the imperial army anyway.
You can even just run around Imperial Army camps no worry, they’re not antagonistic to Rean’s group, heck your party literally has 2 spies working for the (for now) deformed reformist faction which isn’t even something Rean doesn’t know yet it rarely if ever get brought up during the course of the game. Nothing is here to put into question Rean dumb behavior and position in this war. I just think this is actual insanity, Olivier even gives them the key to a literal warship to just go nuts and do whatever.

There is no nuanced political framing here where one camp is so obviously evil that the game fails so hard to find situations to make you feel that what they do is justified and not every noble is evil…

Which leads me to talk about…

The Celdic Incident

So in the middle of the Act 2 Fetch Quest grind, one of the towns, Celdic, gets destroyed by Jusis’s father, a tragic event that claimed the lives of…

check notes

1 random NPC and a couple of non-important, non-habitable buildings… ?

Well whatever, I can’t believe my man Otto freaking died, they must pay for this ! Quick ! Rean ! Activate your sperging power to find a way to psy-op yourself into intervening yet again without you explicitly making the conscious choice to do it… oh wait ! Rufus the 2nd in command of the army and Jusis’s brother made a call, they need to stop Jusis father because he only did this for himself, not for the noble alliance cause, we don’t actually kill people in the noble alliance… at least not on screen !

Well huh… ok then time to fuck him up !

During that entire time, we get to see noble citizens having nothing but contempt for the low-lives of Celdic because they deserved him and also how dare they put Jusis dad in prison ! He was a good governor ! A true noble at heart (a literal war criminal).

So… are we going to have a scene where Rean reconsider his point of view and realize the system is fucked and promise himself to find ways to change it by casting his outdated system of beliefs and make real progress ?

Well no… but maybe closer to his political alignment he would try to reconcile the two sides or find a compromise, well he can’t do that either because centrists never provide solutions, they just observe, say “well that sucks” and move to the next McGuffin dungeon.

This is the closest CS2 has gotten to portray any consequences of this conflict and yet it still amounts to a footnote at best before moving on to the next section of the game.

For a game that take such obvious cues from FFVI in terms of structure and story setting (with the world being fucked over and our heroes having to gather their forces), they never quite understood what made that part of FFVI so memorable and good to begin with...

In FFVI, the world is dead, it’s destroyed, you start the second half in control of Celes stuck on an island with Cid, an old dude and the closest thing Celes has to a family, you go outside your tent and the world is dead, the music is harrowing with a feint empty wind being heard on the overworld even the random monsters you fight die on their own as even they can’t support the corrosion brought forth by Kefka during his rise to power. You're tasked to go get some food for Cid, something you can actually succeed at but the context of the situation will likely make you lose Cid…

Celes, overtaken by all of her bottled up feelings and anxieties and loosing all hopes commits freaking suicide in a freaking 90’s Super Nintendo game, you miraculously survived and back on the continent by that point the game tells you nothing more and your free to see what remains of the rest of civilization and it’s not pretty, eventually, you get back with Edgar and then Setzer the only 2 other mandatory party member to finish the game and with hopes of defeating Kefka by gathering all your forces the most beautiful Airship theme plays out as you go on a quest to “Search for your friends” !

Everything you can do next aside from taking on the Kefka tower is completely optional but highly recommended if you want the best ending and of course because taking on the Tower with 3 under-leveled character is suicide meaning that all the thing you do in this game is to prepare yourself to defeat Kefka, no matter how innocuous the activity may be. When you meet your party members back it’s not just a sappy reunion, it’s more complex, most of the characters are still carrying over the traumas of the days the world wasn’t completely fuck and they now need to find a new place in this new fucked up reality while dealing with the remnants of the demons of their past and grow as persons all of this leading up to your confrontation with Kefka.



Heck, nothing state in the game that taking on Kefka will magically heal the planet, Kefka already won, it would take years for civilization to rebuild itself, you’re just taking one burden off of the people on Earth, it’s an ending that is equally as bittersweet as it is hopeful GOD I LOVE FFVI SO FUCKING MUCH !

NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES ITS STRUCTURE AND GAMEPLAY LOOP IN COMPLEMENT OF THE STORY ! NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES THE UNIQUE TOOL OF THE MEDIUM OF VIDEO GAME TO TELL A POIGNANT STORY THROUGH A COMBINATION OF MUSIC, DIRECTION, GRAPHICS, MECHANICS TO MAKE YOU FEEL SHIT FOR THE CHARACTERS AND THE FATE OF THE FUCKING WORLD ! NO TIME WAS WASTE HERE, EVERYTHING FUCKING MATTER AND THE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY DO STUFF TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER AND MOST OF IT IS TECHNICALLY OPTIONAL SHIT BUT WHO CARES YOU WANT TO DO EVERYTHING AND YOU’LL MISS OUT ON STUFF BUT THAT’S OKAY IT’LL MAKE YOUR NEXT PLAYTHROUGH MORE INTERESTING AAAAAAAAAAAH

SEE FALCOM ? THAT’S WHAT YOUR STUPID VIDEO GAME LACK ! IT LACKS AMBITION, IT LACKS FINESSE, IT LACKS ALL OF THAT SHIT YOU STUPID MONGREL HOW DARE YOU EVEN TRY TO EVEN ATTEMPT AND PRETEND TO COPY FF VI WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN REACH 1/100th OF ITS BRILLIANCE WITH QUINTUPLE THE RUN TIME AND A BIGGER SCRIPT THAN IT HUH ???

Hey you wanna know what all that stupid fucking fetchquesting leads toward the reconquering of Trista, you know the hub-town from the first game ? That’s an exciting moment the entire game has built toward I wonder how it i-

ITS ASS

The army just… leaves for no reason and task the hostages (?????) to run the school and keep it under control, so Rean and friends take on this occasion to go there and low and behold, the noble hostages just confront Rean.

“But this is pointless ?”

“Yeah we know, but we still need to fight because pride of the nobles or some shit”

So you do a boss fight that had literally zero reason for happening and then everyone nods, the hostages were actually fine the whole time and it was just a playful fisticuff for the older students and… Trista is taken back… ending act 2 on a very anticlimactic note…

Hope you enjoyed the 35 or so hours you wasted on Act 2 that lead to this…

The game… really doesn’t give a fuck… it’s insane, there was zero effort put into the actual story.

Yeah sure, you still have Falcom sense of details in NPC dialogues and books but… not the main fucking story, it’s just… wild as shit to me I can’t even begin to process how much this game doesn’t give a fuck and constantly cucks you from experiencing a little catharsis.
It just doesn’t care, even the neat idea of making this game set during the same time as Azure is just an after-thought and the conclusion to that leads almost fucking nowhere and impacts the story very little.

This nonchalance not only translate during the story but even boss-fight, most boss-fight you win in this game by the skin of your teeth (that is a joke, the game is Press Laura to win what did you expect), your characters are on their knees, the boss is going “mmph, that’s all you got ?” then you get your glory stolen by the adult cast which are all way cooler and way stronger than you, you’ve been doing all the heavy lifting but at the end of the day, you guys are just a bunch of students heh ?

I get that this is part of the series to make you understand that the MC will never be the strongest dude around and there’s so many people equally as strong if not more but it wasn’t so in your fucking face before and to lead to something so anticlimatic…

Heck the ending of the game ends on a barely moving death scene (aaaw) followed by the big revelation ! OSBORNE IS BACK AHAHAHA…

Wait a minute…

But we already know that from Azure ?

Wait a minute…

The game just reveals shit to us that we already knew ?

So all of this was for nothing ????

Anyway, Osborne comes tells Rean that he is his real father and then look at Ourogoonos and tell them to fuck off while stealing their plan like a chad because he planned this entire war on himself this entire time to turn Rean into a national icon for his newly establish fascist ethnostate.

Rean of course… agrees to participate in doing warcrimes for the reformist because… well huh… gotta help daddy I guess ???

Look fuck this game

And like a bad joke, it even keeps going after the credit because you thought the final chapter was the final chapter ? Well no you dumb fuck, there’s 2 MORE EPILOGUE CHAPTER

One is … legitimately the only good part of the game because you get to play as Lloyd and Rixia ! OH MAN I MISS PLAYING AS ACTUAL PEOPLE IN THIS GAME THANK GOD ! AND YOU EVEN GET THE CHANCE TO KICK REAN’S ASS WITH LLOYD FUCKING BANNING 10/10 GAME ON FUCKING GOD !!!!

