This remake single handedly took a game that I just thought was a very good PS2 RPG and turned it into something really special. I don't think it's my favorite in the Persona series still, but everything this remake adds to the character development, the narrative, the music, and the gameplay makes all the best parts of Persona 3 sing.

I get that it isn't technically definitive. It's missing FeMC and all the content that came with that, and The Answer (Before it gets released as DLC, I hope they overhaul the gameplay!)

But this is basically the "Journey" in it's best form. I'll not going to talk about any real negatives in this review because they are all pointless nitpicks.

Linked episodes? All kino and give the male cast the development they really needed in the original game. Surprisingly well written too.

Tartarus? It's actually fun. I still slightly prefer Persona 5's handcrafted dungeons but P3R does the whole procedural generation thing a lot better, and all the Tartarus blocks look gorgeous.

Even the gardening/cooking/watching TV/walking Koromaru sections give the characters a lot more time together. Fully voiced too.

Theurgies are a great addition to the gameplay. I can see some people finding it to be a bit too easy on normal but harder difficulties do exist. Shift is a great addition to combat too, making normal battles less of a chore, while still retaining the challenge a boss should pose.

As for the voice acting... It's a better dub. The old dub isn't bad but this dub feels better directed, and all the characters have voices that are either incredibly similar to their original one, or fit the same vibe. The only odd one out is Akihiko, but I feel like Alejandro did a fantastic job with his performance and probably has more nuance than Liam's original peformance... though I will say I do feel like 2024 Liam could have pulled it off as well. I blame the lack of variety in his voice on the direction and not Liam himself.

Every menu looks stylish and its fun to browse through, similar to Persona 5. It doesn't look like Persona 5 though... it's just a stylish menu.

I was originally someone who was worried about this remake. The change in the English voice cast, and the idea that a few things might've been axed. But everything in this remake only stands to elevate the game. The expanded ending is really something special too. Everything added to Persona 3 Reload doesn't lose the feel of the original, and only enhances the gameplay and the story's narrative themes. 10/10 experience.

Trails of Cold Steel IV : End Of Saga (and my sanity)

Before properly starting this review, I wanted to tell you a little story about myself.

In 2019, there was a game by the name of Kingdom Hearts III, now I know this is gonna sound off topic but bear with me for a second. Kingdom Hearts as a franchise was really important in my formative years of gaming, I received the first entry on Christmas of 2003 (the same year I got my PS2) probably because my mom saw Donald and Goofy on the cover and thought it was just one of many Disney games that she already brought home to keep me occupied during her busy hours.

What she didn’t know is that this single event was going to change the trajectory of my life forever and was going to trigger my biggest most long-running autistic hyper obsession I’ll ever have in my life. I’d say that KH1 is the most important game in my life because as funny as it’s going to sound, it was the game that taught me that games could be so much more than electronic distractions, more than just a virtual toy to lose a few hours on. Oh sure I did have games that could’ve also done that in my library such as “Link’s Awakening” or “Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver” but as excellent as these games were, they were a bit too “cerebral” for my younger self and I only got to finish them several years down the line when I was intellectually inclined to do so.

KH1 was this perfect blend of complex yet simple, engaging yet straightforward, beautifully poetic and epic. And of course being attached to Disney properties definitely did help. Exploring worlds based on some of my childhood favorite movies was like a dream come true and all of this packed in a great deal of mystery and a seemingly deeper lore that one might not expect from a crossover game. By the end of KH1, I was so charmed, so starstruck by how magic the experience was that I said to myself : “I don’t know what this is, but I need more of whatever this is !” and thankfully enough, KH1 was also an amazing gateway title to the wider world of JRPG’s. It was thanks to KH1 (and a neighbour who was deep into RPG) that I got to play FFIX, my first Final Fantasy game for the first time, my aunt brought me Dark Cloud 2 and so forth and so forth, combine this with me discovering the internet and the wonderful world of emulation and I was set for life catching up on all the amazing games I’ve missed out on over the years and still am catching up to this day.

But KH was different, unlike many JRPG series Kingdom Hearts had its own mythology, its own internal lore and hinged heavily on its continuity. It was in fact one of the series main selling points, you came for the Disney shenanigans and you stayed to hear about the next chapter in Tetsuya Nomura’s wild ride. And while I skipped Chain of Memories when it came out (only to come back to it, to understand KH2 a lil better), I played KH2 and holy shit that game got me hooked for good and I was set for life ! Between the Mickey letter at the end and the awesome secret ending with these badass knights holding keyblade in some sort of desert, I knew that whenever KH3 was going to come out, it was going to be the best fucking game in my life.

