Overall its pretty easily the strongest game in the series with the best main story, best overall cast, THE best villains, and the best start to an arc. Van Arkride gives this game a 9/10 at worst.

The best "filler game", extremely consistently good similar to Kuro but falls flat with the Dusken Dancer subplot, some daydreams being overall awful and Lloyd route being fairly weak in comparison to Rean's and especially C's. The postgame can also feel very monotonous at times if you aren't constantly getting new sealing stones and its pretty infuriating, especially when many of the gacha characters are some of the series worst like Angelica and Roselia

The most consistently good game in the series. Wrapping up things from Sky in the start of the next arc is pretty ???? but it works. The SSS are an extremely strong cast and it works extremely well for the game. Also the overall best ost in the series

Foreshadows events from the future of the series expertly (despite some of those being extremely fumbled, looking at you Star Door 8), but the disconnect between the actual main plot and the rest of the series is ludicrous. Personally find Ries a very overhyped character and I wish she interacted with fucking anyone who isn't Kevin more, she feels like a backpack for his development if anything. The side content also being essentially mandatory is very silly

This game is so fucking weird to talk about because it has some of the absolute best content in the series (Prologue, Fragments, Finale), while also containing some of the worst (Act 2A, Act 3 in general), but for me personally the good outweighs the bad. The combat is also pretty easily the best in the series

Excellent followup to Zero but the start of many problems that constantly plague Cold Steel (bad pacing, awful villains, harem bullshit, bonding events holding key character moments). Azure also completely fumbles Elie as a character, losing her geopolitics plotline on top of her pretty clearly setup romance with Lloyd. Azure is an excellent game that frankly pisses me off way too much, and its status as the "best Kiseki game" feels pretty undeserved to me

Literally fucking nothing happens in half of this game but the other half is fantastic and really wraps up what FC set up expertly. I'm not super attached to Sky's cast either despite liking them enough so a lot of the meandering moments hurt the game for me

The best Cold Steel, overall all the elements work well together but holy shit I think the game should actually end at the chapter named "finale"

The best place to start the series no questions asked. Cute game where nothing happens where the cute fun cast can carry you through

Genuinely the best Cold Steel has to offer for the first three chapters of the game but then it decides it wants to bash its head into a wall until it starts bleeding in the last two

Tries to be a grand finale of the first half of the series but falls on its face by not committing to fucking anything with the main cast or any returning characters and instead chooses to have harem moments and really fucking stupid plot points with a small sprinkle of actual good in there (Duvalie, Cedric, Crow). Its a bad game but it can slide because its bad moments are kinda hilarious half the time

The difference between FC and Kuro 2 being good and having nothing plots is they actually had a good cast to carry the nothing. This game has Sara Valestien and the ost, with nothing else of merit. Easily the worst in the series, and the worse of the two I would actively call bad games