Followed by several hours of the worst fucking final dungeon you’ve ever played through.
Yeah in the last chapter of the game, you go through a randomly generated multi-floor dungeon where you fight recycled bosses from the main game AND a swap color of the final boss of the first game who literally tells you that doing this dungeon… was actually pointless, he literally says it verbatum, I’m not making this up ! Gotta love Falcom’s brand of cheeky humour ahahaha…

I kneel Kondo, I really am kneeling hard, one last final goodbye to the cast and …

OH NO FUCK OFF KONDO ! WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO PLAY ON NG+ TO GET IMPORTANT LORE FOR THE NEXT ENTRY WHAT THE FUCK MAN WHAT THE ACTUAL SHIT I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD THIS GAME SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS

RAAAAAAAAAAAGH THIS GAME SUCKS

So you’re probably wondering why I’m ranking this slightly higher than CS1 well…

For 2 reasons :

Witnessing a story failing at everything it sets out to do in marvelous over the top fashion is somewhat entertaining in its own twisted kind of way
As mentioned earlier, I like what this game does structurally compared to the rest of the franchise (any game where you get to fuck around in an airship and built up an home base by recruiting people has a few more points in my book) and even the dungeon design has seen a significant improvement that I hope to see come to fruition in the rest of the series so there’s that.

CS1 was literally just “white noise : the video game”, homework to do to experience true gaming in the sequel and I must admit that at least CS2 didn’t commit the sinful crime of making me bored to death, there’s definitely a good game buried under all of this trashy nonsense…

But you won’t find it here…

Which leaves me to my conclusion…

Why would you play this ? Yeah the obvious answer is to experience the next chapter in the epic Trails saga, especially if you’re a fan or a masochist like me looking to satiate my curiosity but in general… Why ?

The few good things that CS2 does and heck even what it’s trying to do story wise are things you have likely seen done better in other titles some of which I’d consider true work of art worthy of your attention. Trails is being championed left and right as this life-changing franchise but all I get almost everytime are some average at best game with good ideas and good feelings behind them… But CS1 and CS2 only exacerbated the problem with this franchise, I actually now regret to have been so harsh towards Azure or SC because man, at least they tried, Cold Steel is just chasing trend, taking ideas and throwing them at a wall to see what sticks and if they could bait out the fishies with some good old waifu war.

But if it was only the anime bullshit, it’s also a mediocre attempt at political commentary ? I guess ? Even ideologically speaking, this game is spineless to the point of no return and is constantly trying to sound and look smarter than it actually looks but doesn’t have the balls or the shoulders to carry the boats and the logs ! The writing team behind this game must’ve felt so fucking proud for this last plotwist !

“Hey guess what it’s actually about how centrism is bad because it helped the bad guy !” and it could’ve been almost clever except it’s not and even after that revelation, Rean continues to be a good puppy dog with no spine, no thoughts, no choice no freaking nothing god I hate that character.

So yeah gameplay aside which sucks anyway, there’s the structure and yeah, it’s fun, I must admit I wasn’t completely bored playing this. But… is it really enough ?

If I wanted to play a poor’s man Persona, I’d play Persona
If I wanted to play a game with heavy political writing and a complex nuanced geopolitical setting, I’d play any Matsuno game
If I wanted a game about going around the world to gather people and grew my forces by doing tons of side-content, I’d play FFVI
If I wanted both of the previous statements, I’d play Suikoden which also has the benefit to be like Trails with each entry building off of the previous game in cool ways like .hack did too and those games are also damn good.
Heck I’d even throw Chained Echoes a modern indie RPG that did all of what I just said aside from Persona way better than what CS2 did

Heck if I wanted to play a series with a rich lore to chew on and a solid continuity with charming characters and humors, creative gameplay systems and some surprisingly insightful and dare I’d say ballsy attempt at delivering political messages

I’d play fucking Rance, yes… Rance, an actual honest to god porn game with the most reprehensible protagonist and content in existence but which has more heart and soul poured into it than anything I’ve ever played in my life.

I’d rather fully admit to being a degenerate and a Kingdom Hearts fan (which I am… I know… shocking) than playing Cold Steel 1 or 2 !

CS1 and CS2 are just a copout answer to a regular game recommendation, a good person will direct you to the good restaurant but the weirdoe cultist member who only knows the confine of his cult temple since childhood will tell you that you never eat better than at Veggietales.

Heck by the the time it took me between finishing the game last month and writing this shitass review, FFXVI came out and it had many similarities to Cold Steel especially in terms of structure, pacing and quest design (and not in a good way if you ask me) but by god, after playing FFXVI, CS2 barely was thought at the back of my head, it’s like a version of CS2 that actually worked, with an interesting story, a war setting that takes itself seriously, a badass anarchist hero and some seriously kick ass boss fight that is humanity pilled as fuck.

CS2 was a fascinatingly bad experience and I can’t believe I’m too deep enough into this shit to not hop on CS3 and … CS4 (that one seems to smell some exquisite taste of ass that I just can’t wait to experience)

So TL;DR : Play FFXVI, it’s on PS5 right now and it’s fucking awesome and Clive uses Rean’s asshole as an onahole anytime of the day

Before I start this review I need to preface that this game is an extremely good game there's no reason to deny the sheer quality and scope of such a project.

With that said, was it a completely satisfying game to me ? A long time Zelda fan who also happened to have the original BOTW ranked super highly as one of my favorite game of all time ?

Heeeeh not quite

By the time I'm writing this review I have completed every single shrine, gotten every single light roots, gotten every single bubul frog crystals, done a couple of the most important mission, got all the dragon tears and ofc finished the 5 temples as well as defeating the evil Ganondorf.

So I'm confident in saying that while all of this was still a relatively fun and addicting experience, there's a lingering feeling at the back of my head telling me that this wasn't really that great of a sequel to BOTW

But why ? Why did I have this awkward feeling ?

I guess it's because BOTW was such a unique experience on release, one that could be difficult to top even with the best of effort, it's such a unique take on Zelda going back to its roots and giving the series the proper evolution it needed after years of stagnant attempt at recapturing the magic of OOT with more or less good success.

It was an ode to freedom, to adventure, it was a game that had the balls to throw away 20 years of Zelda convention and was making no compromise to deliver the best experience possible.

It's hard to deny how much of an amazing title BOTW was when the only people complaining about it are game design illiterate Zelda fans who thought it wasn't "Zelda enough" (which in my book was a good thing) and personally speaking it was hard to recapture a similar experience.

TOTK feels more like what happens when you're bored of playing Minecraft Vanilla and you want to spice things up with some mods to add more stuff to do and that's how I feel about most of the new features in this game, nothing that truly enhances the original game experience in any significant way but just add more stuff on top of what was already a pretty meaty game.

But in doing so, I don't feel that the new stuff was thought with the same minutia or the same sense of vision that BOTW did.

I start with the big elephant in the room which is the map of the game.

As you may know, the map of TOTK is mostly lifted off of the one from BOTW, the surface world isn't entirely devoid of new stuff but it's still relatively the same world just slightly touched up.

The problem with this is that it completely change the way you experience the world, in BOTW I was discovering the world, I was letting myself go loose and absorb the entirety of the game in all of its scope, in TOTK the exploration feels a bit more processed.

I know these plains, I've climbed these mountains, I've sailed those seas, I've been there so I don't approach the world of TOTK the same way I did the one in BOTW.

BOTW felt like actually exploring a world and creating your own adventure, TOTK feels like checking a list of stuff to revisit to see what's different as well as progressing through the very disjointed story of the game (more on that later).

But TOTK has 2 more layers to its map, the sky and the depths !

These were the main selling point of the game (especially the sky) and the two biggest addition to BOTW's world and what do I think of both of them ?

They're honestly not that amazing, there are very few sky islands and most of them outside of the starting area are just the same copy pasted layout of one island with a rotating platform, a distributor and an empty shrine you have to bring a crystal to either by going to an island with an underground where it lies or going to an island where the same cube boss guards it on its back.

There's only maybe 2 or 3 sky island that are actually different and offer a different set of challenges and going to them is kind of bothersome with no proper way to traverse the sky (unless you decide to create an airbike), at some point the sky islands were becoming a bit too predictable but at least they were better than...

The Depths...

So ok, when I first entered the depths my jaw dropped to the floor, these crazy mf made an entire map under the map ???