Now KH2 was released in 2005 and KH3 eventually released in 2019…

When Square eventually announced that we’ll get not just one, not two but three KH games before the release of KH3, I was going insane !
But deep in my mind all I really wanted was KH3, the fabled conclusion to the epic saga that I was now a part of because in the end that’s one of the reasons I even got obsessed with KH in the first place. It felt like I was becoming a part of something ! I was witnessing the birth of a cult-classic franchise and I was witnessing first hand the continuous creation of its bigger story…

This excitement lasted for a while… but then an event happened which started instilling doubt into my faith in this franchise, this was the release of a little game known as Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance. As a videogame, KH3D is probably one of the most serviceable games in the franchise but its story is where I started realizing that the writers were kind of stuck in a corner with this whole “seeker of darkness” arc. The plot started going off the rails with retcons on previous antagonist coming back for plot contrivance reasons, the 2 main lead were going through the same character arc they did in the previous mainline title only served on a different plate and fucking Time-Travel was a thing and made an already convoluted story even more convoluted and everything felt like it’ll lead to all the tragedies in the series and the investment I had in said tragedies being ruined for cheap fanservice down the line.

And yet, I didn’t give up, I still waited for the day KH3 would be mine. But 15 years is a long time, in 15 years a lot of things happened and the little boy who was having fun pushing the triangle button to get on the Hydra’s back in 2005 has went through a lot, I graduated from elementary school and high school, I’ve entered college then dropped out of college, I had a stomach surgery, lost my virginity, experienced many other games and many other media and sadly developed something known as : critical thinking. Since then, I replayed all the KH games through the HD collection discovering the Final Mix version of these games for the first time and realizing that KH2 wasn’t just “great”, it was “a masterpiece” and easily the single best Action-RPG ever released even almost 20 years after its release and while I still hold a lot of fondness for both KH1 and KH2 (and 358/2 days to a lesser extend), the same couldn’t be said for the portable entries.

I tried to get back into BBS but I found the game to be a boring slog with terrible writing, a bland trio of characters, a battle system that was fundamentally broken and became monotonous very fast once I understood the “cracks” in the code and a story that’s full of good ideas but executed sloppily and had to resolve to using a shit load of retcon about how the Keyblade worked in order to expand the universe which killed a bit of the magic of the first game’s plot in my opinion. Suffice to say that while I don’t find BBS bad, it’s definitely a game that aged like piss in my mind because it was trying to make the world too complex while not delivering where it mattered (aka : the character writing, the main plot and having a fun complex battle system).

When KH3 finally came out, I was a changed man and part of me still couldn’t believe this game was real and I could actually purchase it at my local game store. So I did play KH3, spending roughly 40 or so hours completing it and to say that my disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined was an understatement. KH3 was indeed the big conclusive finale of the franchise and as such it’s the converging point of everything the series has built up to this point but sadly, it was also the culmination of all the bullshit the series has accumulated over the years and has slowly but surely transformed a once beloved and respected cult classic JRPG series into some sort of a running joke.
I kinda live with the disappointment nowadays and the Re:Mind DLC probably helped mitigate some of my issues I had with the game initially but I simply couldn’t believe in the “KH plan” anymore. The problem with Kingdom Hearts is that what was once the game series that taught me that games can have genuinely great and engaging writing on top of fun gameplay became just this confused mess of shitty fanservice and lore-flopping. Like the series forgot that it was supposed to tell a story with themes and shit and instead just became a collection of cliché and lore stuff thrown haphazardly into a semi-coherent mess and in the end, it wasn’t even conclusive enough, most of it was set up for the next arc which is going to be based on the story explored in the mobile game and … man I just couldn’t care less.