But then you actually explore the depth and realize its depressingly void of interest, it's the same biomes and structure repeated infinitely with little to nothing of value to be found in here and the only real appeal of it is making surface shrines easier to find (due to the map being symetrical) and grinding for Zonite Ore to upgrade your battery (and I guess that neat little quest with the Yiga Clan but even that got dull pretty fast), every trip down here ended in disappointment and felt like a massive waste of my time until I decided to make an air bike to skip on most of the cumbersome traversal (because god the geography of the depth coupled with the limited light sources just makes me loose my mind)

The best addition to the world at least to me are the caves and wells, these should've been more advertised because these are awesome ! They're the kind of places that feels like it actually belonged in the original game map, they have unique and interesting layouts and they hold lots of surprises within them without feeling too samey and I wish the Sky Islands and The depths were designed with the same philosophy as them.

Another problem arise when discussing the story of the game. See BOTW structure really doesn't mesh well with a more narratively driven story and it shows, you can feel that there was an intended order in how you're supposed to experience what the game has to offer but if you played BOTW before, you don't wanna do that, you just want to explore the world and do things in whatever order you want !

But TOTK encourages to qualm your drive to explore and go on an adventure because not doing so will lead to a worst narrative experience, sometimes you get cutscenes out of order, you experience story segment out of order and the whole story gets broken because the first memory you get is of Zelda traveling to time and the second could be Ganon transforming into a demon and there's like 15 different step you just skipped.

It's sad because it makes some of the stronger more controlled moment of the story less effective as a result

In conclusion TOTK is a game that I enjoyed but it lacks the cohesiveness of the original game even if its fun to play around with the new ability

Trails of Cold Steel : “It’s a game about nothing”

Been a while since my gigantic review of Azure right ?

I think taking a break between the arcs or heck even between these games is important if you don’t want to end up burning on them. You know, give it a fresh start, give it a fresh new look, give yourself the time to forget about the bad things and enjoy the serie's strengths in retrospect.

Well good for me because the Kiseki grind is not over and there’s a whole new arc to explore this time around with the Cold Steel series. Now to be frank, I was wary about this one, I got a lot of mixed signals from my friends about this, some people loves Cold Steel like it’s the second coming of Jesus Christ but then you have others more reasonable people who have a lot of criticism of the game and let’s be frank neither of those people managed to sold me on Cold Steel.

And looking at it from a distance, this didn’t seem like a good start, a high-school setting, a main character that look just like every Kirito wannabe on the face of the earth even more blatant coomer bait otaku pandering than usual and some stuff I heard from my friends did not bode well for the future of my mental health getting into this game. I knew what I was getting into, it’s trashy JRPG stuff for teenagers to get crazy about on Twitter dot com and kneeling at Rean for being an extreme giga chad of normalcy.

So I went in, tampering my expectations below the ocean floor for this one, thinking that, the series already proved itself enough already and maybe there was a way that my prior investment into the series and the few qualities all the games share with each others in terms of worldbuilding might keep me invested and interested in this right ?

Like this series has set a standard of quality, I’m not a fan of Trails but I can’t deny that in all the issues I had with the series (namely what frustrates me about it that I mentioned in my other reviews), it’s still an ambitious, sincere piece of work with a lot of charm to carry you out for hours even when nothing is happening.


So here I was, bored out of my ass once again in one of my afternoons, and I felt ready, I needed to know what Cold Steel was all about, I needed to form my opinion on it, heck with my expectations being so low it can only positively surprise me right…?

Let’s not play around any longer.

The Legend of Heroes : Trails of Cold Steel is one of the single worst JRPG I had the displeasure of playing and every minute of it felt like actual mind numbing mental torture.

Now claiming such a bold statement for a piece of work with a decent following of people who loves it to death might as well be a death sentence and please, do re-direct all of your future death treats to my dm’s or in the comment so that I can completely ignore them and pretend I’m morally superior to you for not partaking in such trivial display of self-defense and bad intentions.

But I need to get this out of my chest anyway, not only because I have nothing better to do, giving my unneeded opinion on everything is pretty much the solid foundation of my career and because this looks like a job for me, so everybody just follow me cause we need a little controversy cause it’d be so empty without me.

I’m not going to do the old song and dance in this review by re-explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the Trails formula because at this point very little has changed (or at least they took a worse direction overall in terms of execution, more on that later) so let’s just talk about the game itself.

The game is set in the Empire of Erebonia, a vastly overhyped land that was constantly mentioned in the earlier entries in the series most of the time as an antagonistic force so let’s at least address the one positive of such as a setting.

You’re witnessing the event leading up to a full-scale war launched by an expansionist faction who just love to colonize and annex stuff from inside the invader country, it’s a really interesting setup as we rarely get games taking place inside of the “evil empire of doom” most RPG’s tend to have and Erebonia’s situation is a bit more complex than it may seem at first since the Empire itself has its own sets of issues mainly a social caste one. With the nobility still being a thing so we have dukes and lords and barons and the plebs, the commoners but with the advance of technology and change in social habits and custom some commoners have gained prominence in the higher state of society and are now politicians, CEO’s, Generals and some of them have formed the “reformist” faction who are opposed to the “noble faction” which have two lines of thinking “Nobles are cringe and commoners rules but expansionism is based and we should conquer more land to get the point across'' think of it as Stalinism interpreted by a Japanese author who is not super well read on those ideologies.

That is arguably, a fascinating setting for a JRPG and one that could if done correctly rival with the setting of Crossbell which was a whole can of worms onto itself and this is in those instances that even thought the entire rest of the game will absolutely fail at doing anything remotely interesting with that setting that if anything Trails is good a framing the action of their stories in interesting coat of paint.

But then you scratch the paint and you realize that the game is very, very, very rusty and full of cavities and holes and its inner machination is faulty and at times completely out of touch with any form of tangible reality or common sense.

So what POV does the game choose to tell this story, in the Sky Series we played as bracers a private militia with the goal to help the common people without involving themselves in politics, in Crossbell we played as the SSS a special brigade of the police who does the job of bracers but unlike them can actually run investigations and involve themselves with political affairs.




In this game, you play as Rean Schwarzer (a piece of white bread that the game will pretend to be a good protagonist) , a fresh new student going to Thors Military academy. So yes, the framing for this story is that you’re playing as… high-school students… and yes… it’s as thrilling as it sounds…

Look, I don’t mind school setting, I really don’t and in fact some of my favorite pieces of media have a school setting or heavily feature teenagers but as I grow older and bitter and more cynical, my tolerance and patience towards those elements decreases with time. I guess this is my L for playing a video game aimed at a certain demographic of people and complaining about not being catered to but let’s see how the game execute that concept, afterall, I’m all for a good, funny, wholesome high-school slice of life from time to time and it seems like the main bulk of the game anyway.

Now ok, what is the single-most important aspect of any story ? Regardless of genre, regardless of conventions, regardless of scale or ambitions.

That’s right, it’s the characters, my rule of thumb is that you can make even the most basic mind-numbingly cliché story amazing if the characters are awesome (cf. Most of the “Tales of “ series) and boy we sure have characters this time around because guess what, you don’t just have 1, not 2 not 3, not 4 but 9 !

9 fucking playable characters in this game which compose your main party, as you can see this is a large cast of characters which I mean, fine, I don’t mind it but that’s a bit overkill this early into a story as you can’t possibly hope to make all of them standout by the end and you will run into the issues of having a few weak link amongst the party.

Heck even my favorite RPG, FFIX with its cast of 8 playable characters by the end of the game, ends up having 2 characters pretty much being slot fillers that don’t contribute much to the story as a whole and are just here to break the game in half with their abilities but at least you meet them progressively and not all of them dropped on you from the start so they can get a bit of breathing room for them to get introduced before they can wipe the floor with Death Blue Magic.

And you know at least, these characters have personalities, interesting dynamics, layers to them and their arc and even though not all the characters are special, at least the ones who stand out are some of the most compelling characters I’ve had the pleasure to accompany in an RPG.

This is something JRPG understood fairly early on when they started giving a shit about pushing deeper more ambitious narrative into the forefront of the experience, if you want people to spend hours in a game and getting invested into its world, lore and themes, you need good characters to channel those elements and make them shine more brightly.

Well let me tell you that Cold Steel spectacularly fails in epic proportion at making its cast of characters likable or at least interesting, they are the equivalent of paper cutouts with a ChatGPT prompt attached to their mouth and the depth of a glass of water that’s been half-emptied and then left unattended for 9 days straight.
While it is usually a pretty low criticism to say, here it is legit the truth, most of the characters in this game are just a collection of one note anime cliché with almost nothing more going for them beyond that initial first impression. And maybe you’d be like : “But Cani, maybe they start as clichés but then evolve into fully fledged characters through trials and tribulation”, they don’t and I wish I was kidding.