I already invested so much time and energy with this franchise but nowadays, I can’t even gather the energy to recommend it to anybody anymore. I think KH is very different for the people who discovered the franchise now without any nostalgic childhood attachment to it, the early games are a bit janky and most of the portable entry are not the height of gaming promised by your peers, only KH2 stands out amongst the rest for just being some sort of miracle accident which ended up creating one of the most fun and versatile action-rpg ever released (but only if you’re playing on critical mode, why would you play KH2 on anything but Critical is beyond me)

The reason I went on this tangent about KH is to tell you that after KH, I always seeked for something else that I could claim as my new hyper-obsession and at the time I was playing KH3, a friend of mine was talking about the Trails Series and hearing about it made me jump out of my chair, it sounded too good to be true ! An expensive multi-generational epic journey through multiple connected entries with an insane amount of attention dedicated to worldbuilding and continuity ? Damn, maybe I found what I wanted. So over the past 3-4 years, I caught up with the series and I did find my new hyper-obsession… well not with Trails… but with another less “respectable” franchise that I already mentioned in my CS2 review but that’s a story for another time.

I really wish I could’ve become a true super highly obsessed fan of Trails who couldn’t help but marathon these games, but the story of my relationship with Trails was a rocky one, full of powerful highs and unfortunate lows. Full of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential, not everyone can be the next Matsuno and with the last few entries I kinda gave up on the series giving me something meaningful to latch myself onto, I never became a fan of Trails but I can somewhat empathize with Trails fans due to my experience with the KH series and how it went from my lifeblood to my favorite gaming toxic relationship.

And these problems, these minor issues that I reported in detail back during my Azure review kinda grew out of proportions like a big cancerous tumor filling itself with pus and dead cells and it all culminated in me playing Cold Steel IV.

The worst JRPG, I’ve ever played

Not “one” of the worst, that was true for all the previous entries but this one, easily takes the cake as “THE” worst experience I’ve ever had playing a JRPG.

This is quite a bold claim especially for someone like me who has well over 5000 games logged on my account, I can already smell the comments coming from a mile away.

“But CaaaaaaaaaaAAAaaaaani, you can’t possibly say this is worst than the likes of stuff like FF2, Sonic Chronicles, Any Compile Heart Games ever made, Lagoon, Lunar : Dragon Song or wtv… if you say Cold Steel IV is the worst, you should really start considering playing more truly bad games !”

And here’s the thing my dear readers, I do play bad games, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, I’ve had my fair share of experience with bonafide turds ! From games that are barely playable, those with awful game and level design flaws, bad controls, bad music, gameplay, completely nonsensical plot and generally an experience in which all of these elements combined into something truly awful !

I remember fondly when my mom got me “Realplay : PuzzleSphere” on Christmas and I ended using the “PuzzleSphere” in question more as a mace to hit my brother on the head with than an actual controller because of how much the game sucked ass, or getting “Space Chimp” and “Zatura” on the PS2 (bet you don’t even remember Zatura ! It was a shitty sci-fi rip-off of Jumanji that was released in theaters for some reason) ! And don’t get me started on Shrek Fairytale Freakdown for the Game Boy Color ugh. Heck I even gladly played bad games from franchises I love, Megaman X6 and X7 comes to mind as two different flavors of bad games, several Castlevania entries too and to stay on topic with the subject of this review : Ys IV Mask of The Sun and Ys III Wanderers From Ys are legitimately worse games than CS4 !

To me there’s layers to bad video games and to quote Yahtzee from the Escapist : It’s not the bad games that are the worst to review, it’s the bland ones ! The one that just takes ideas from several places and mish-mash them into a semi-functional but seemingly indistinguishable mess, the kind of games that makes you feel “nothing” at the end of the day and might make you hate the medium or genre they came from more by their sheer laziness and incompetence !

I usually love playing bad games because to me every experience is worth having, I have a lot of fondness for bad videogames. I don’t think people make bad games on purpose and you can learn a lot about your own taste or learn a lot more about what not to do when making a game from playing bad video games ! Bad games have cultural values because you can teach about their failures at game design school to teach younger devs what not to do when making a video game ! I sometimes think that some bad games have some “soul” to them, like the developers made it as a labor of love and not a labor of pure exploitation to get a paycheck at the end of the month. So yeah ! I love bad games ! Some pure exquisite kusoge of the highest level !

But even amongst BAD and I mean BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD games, Cold Steel IV, heck even more so the entire Cold Steel saga stands out in the sea of forgettable throwaway garbage that the industry pulls out on a monthly basis thanks in no small part to being part of a larger series and in doing so and failing completely at everything it does retroactively ruin my enjoyment of the entire Trails franchise up to that point ! And you may think that my little KH3 tangent at the start was to pad out time ! Well, you’re right !
But it wouldn’t be a Trails game without a copious dose of pointless padding now wouldn’t it ? (and don’t worry, it’s not just an elaborated meta joke, there’s a lot more in common between KH3 and Cold Steel IV than meets the eyes)

This time I won’t make you sit through an entire slew of paragraphs talking about the gameplay this time around because unsurprisingly, it hasn’t changed, like at all. Aside from being able to stack 2 additional BP on top of the 5 you could already stack in previous games, there is no change to the battle system this time around. That doesn’t mean that CS4 improves on the battle system, the enemy design, the boss design or god forbid the exploration but we’ll talk in due time when I’d talk about how basic the entire thing is and how it ruined my enjoyment of the entire experience.

On a more minor notes, there’s a few QoL improvements here and there especially when it comes to NPC, now every new dialogues are notified by a “NEW” next to the area you want to quick travel to which makes it easier to do an NPC sweep but also makes it harder to ignore that part of the game if you’re autistic like me and can’t stand looking at unfinished business.

In fact, unlike most games in the series, I actually did manage to get a full rank of AP point this time around by just fucking around completing side quest ! Was that necessary ? No, did it make my suffering last for longer than necessary ? Absolutely ! But I’m glad that at least in midst of all of the game’s issues, there are smudges of brilliance thrown here and there and I’d say that not making the 100% completion requirement as cryptic and obtuse as the other titles for no reasons (especially due to the needlessly padded out nature of these games preventing me from ever wanting to replay any of them, even the ones I did enjoy) was for once something that I did appreciate (now as for the actual quality of the side content, we’ll talk about that in a minute).

The game starts on probably the only good part of the game until a long while, the game teases you on being good by bringing back the playable cast members of the previous two arcs and even opens up by a shot of Estelle brand new PS4 HD Graphics ass, showing that the priorities and demographic of this game changed a lot since the last time Estelle was relevant in anything and was actually a respectfully written female character unlike most of the cast of this mess of an arc.

This section which seemingly serves as a tutorial to the game mechanics (you know, the one’s that hasn’t changed from the previous game) will let you play as husks of your favorite characters pretending to have any relevance into this game plot, a running theme throughout the entire thing but we’ll get to that later down the line (and I’ve been saying this a lot already HUH ?). After a boss fight against two of the worst antagonist ever written in the series, the game can actually continue

In the last episode of Rean Schwarzer epic Schwarzin adventure, our boy turned completely schizo after sniffing too much of the gnomes racist perfume infusion therefore triggering the release of said gaz throughout the entire country and activating the cheap cliffhanger protocol that’s so near and dear to Falcom’s writing team to make you play another 80-90 hours slog of a game where only 30 of said hours (assuming I’m being generous here) will be of any significance thanks to the power of cockblocking !
After this gnome endeavor from last time, our heroes got teleported to Eryn village, the hometown of Emma (the plot delivery glasses girl) and the base of operation of the ancient Hexen Clan aka the Witches aka Ancient Guardians of the world who lives like Internet hasn’t been invented yet like in the funny wizard boy book written by a notorious transphobe. It’s here that the rest of Class VII realizes that their teacher has gone missing and is stuck in some sort of gnome BDSM dungeon at least according to a few cutscenes and the deliciously edgy title screen of the game and thus they need to save him !

But how will they do it ?

Well by going through all the places you’ve already slogged and backtracked too with next to no change to the level layout of enemy types of course ! But don’t worry, you’re not just going around planting magic needles on the ground for plot reasons, you’re also doing this to find your missing friend and yes

Yes, you’ve been waiting for this one haven’t you ?

It’s time for yet another epic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onXp-Ft404E

“Final Fantasy VI Search For Your Friends Rip-Off moment™ !”

Yes because the same way CS3 was pretty much a repurposed CS1, the same goes for CS4 being a repurposed CS2 ! Because here at Falcom, we love recycling our own ideas (borrowed from several other franchises which did it miles better anyway) and running them to the ground because you bitches have no standard and will eat anything up and accept how stagnant the franchise has become by now !

So after another tutorial dungeon to re-teach you about all the mechanics you already experienced with in the prologue (I shit you not) in one of the series now titular “Tartarus rip-off which looks randomly generated but isn’t actually randomly generated” dungeon (aka : Old Schoolhouse 3 : Revenge of the Sith) you’re out in the world to plant some magic needle to find the Gnome Headquarters, repeat that in a pattern of 3 times, get one party member back and experience what’s happening to the world in the eve of a full-scale war.