“But do they have like… conflicts with the world or between themselves to make them grow as characters ? Motives that drive them to do the things they do ?” At this point, you might just be grasping at straws trying to find gold. Falcom decided to do the novel idea of making you use your imagination to imagine what these characters could’ve been had they been handled by competent writers who actually cared about the topics they were trying to talk about.

So the context behind how our ragtag team of wet towels got together to become friends and maybe saving the world or some shit is fairly straightforward. At Thors Military academy, classes are usually separated between nobles and commoners with nobles getting extra privileges like exclusive rooms for them and an actual extended vacation period whereas the commoners have a whopping 5 days of break in the whole school year (terrible news, I know right ?) but this time, things are getting a bit wacky and experimental.

Usually the academy has 5 class but this year there’s a 6th one cleverly name “Class VII” (they make a joke about it but don’t expect it to make sense at least in this entry), in class VII members of the nobility and commoners are mixed together into one group to see if they can get along and be friends with each others, they also have a special curriculum which mostly consist of going on on field trips where they’ll fulfill request for the citizen of Erebonia (which is the convenient excuse this game found to justify its terrible structure and quest system more on that later).

This opposition between commoners and nobles is the main conflict of the narrative but it’s only crystalized by two of the most annoying characters I’ve seen in an RPG yet, Machias and Jusis. Machias HATES the nobility because of some old trauma about her sister being bullied into suicide or at least that’s what you learn about after 40h of the game in perhaps the game worst chapter and the dude just can’t stand having to team-up with nobles (rightfully so) so you’d think he’d have a problem with all the nobles but he only has issues with Jusis, a snarky, indifferent asshole, who’s a noble but doesn’t care about all the etiquette coming up with it.

These two character dynamics is the most annoying and cliché thing shit ever, it goes nowhere, they grew to tolerate each other in the span of one chapter but that’s about it and their dialogues might as well be sandpaper for my eyes, they literally have the dynamic of the “enjoyer vs fans” meme, if you liked poor people before, get ready to fucking hate them with Machias… or will you ?

See, you quickly realize that even in its own setup, the game cannot handle that conflict for shit, in Class VII there are only 9 members, 3 of which are nobles and the rest are all commoners, the ratio is a bit unbalanced but alas it gets worse. See because this is a JRPG, every character needs to be a super special character, so all the commoners in class VII do not actually fit the definition of commoners, if anything they’re a product of bourgeoisie.
The commoner characters are either the sons of important political figures, generals or CEO of a multinational company or in the case of Emma while the game doesn’t say it outright yet, she’s a member of a long lineage of secret guardians of the world which is meant to guide Rean (the chosen one of some prophecy we haven’t been briefed about yet but it might happen in the sequel). The only character in the party that can fit the definition is Gaius but that’s because he’s an immigrant from a society where social caste don’t even exist at all so the man is completely outside of that conflict except to show us a different point of view (and pointing out how dated Erebonia’s society is).

This of course gets even worse when around the 70h mark, you get 2 other party members who are also commoners and also have a deep secret past that make them super special (except one will turn out to be the main antagonist of the game real identity, woops, spoiler I guess), now mind you this is actually very thoughtful of the game to finally give us characters that are actually likable and endearing in our main party so late into the game, I’m fine with that but still it’s a bit too late on the uptake.

So you have nobles (who are for the most part not representative of the noble faction at all, nor nobles in general since they need to be “one of the good ones” to be in a JRPG party) and commoners who aren’t really commoners at all and never once represent the real struggle of the common everyday man, a great way to introduce this arc central conflict I guess but somehow it gets worse.

With this setup alone, you realize that what little conflict and themes the game had behind it is completely muddled by a confused writer who has no idea how class warfare even works, this is something I already noticed back when I reviewed yet another game by Kondo “Ys IX Monstrum Nox” which was also another boring slog of a game that shat on Ys’s entire legacy with empty fanservice and terribly bare bone gameplay and level design while trying to make a somewhat confused weirdly political point that just amounted to “Centrism the videogame”.

Chapter 4 of Cold Steel was perhaps one of the rare occasions while playing an RPG that I felt like somebody was ripping my brain apart. A whole lot of things happen in this chapter and a whole lot of nothing too, the gang goes to the capital for some annual festival. Two characters didn’t have an established character arc or any conflict yet so let’s just spawn one out of the blue despite these two characters barely interacting with each others for the past 40h so they have a bit of beef with one another which is this bizarre “I hate you because I love you, stop hiding shit from me” deal and like… what the fuck is this bizarre excuse to lead up to a character dumping their entire life story on you. I get that these are teenagers and teenagers tend to act irrationally at times but this felt very tacked on and was also presented in the lamest way possible (in the lamest in-engine combat cutscene I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing).

But on top of this, you also have more “Machias” moment who at this point of the story stopped being a shitty nerd with prejudice against the nobles and became an advocate for the #NotAllNoble movement, this scene where Machias explain his backstory and then proceed to explain how he changed his opinion made me cringe so hard that I let the game ran in the background for a solid hour and decided to take a shower and grab a beer at how asinine this take is.
Cold Steel, but I’d say Kondo is the kind of person that just runs on sophistry alone, Kondo is the type of person who is wholly uninterested in answering the political conflicts of his story that he will just either not address them or address them in the most out of touch way possible. See, the idea that a society is divided in two camps, one with privilege and the other without any is enough to set the stage for a revolution plotline but not in Kondo’s stories, Revolution is a brutal, outdated way of leading up to a deep change in power dynamics. Kondo prefers to stay in his position because there are good people in the dominant class, therefore, the system is fine and just needs some tweaking to flow better.

That is complete horseshit and sophistry of the highest level, we live a world right now where social divide is as steep as ever, people at the top are indifferent pedantic asshole with the power to get anything they want at the flick of a hand and can exploit millions of people just for being born under the right circumstances or because they stole assets and profited out of them. For as much as I’ve criticized Falcom’s villain for being corny Saturday Morning Cartoon characters, we now live in a world where these characters can be seen as almost realistic depictions of real life individuals.

Let me indulge in being a massive commie here, when people point out systemic issue in a general sense by saying X privileged group of people are responsible for the suffering of less fortunate people, if you answer is : “But not all of them are bad tho”, get ready to have my foot up in your ass because we simply do not care. What we care about is changing the system for the better or at best get rid of it entirely if its based on no solid foundation and the fact that noble exist in Erebonia don’t have solid foundation and that’s even something that the characters point out in the chapter right before it during one of the game many side-quest so why trying to push a narrative of common ground and acceptance, a so called “third” way that takes the best of both world when one side clearly is answering for the plies of the majority of the country’s population.

Mind you, this is just what I got from what little time the game actually brought up these topics up because and that’s the worst part about this game, Cold Steel seems to be wholly uninterested in its own setting and also in addressing the questions and themes they brought along with them, because this doesn’t constitute the bulk of the game and also because in order to make me even care about these topics, it would’ve been a good start to make us follow characters that are well written and likable and entertaining.

Because of the game's shitty structure, whenever tension arises in the story, the game just looks the other way and wants you to grind for more conclusions making it a game about nothing. Most of this game is just empty and void of any potential interest and is only interested in wasting the players time in pointless trivial matters like preparing for a school festival or retrieving someone’s hat (and I swear this is a mandatory quest, you need to do to progress through the game).

In great part due to the game’s structure and pacing.





As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’ve mentioned my game time at several point in my review, to contextualize when the stuff with the game I had problem with arose and that’s because I just wanted to point out that Trails of Cold Steel is a game that took me 100h to complete but since the in-game time is affected by turbo-mode, I will probably say it was closer to roughly 75-80h, nonetheless without turbo mode almost constantly on, this would’ve been the tangible reality of my game time with this game.

Trails games and this isn’t something that started with Cold Steel are long but they often struggle to justify their own length in a meaningful way. There is this common misconception in media analysis that the more time is spent on a piece of media is representative of its level of complexity and interest, that if a game takes its time to tell the things they have to tell then it must mean that it has a lot of things and a lot of interesting to either tell or to make us experience from a gameplay perspective.

Now it is no surprise that Trails game are very wordy, it’s a fact I already pointed out in the Crossbell arc which was a duology of game I’ve jokingly called “more of a visual novel than an RPG” especially for how long the cutscenes and dialogues were in comparison to the time you spend playing the game. Nonetheless, you do play the game, and the game lets you explore its gameworld to participate in classic JRPG affairs like combat, dungeons and of course side-quest that has always been the main point of contention of the game.

Now Trails of Cold Steel is the 6th entry in the Kiseki series, less than 10 years separate the first Trails in the Sky to Trails of Cold Steel so you’d naturally think that the formula has add a positive evolution from the rigid constant use of back and forth between segmented area of the first game, heck even Crossbell proposed an interesting change of pace by having an hub town attached to a bunch of adjacent routes you explore almost in its entirety in the first 15 to 20h of the game but that’s because Crossbell was a small country, here in Erebonia, to give you the sense that the country is large, you traverse the country by train. Meaning the game forces you to go where it wants you to go, but given that those games are linear by nature, it’s not all that terrible.

The problem is that the series already rigid structure has been more rigidified by some choice, each chapters and I mean each chapters plays exactly the same :

-A first day of going around talking to NPC
-A Free Day of going around doing quest and talking to NPC ending on the exploration of a new floor old school house (which is very mysterious place you visit multiple time which is just a reason to get one similarly boring se and repetitive sewer
dungeon to go through at the start of each chapters)
-Followed by a practical exam day which are literally small tutorial fights (and yes you get tutorial fight even in the final chapter 90h into the game)
-Followed by an exposition train trip where you play card games for extra bonding point (more on that later)
-2 (sometimes 3 when the game feel very spicy about it) days worth of pointless fetch quest inside one of the games many town and surrounding areas
-Concluded by (but only starting with Chapter 3) a terrorist attack where you beat the bad guy but they get away and then the news says “Damn, lots of shit happened heh?”
-Then it’s back to the start of the cycle repeat for 6 10 to 15 hours painfully long chapters
Rarely does the game ever deviate from that structure which makes every individual chapter more predictable than the last but also makes each instance of the game padding itself out even more obvious and increasingly annoying as time goes on.

In my previous review of Trails to Azure, I said that the game pacing was excellent but bogged down by the game constant need to pause its action to make us partake in pointless errant of various quality and for the first time ever some of these errant were mandatory to progress into the game with the game sometimes having a weird sense of priorities as what was considered important quest (and as such mandatory) and the ones that could be skipped (which sometimes were actually more story relevant).

And I suggested naively that if they wanted to go moving forward in that direction, they should make things more explicit as to avoid people missing out on important context and lore like that was the case with Azure and so they did the most logical move, make 90% of the side-quest in the game mandatory.

You’ve heard me right, long are the days of getting the luxury to skip on mediocre monster hunt side quests if you didn’t like going through them since this time around you WILL hunt these monsters inside sewers and you WILL enjoy it whether you like it or not. Oh sure the game still has a few game objectives that are completely optional (and even dares to still have secret side quests seriously how is it still a thing). And the worst thing is that they didn’t stop and thought for one second to change the way these games plays out, I hope you like having to arbitrarily do a random monster hunt to progress through the game because this is what most of the climatic big quest of this game consist of and it’s fucking terrible.

Let’s indulge in a bit of game design analysis and try to comprehend this sudden rise in rigidity in a series which already had an issue liberating itself from the shackles of its own faulty foundation.

See, with Trails Falcom has created a really cool world that they’re really proud of and one of the things they are probably even more proud of more than anything else is their NPC’s who constantly update their dialogues for every minor advancement in the story and help the world feel more lived in as you experience micro-level arc and the life of these random people alongside your own journey.

It is one of the core aspect of the series and one of its best idea ever since the original game but in order for this aspect to work on people, you need to condition people to participate in it and while some people are easier to convince than others when it comes to asking them to always recheck all the NPC’s every time you advance the story even in a minor way, others may not.

See most JRPG only ask you the bare minimum when exploring a JRPG town, usually you’re going to enter a town, talk to all the NPC’s to gather clues, learn more about the world or more broadly to advance the plot and maybe check the shops and explore the area to see what other thing might hide in between the streets of these bustling cities but in general this is a one and done thing and unless we’re talking about a semi or full hub town that you come back to constantly and change with time, most of the time it’s a one and done kinda deal, rarely do talking to NPC multiple time at different point worth the hassle.
But in Kiseki it is such a core aspect of the experience, so how do you unconsciously manipulate your player into partaking in such an activity ?

Well by designing the game in a way that will push the people toward that experience and it’s with this game that I finally understood the secret sauce behind what makes Trails side-quest so terrible, these fetch quest and not meant to be interesting, they aren’t meant to be fun, heck they aren’t even meant to fill out the game with content like you’d see in a lot of modern RPG’s.

They are meant to put you on a tour, each quest consist of you going back and forth around the areas the chapter take places in so that you will probably think unconsciously to re-check on all the NPC’s, it’s not about how good the side-quest are, it’s about how these side-quest will force you to a second, third, fourth or even fifth lap of the single area the chapter takes place in and as such, you will have the reflex (or not) to re-talk to the NPC who are on your path to complete these various objectives.

But then how do you encourage the people to even do the side-quest if they’re so boring ? Well before Cold Steel the main incentive behind them was to gather money, you see in Trails you can trade elemental crystal called “sepith” for money but Sepith are also used to create quartz and unlock orbment slot to make your character stronger so using too much Sepith for money means missing out on making your characters better in battle and they might be drag behind the game (very generous) difficulty curve, monsters do not drop money in this game so the only method to get money without trading Sepith were, you guessed it, the side-quest which always gave just the right amount of money to upgrade all of your characters gears as you proceed to the next chapter.

But the Sky games were smart about this by giving its players choice, you can choose to do the side-quest or not, so imagine if there’s a couple of quests that you didn’t want to do like let’s say the monster hunts which were always the most fillerish type of quest in any JRPG, well you can simply skip them, you might not obtain the money, or bracer point for 100% completion or the extra goodies that come along with them but you will spend less time doing unfun shit and you can always use some spare Sepith to fill the gap in your wallet.

But in Cold Steel a new type of Sepith was invented, Sepith Mass, the only purpose of Sepith Mass is to be sold for money, you can’t use them in any other ways (and at this point, why don’t the game simply give you money I hate that gameplay quirk) meaning that the game brought back regular money grinding into a series that has always structured its difficulty and gameplay loop around limiting the player sources of income to force them into doing things they might not have been willing to do in the first place.

Mind you, you can still use regular Sepith for money and by the midway point of the game where all your character are fully upgraded they make it so you never run out of money ever, but that risk vs reward between selling sepith over doing side-quest is completely gone and so with the main purpose of those side-quest being removed, people will be more inclined to skip them and we’ve already mentioned how Falcom doesn’t want to do that for the sake of not making the time spent on making all the NPC’s and their updated dialogues wasted because of the regular player unwillingness to be curious and it’s especially bad to lose your player, especially in a game that was meant to attract a new audience.
So what is the obvious solution ? Well if players won’t go to the side-quest, we’ll make the side-quest go to them and that’s how you end up with a game that has to pad out and fill the gap between important event with pointless errants that the players now MUST WITHOUT ANY QUESTIONS DO !

Oh sure they are still “optional quest” but they represent 10% of the quest this time around and also yes, you’re not rewarded with money for them so feel free to skip them, I did all the side-quest in this game and most of the optional quest reward was not worth the hassle of doing them, I did them just out of completionist sake and to get those sweet sweet AP bonus which are this time around the only thing pushing you towards those optional thing.

And so you’d think, maybe they would make those errant more entertaining, fun or enticing in any way, well no and most of the time the game will make you understand the definition of insanity when most of the quest in the game are regular monster hunt quest and this is how you end up with a game where you’re still rendered at killing monsters in sewers at the 40h mark of the game while the story has still gone nowhere interesting or is spectacularly avoiding to get you in on the good shit.

And this time around, this particular Trails cannot compensate for its shitty structure with good, entertaining or even charming writing for the life of it and can’t even do it through its gameplay either.

Oh yeah because it’s not enough that the game is a boring slog with almost nothing engaging or even charming going on for it, it’s also a boring slog that made the gameplay of the series worse somehow. Trails gameplay was always kinda fun, it was not the revolution of the century but you could see that the more the series progressed and they more they tweaked some of its elements to make more varied boss and monster encounter and make use of its excellent arts and craft system at the center of it all and one thing that lays the foundation of such a solid system were the Quartz system.

Well fuck me because they decided to make orbment and Quartz way worse in this game, see in the previous games in the series, you had to arrange quartz in certain way to gain access to new and more powerful spell, the players needed to struck a good balance to get access to the most move possible while still profiting of the advantages given by each individual quartz like stat increases or additional effect, the system allowed for a lot of customization and a bit of experimentation, often times limiting the player with the characters different align to push them into playing them a certain way or to try and overcome these limitations.

Not this time tho, now you have quartz that give you stat boost and additional effecst and now you have quartz who are specifically designed to give you one spell, no more messing around with crystal combination and doing math, our players don’t care about an actually good progression system or having fun with an RPG, they want to get through the shitty slog part of the game faster so they can get to the twisty twist turn shit faster. This change severely reduces the utility of Arts which used to be main meta of Trails especially on higher difficulty and as such render characters who are either full-caster or mixed-attacker in the game completely and utterly useless outside of spamming their support crafts which are for the most part absurdly good.
Now be ready to just jack your physical attackers with as much strength boosting accessories and quartz as well as passive status effect and spam the ever living shit out of AoE attack like it’s FC’s endgame on steroid, past the midway point of the game most fight can be trivialized by out-dps’ing or simply not let monsters and bosses take turn.

Because all of your characters have insanely broken crafts, the crafts are so broken in this game whether they’re offensive or support type that they render the use of certain arts completely useless, in fact most arts are useless after a while despite the game tutorial making you think that it wouldn’t be the case and that you’d still need to cast a spell and heck now with the Zero-Arts bonus in combat that can pop-up, you can still use them without any cost.

More than never, the determining factor towards victory now are the master quartz an element introduced in Azure that didn’t have much influence on combat and was this game attempt at a job system but now in a setting where Quartz have been jumbled up to favor just powermaxxing everything, Master Quartz are now going to be essential to mix up your gameplay… or not…

The one that are installed by default on your characters are for the most part the best quartz adapted to them and even if you can get new master quartz throughout your adventure, by the time you get them, you MQ would’ve already evolved past a point where it would be worth changing them (Rean and Laura Master Quartz makes them absolutely stupid from the early game all the way to the final boss)

Wow amazing how the game has 11 party members by the end but half of them are rendered almost useless by this change, what else do we have to do to save this mess of a change ?

Well the main new feature that Cold Steel adds to the gameplay of Trails is the addition of links, you can link your character between them for additional advantages in battle and by using certain type of weapons on enemies (with the damage type borrowed from at the time Ys Seven and Celceta), you can initiate a break and chained them with an additional attack.

As you progress through the game, chaining link attack become a good way to inflict serious amount of damages and after a certain point in the game, you can do the rush attack from the Crossbell titles after chaining 5 link attack (which I think is a good limitation over how Crossbell games handled that feature). The more characters are linked together and the more they gain link points and when their link levels up, they can do even more additional action like counter-attacking or protecting their allies or auto-healing.

This is a pretty neat system sadly not exploited to its full potential here in this title because outside of 2 notable exception, this game is painfully easy, ofc part of the blame is on me for playing on normal like always but no thoughts was put into most of the aside bare the 2nd fight against C which was a welcome raise in difficulty.



Sadly 2 things bog down the fun factor of the system for me, the first one is having to resettle the links everytime someone dies, resettling the link doesn’t sacrifice a turn but it’s something you can easily forgot to do until you’re 5 turns in wondering why you can’t break enemies and then realizing that you just forgot to re-link, I think link should be regenerated if one of the pair gets revived without having linked to another character in the meantime, it’d be a great way to do this, also regenerate the link after battles, it’s just kind of stupid but heh, a bit of QoL wouldn’t have hurt and the other thing is the fact than in order to make full use of this system well… you have to actually give enough of a shit about the character to bond with them and level them up faster.

Because yes, back to writing (and also gameplay).

CS1 seems to take a lot (perhaps a bit too much) inspiration from other popular RPGs at the times, the setting is like Final Fantasy Type-0 (to the point of plagiarism) and the way the game tells its story borrows a lot from the Persona series. I could make a commentary on why I don’t think NU-Persona (heck Rean strikes the same pose as Yu Narukami in battle if that isn’t enough proof) should be this influential on this market but that’s not the subject what I mean by this is that the already rigid structure of the game is completed by a bunch of mechanics and narrative trick ripped straight out of Persona without really understanding the point of them.

The game has a calendar system and even multiple time slot often mention each day but that’s about it, it only serves to place the events of the game on a timeline something that the other titles didn’t need to do in the first place so I don’t know why it’s here, there’s no time management, there’s no prioritizing activities or social link over the other, there’s no meta to that system. However what the game has is something similar to the Social Link from Persona called “Bonding events”.

Now Bonding Point and Bonding events was already an element I complained about in Azure but in that game it was sort of an hidden but hinted at feature that was sadly ruined by bad programming and also by Azure oftentimes bad sense of narrative priorities (hiding who character backstory behind the final bonding events for exemple).

I also said that while I don’t mind a bit of player agency and choice for a personalized experience in my JRPG, I also felt like this feature was a bit pointless in a game that is supposed to have one true canon and that there is no way any subsequent game especially from different arcs could follow through on the individual romantic (or not) choice of the players.

But in Azure, it was discreet, badly programmed and not implemented super thoughtfully but at least it was a subtle way to make the player experience with the game more unique depending on how he acted during the game. CS1 decides to fully embrace that aspect of the game and making it more explicit and I do not feel like it pulled that off successfully either and in fact because the characters in this game are rather dry and bland, I had a lot of trouble actually giving a shit about any of them during regular gameplay and I guess they expected me to like them more through their bonding event and fellas, let me tell that if this was the plan then I’m sorry to say that I see the vision but I feel like the vision is shit.

Persona at least try to make the characters and their dynamic compelling outside of their social link and even though the divide between Social Link and main story creates inconsistencies, at least you were probably more willing to learn more about these characters because they have fun interactions with one another that cement them as real people with personalities, doubts, feeling and not just a succession of one-dimensional anime trope with a character design.

I think a lot of CS problem also comes from the presentation of its story, being the first game of the series for the PS Vita and the first game in Full 3D, I can’t say that the change in arstyle brought with it a net positive, sure environments are in 3D but from the dungeons to the different towns and cities that doesn’t really make a difference since they seem structured in a similar fashion than in Azure except now the game presentation needs to rely on cinematography and I think that Falcom didn’t really nail that aspect at all, the scene composition and direction of the scenes and dialogues are so bad, because the party is so large a lot of cutscene just involve all of them sitting around and blocking each other from the view and it makes for very cluttered scene where not much emotions or anything could be displayed to full intensity.

While I was writing this review, I got curious and watched the CS1 musical adaptation and while it couldn’t fix the gaping ideological and thematic holes in the story it definitely did a better job in selling me on these characters in 2h than this game failed at doing in 80 and that’s saying something about how just a little change like characters being more expressive and proper stage direction can do wonder to an average/mediocre story (in fact RIP character portrait it legitimately hurt the game even more visually). I’m not criticizing the graphics here since Falcom probably wanted this game to sell to a wider audience and most of them can’t handle anything else in terms of artstyle but I will say that the transition to 3D wasn’t an improvement but could’ve been had Falcom would have cared more about directing than just dumping a bunch of text to fill textboxes and embrace other type of narration something they’ve always struggled to do even in the earlier titles.

In fact even the writing this time around I felt to be a bit stiff and lifeless which definitely didn’t help me care about what the game was trying to say, I think this is more of a prose issue this time around, I’m missing the charm and quirkiness of the writing in games like Sky (especially sky) and the Crossbell game. CS1 relies a bit too heavily on unfunny forced sex jokes because “anime” or make their character just have the most annoying dialogue ever like Machias, it’s like CS1 is Trails skinwalker because it’s trying to be like those legacy titles but can’t do it even in the NPC dialogues.

The game just doesn’t let the character group dynamic shine because it also feels the need for gameplay reason to separate the group in 2 in all field studies which makes you feel like you never get time to know these characters as people despite the game spending a considerable amount of time trying to make you care about their school activities.

Some people might say that finding CS1 boring but FC charming is gonna be up to my taste and while it is true, FC only got better with time and while FC has less things going on than CS1, at least it wasn’t trying to blueball you with a real story until the final moment which was genuinely hype as fuck, it was a game carried entirely by the relationship and complicity of its two main lead and the guest characters coming along the way.
CS1 has too many characters and doesn’t have time to spend for a lot of them, Trails work best with a smaller cast that grow larger as the game goes on but CS1 build such weak foundation that you’d rather do anything but waste your time desperately grasping at straws to find an ounce of quality to the game’s writing, atmosphere or structure which all works against him.

Even Rean, the main character of this game couldn’t be more barebone for the life of me, he’s a random LN default looking guy with a sword with the personality of a brick and the social awareness of a cloister and the narrative always try to propel him to be this incredible badass while also pushing a Shirou FSN narrative of him being reckless because he hates himself or has trauma or ofc has some sort of curse in his vein that turn him super saiyan from time to time because anime… he has almost no chemistry with any of the female characters even Alisa which is a character many people like but that I just found annoying the whole way through (definitely has at least character motives which is more than nothing I guess),

I just couldn’t bare to care about these characters or even the few good things borrowed from the series legacy had to offer, I think that after 6 games, effort should be made to improve a game formula and not making it worse in every conceivable way and a lot of the tool the game uses to keep you going and invested are really cheap including the ending.

Crow standout as a really cool character but the way the game foreshadow his twist couldn’t be more obvious and in general you feel like this game just care as much about me about all of the stuff it’s presenting to you, it’s infodumping you on stuff in the most bland way possible like in bar or classroom, it’s reflecting on subject matter it barely has any knowledge or deeper understanding of, it nullify all sense of urgency by showing and telling you that shit are happening but you’re doing things that has nothing to do with the shit happening despite having chapter names that make those story beat more badass than they actually are.

They give so little shit, that the final chapter of the game, I kid you not is the worst lead-up to a final dungeon and final boss I’ve ever seen, first of all the final chapter is about a school festival and preparing for a concert like it’s some bad Naruto level filler, you play freaking mini-games, you go on date, suddenly the old schoolhouse lights up and the characters take the whole situation super seriously, you got the epic music, you got the chuuni quotes, you got the weird surreal environment, yeup doesn’t feel like the climax of the game but it’s the final dungeon anyway and you’re going to fight the final bos which is just a really lame fight coming off of the last boss you fought which was the only genuine challenge of the game.

Then it’s followed by several hours of cutscenes to complete the school festival arc with the final concert which… I understand it was meant to be this emotional peak and a huge accomplishment for the characters solidifying their bonds but because of how badly the game managed to develop or make me care about them, this doesn’t feel earned at all and then…

Well



The only really well done part of the game happens in the last few hours, a roller coaster of twist and turn and melancholic vibe featuring child soldiers being scared of being deported and giant robots punching each other in … huh… let’s say … functioning gameplay ?

But even these last moments feel like a cheap way to make you stay and check out the sequel rather than something truly impactful and earned, like yeah sure if this was let’s say FC, I would be like “oh shit” but here, not really and it’s sad really.

Because that ending really slaps dick, it’s really cool, I just don’t feel like the game earn such a finale after failing at building all the foundations necessary to make this ending worth it, the game feel like a waste of my time, a waste of my energy, a waste of my mental health.

And then it just decides to blueball you like that, I just don’t really have much respect for this, even earlier it was doing it with the intro of the game being a flashforward to an event which was a red herring and nothing really major or important and it even dares make you replay through the intro again when you reach that part, gotta love reused content and padding, well played guys.

Mind you, I do plan on still checking the sequel one of these days, not out of excitement to know what will happen next but because I’m too deep into this to stop now and I’m also morbidly curious to see how low that ship could sink.

So…

Huh…

I forgot to mention the actual one positive of the game

IT’S TOWA HERSCHEL OMG, GUYS, GUYS, GUYS, I LOVE HER, SHE SAVED ME GUYS, ALL THE MOMENT WHERE SHE WAS ON THE SCREEN IS THE BEST MOMENT! SHE’S SO SMOL AND CUTE AND HARDWORKING AND I WANT TO GET HER OUT OF THIS GAME AND SHE’S THE ONLY REASON WHY THIS GAME IS A 2/10 INSTEAD OF A BIG FAT 1

FUCK AM I GETTING PSY-OPPED INTO PLAYING MORE OF THESE BECAUSE OF CUTE GIRLS ?

FUCK YOU KONDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Trails in the Sky The 3rd : Diamond in the rough, don't skip



Previously on "Cani plays the Kiseki series", Cani was struck with how lukewarm he ended up being towards Trails SC the most hype entry in the sky trilogy, if you want some recontextualization refer to my Sky SC (and a bit of FC review)

With that said, let's talk about the 3rd and final entry in the Sky saga, Trails in the Sky the 3rd !

This one is kind of an oddball within the series, remember how I said that despite its flaws Trails SC still retained the same quality as FC in terms of writing and coherence ? Well this time it's a bit more complicated, Trails the 3rd doesn't really possess any of these qualities because it goes for a completely different thing, while the first 2 games were classic JRPG titles were you go around the world, talk to people and explore dungeons from time to time , Trails the 3rd is mostly a dungeon crawler where you go through different dungeons , beat up ennemies and get some random story content from time to time.

In a lot of ways, Trails the 3rd feels a lot less ambitious than its predecessor, the game is kind of a budget title and it's something that you can feel quite a bit. From all the reused assets, to the weird plot structure and doors, Trails the 3rd is a chimera Frankenstein monster of an entry that is so drastically different from the first two that one might not vibe with it if they liked the first two games much more than me.

Even the title kinda put a big emphasis on that, it's Sky "the 3rd" instead of sky "3rd chapter" that's because the game is the third title of the Sky series but not really a sequel to the Sky main storyline which is well over by now.

I honestly even doubt the game was even planned by any stretch of the imagination, it's like "Ok we have enough unresolved plot points and under developed side-characters to fill an entire game with it but the story is over ? What do we do ?"

"I dunno do you know about Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories ?"

Trails the 3rd has to bear on its shoulders three completely disjointed promises :

-Expanding on the already well developed cast and storyline of the first 2 games
-Setting the stage for future entries
-And telling a self-contained story of its own that's worth going through to not feel to justify this game being more than an anthology

So did it manages to do all of that ?

OH MY GOD THEY DID AND EVEN MORE, TRAILS THE 3rd IS ACTUALLY THE BEST ENTRY IN THE SERIES BY FAR

But how ? How does a game so drastically different ? So drastically cheaper on such a drastically smaller conflict can even achieve the status of being quite literally a masterpiece were the first two entries were alright but not above average ?

I'd say that the first aspect that Sky 3rd excels at is structure and general pacing, the game is much shorter than the first two entries but much more is going on in the story at literally any point, there's not a single dull or repetitive moment nor are their needlessly stretched out chunk of gameplay (except maybe chapter 6 but chapter 6 also possess some of the rawest boss fight in the trilogy) and despite setting its story in a world vastly different than the first two entry, it manages to have a superb vibe and atmosphere enhanced by what is easily the best soundtrack in the entire trilogy.

This is also served by probably the best gameplay the series has seen so far, while like the first two entries I still played on normal difficulty, Trails 3rd really does use the serviceable but still fun battle system of the original to its full potential here. This is due to how the game handles its difficulty and the different ressources you get throughout the game, unlike Sky FC and SC, getting access to Mira and new quartz is harder so the game pretty much forces to play smarter with the limited toolset given to you , that toolset grows exponentially larger as time goes on and the more party members you acquire and the more quartz you can get access to grows and the more insane the builds can be.

I actually enjoy the fact the game prioritize giving you characters you might've not used in the original titles meaning that you have a bigger time to experience with new and unique party combination , eventually you do get all the party members available in the previous games (which have also seen some changes in their gameplay with new or upgraded crafts) as well as two surprise party members which just happens to also be 2 of my favorite antagonist from the previous entries (and both are allegedly SUPER BROKEN) but that doesn't really change the fact that for most of the game you have to adapt yourself to what you have, and thank god investing on some of these characters is so worth it (Tita becomes a fucking MONSTER by the end of the game let me tell you)

Everything is served by the game having quite an upscale in difficulty, because of plot related reasons the monsters have new elemental weaknesses and resistance, so now you can't just spam time magic anymore and be gone with it, elemental weaknesses are even more important in this game than in the previous titles and boss battles aren't just about brute forcing your way through them trying to out-dps them, you need to manage buffs and debuffs accordingly, being cautious of your placement and general movement as well as managing your status resistance because this game will not forgive even random encounters can kick your ass without you noticing if you're not careful about that shit and if it's already this much fun on normal mode, I can't even imagine how amazing it would be on the other game difficulties, 3rd is the only game I'm looking forward to replay just for the gameplay , it's really that good.

The exploration is also vastly improved from SC, SC had the problem of having too much less new content, recycled areas with little to no changes and a fuck lot of backtracking

3rd changes that by doing three things :

-Having way more new environment and dungeons to explore
-Recycling areas but putting a twist on them to make them feel fresh and new to go through
-And little to no backtracking with the game having actual fast travel with a LOT of areas you can teleport to

Meaning that yes, Sky 3rd was clearly less of a pain in the ass than SC in that regard and all that I've mentioned above does make the game pacing quite buttery smooth for the majority of it.

But what's good gameplay and exploration in a JRPG if not tied to a good story ?

Well turns out despite its weird disjointed plot structure, Trails the 3rd is the perfect cap off to the franchise one could ever hoped for.

The main content of the game itself is quite straightforward and short, but the side-content is truly where the game truly shines and what make this the penultimate kiseki experience for any fan of the franchise.

Like I said the game has an anthology approach to its story, along your exploration of Phantasma, you'll get across different kinds of doors which ranges from short stories about random characters to longer more developed stories to minigames. Some doors even have the luxury to tease you on the rest of the franchise especially star door 8 and 14 which sets the stage for what I believe would be stuff happening later in Crossbell and Cold Steel.

These doors really adds a lot to the cast that was already pretty meaty in the original and helped me get an even better appreciation for them even the super minor ones, some of these are actually so good you actually wonder why these subplot weren't in SC to begin with (especially the Estelle and Joshua ones which would've hit even harder in the context of that game rather than a random substory in 3rd).

Of course the clear outliers of all these doors is clearly Star Door 15 which is to put it lightly the "PTSD arc" of the Trails series due to how brutal of a tone and atmosphere change it is from the rest of the game (note : therapy not included) and have put me in quite a bad mood after finishing it. It's so viscerally brutal and told so crudely while keeping the doubt throughout the entire thing where you're in a constant state of "No fucking way..." until it is "yes fucking way" and your heart is broken to pieces.

But what about the main story ? Well this time instead of Estelle and Joshua serving more of a support role this time, the story focus on a character from SC named Kevin, Kevin was already a pretty damn fun character in SC but more in a comedic side-kick kind of way well at least until the ending of the game when a new side of his character is revealed to us.

Trails the 3rd builds on that ending to develop Kevin from a funny sidekick to quite possibly one of my favorite protagonist in media, even surpassing Estelle in her own series despite having two games worth of character development herself.

The story of Kevin about dealing with his past traumas and trying to bear the pain on his shoulder to atone for his sins and how his destructive coping mechanism manages to hurt the people around him (metaphorically and literally through the existence of Phantasma) is one that deeply touched me and was so effective and told with such brillance, nuance and subtlety that it managed to even get little old me emotional.

Suffice to say that the final third of the game is truly where the game reaches its most climatic point yet, seriously this ending feels even more cathartic than the one from SC in many ways and yes it did made me cry like a little baby because despite all of the bumps in the road, I did got attached to these characters and that particular smaller story really emphasized how much seeing them grow over the course of three games truly was something few JRPG can manage to pull off.

The final farewell to the cast was probably the best way to cap off this series.

Trails the 3rd is quite honestly a masterpiece but one that truly holds meaning within the context of its own series and to think some people would skip it is absolutely unreasonable.

You got me Falcom hive, you got me DAMN well

TL;DR : SC is trash , 3RD GANG RISE UP !

I remember I was kinda hyped for this game when it was announced cuz of the story mode, but then forgot about it

Then, after some time I saw a post in acecombat subreddit saying that it was like "ace combat" but racing. Say less my guy, that's my horny dream. I love ace combat and i love racing

So I usually play "arcade sim", like f1, forza motosport and so on. I play it with the wheel and in first-person mode, so just to establish my preferred way of playing racing games.

So, the main thing that I was interested in is the main story. It's structured in a similar way to "Drive to survive", a documentary about F1. Pretty much it's real ppl on cameras, taking place in a singular season of some moto racing championship. I'M DOWN.

The characters are pretty cliche but that is what it makes it good. Bad guys are so bad, they just show with every second they are in. Good guys are underdogs who always are in the fucked situation. That's the part that I adore: simple cliche characters, good over-the-top drama, simple and effective.
This story also makes some races more impactful, sometimes you actually feel that "oh this son of the bitch said that and this about me, I'm gonna race him rly hard this race" and so on, there is even one somewhat emotional moment near the end. Also during the races, they add some cool music depending on the mood of the story. That's the best thing that the game can offer.

Sadly, that's about that. That's the only feature of this game that makes it stand out. But the worst part is that it's just not enough. There are 36 or 31 races in total, and about 10 of them have cutscenes. And like only 2 move the story forward, the rest of them is just establishing the characters and showing how bad the main guys are. I'M fine with it, but there is just no story development. Deadass the story progresses only in the last 3-4 missions. There is a beginning where you only get introduced into stuff, the middle part has no story, and then the end.

It just feels like there is no story whatsoever. Such a letdown, I was expecting all kinds of drama, sports drama, character drama, and business/politics drama... but I kinda got nothing... The actors and acting are good, I really liked all of them, but there are just not enough interactions. I wish every race was treated as the last one. And cuz of how little we gotta see them, you can't connect with them and they just gonna be forgotten :(

So, the story, while I was super hyped for it and super excited, was a let down cuz it was wayyy to little of it.

Now gameplay
It's fine, but it just doesn't feel as good as other games. I dunno how to describe it. It's an arcade, but if you disable every assist setting and crank up the difficulty, you will get more enjoyable racing, but it still feels kinda clumsy. Especially fucking pick-ups or wherever these cars were. I dunno, at the end, I really wished that I was playing forza motorsport tho


Anyway, I was super hyped for it. It was kinda my dream racing game in my mind. Dramatic sports story with good gameplay... But it has such a small "story" and the gameplay is alright... Also the performance wasn't that good on xbox one s

Anyway, I know that dlcs enhance the story. I might check them out later, but for now, this game is a disappointment for me

One of these games that make me hate being a completionist. Up until the 120th star, it's all good, an excellent creative game with unique mechanics and lots of variety. The few issues I have are the slightly annoying way that prankster comets don't always appear when you need them, which bugged me a bit during the last twenty stars (purple coin comets), but I loved playing through the game. To get the 121st star, though, you have to play through the entire game again as Luigi. All I knew is that you had to get all stars with Luigi so I thought that at least you had already unlocked everything, could choose which order you did them in etc.., but no, you actually start at the beginning and have to do everything again as Luigi, even moving annoying prankster comets or collecting star bits to pay hungry Lumas. Seriously, no idea what Nintendo was thinking. You can tell they didn't even put any effort into this, because the levels and world don't change at all, you're just playing with slightly worse mechanics, and you even have to save Luigi (?!) as Luigi. Other than that, fantastic game, but man....

I am eternally destined to like games that are divisive because people are too joyless to appreciate em, and Fire Emblem Engage is absolutely no exception.

Don't get me wrong - my first impression of this game was far from stellar too. I had half a mind to avoid using Alear entirely because I hated their design so much.
But with every bit of gameplay features we got to see, I got more and more excited for this game - and man, I'm so glad I did. It is such a ridiculously fun game.

We haven't had such a heavy focus on player-phase combat in the series since FE12, which was already my favorite FE gameplay-wise - but this game just goes above and beyond. The Break system took me a while to get used to, but when it finally clicked it was so ridiculously satisfying.
The low deployment slots and gigantic amount of Emblem Ring combinations you could pull off means it's gonna be great fun to replay too, and I can't wait to give that a shot.

The story definitely takes a while to get going, and I don't blame anyone for losing interest relatively quickly, but I'm glad it picks up as well as it does.
Didn't think I'd ever say this about Fire Emblem but the ludonarrative harmony is what especially fascinated me about this game - there's some really impactful moments where you're supposed to feel powerless and it shows SO goddamn well through the gameplay that follows. It's incredible.

Despite the story being pretty basic at first, the characters are still as enjoyable as always - and although it takes more of a GBA FE approach of having some quick and simple supports, there's still plenty of meaningful and enjoyable ones. Ivy was a really stand-out character to me, because she's one of the few that tackles issues that are very specific to the game's setting. I think you could've taken any other character in a different setting and they'd still work - which doesn't bother me too much, honestly - but she's definitely the most layered character I've seen in the supports in my playthrough. Pleasantly surprised about that!

All in all, I'm really happy with this game. It's not perfect by any means, but I think any long-time fan should really be able to appreciate what this game's going for. Tons of subtle nods to older games and tons of direct fanservice with the Emblem Rings and how they play.
Couldn't think of a better (regrettably delayed) anniversary celebration!

Really excited for Fire Emblem's future after playing this game. Fantastic gameplay, a story that works more than well enough for what the game's supposed to be, great fanservice, incredible animations and hell - the game looks gorgeous in general, honestly.
With so much going well for it, I can't wait to see what's next!