I’m going to give credit where credit is due with Act 1, starting off the game without its titular main character is actually a pretty cool idea in a “passing of the torch” kind of way. Rean has always been the strongest, baddest party member in all 3 previous Cold Steel games (if you didn’t have Laura to one-shot everything and anything that is). So it creates an interesting power imbalance which forces you to play with how well NC7 plays out of one another, this balance is pretty cool and makes for some cool moments. At that point, the story hasn’t really devolved into full crayon-eater mode either so it’s alright, I do wish that Act 1 or at least the idea that the game featured NC7 as the new lead party member actually lasted for longer because Act 1 is going to be one of the last time outside of bonding events that the characters will get to shine in any particular way with some insanely cool character moment and interesting arc.

However, I must insist that this part of the game is still relatively boring to go through. Since this is the sequel to a previous Trails game, most of the environments are ripped straight out of CS3 and with little change to the environment (aside from the skybox because that’s what war does to you) and…

Ok I think I need to come clean about the padding issues in this franchise because it is genuinely going out of control the more I advance throughout the series. See the issue with Trails isn’t that the games are too long because BIG NEWS !

JRPG’s ARE LONG !

…

Right ?

No, it’s just that in been long, these games really don’t offer much in terms of actual proper game design, while there was some effort made all the way back in the Crosbell duology to mitigate those issues, in the end, Trails has never been a series known for how excellent its gameplay loop and game design was. Ultimately, the problem with Trails is a fundamental issue with how these titles are constructed and this isn’t something I only recently started complaining about in this arc, it’s something true for the entire series up to that point. That the first game is a slow burn to get yourself familiar with the world and the setting ? Fine ! But why in the absolute living fuck does that slow pacing need to translate to every title regardless of whether or not it’s an intro title or not ?

I swear to god, it’s something you start getting numb to because of how much the game tries to find ways to make the act of playing them less of a chore, by adding more quick travel points or even turbo mode or things of the sort but it never really solves the issues ! These game structures are so rigid and artificial that you can almost see and feel where they pointlessly added stuff to artificially make the game last longer ! But I can already hear you say :

“Well if these games are so long, it’s because it’s to establish the atmosphere and the worldbuilding and the” blah blah blah cut the crap already, you know it’s not true !

You know that most of these games could be cut in half and only get better for it in terms of rhythm if you only keeping in it the actual meaningful content and that’s the problem because we’ve all been fooled into thinking that it was actually necessary to be like that in order to communicate the plot better but it’s not even fucking true is it ?

Even less so when all of the actual good scenes and character moments are contained almost exclusively in the bonding events scene which for the record are both some of the best and some of the worst in the series for reasons we’ll get into later.

These games barely evolved their formula and I’m getting tired of them, as an RPG it’s also some of the milquetoast RPG structure you could ever eat. What’s your favorite dungeon in CS4 ? The series of corridors with brown bricks or the ones with blue bricks ? SO MUCH VARIETY IT’S STAGGERING !
It’s crazy how much I managed to put out and how much so many people managed to put out with how dull and boring the loop of battle, exploration, fetch quest and cutscenes gets in this series, it’s literally driving me nuts at how fucking dull this shit it, I’m going insane !

The only thing that’s carrying this series is just text since the “cutscenes” (if you wanna even call it that) have always been so fucking low budget, badly directed and animated that you might as well make it a visual novel instead and I’ve seen Visual Novels with better staging and direction than most of the dialogue scenes in this game !

God it’s also so fucking predictable, you can make a freaking drinking game out of this !

The characters are in a pinch ? Take a shot as they get their ass saved by a random third actor that was seemingly in the room this whole time and solve the situation on their own while “Sword of Biting Gale” plays !

Take another shot when the characters are done talking about their next step and a villain that was positioned on a roof or a hill was observing them menacingly saying “Nyeheheh, class VII, We’ll see about that !”

Take another shot when the progression is stopped by Rean doing another unwarranted and frankly unnecessary pep-talk friendship speech for no fucking reasons !

Ludo-Narration ? Staging ? Direction ? Not using every repetitive character trope and cheap narrative tool in the book to tell your story through what the medium can offer instead ? I never heard that shit from a freaking Falcom game ! Good god, this is the lowest of lows, you know some games have good direction, others have bad direction but Welcome to the Kiseki series where we just won’t direct our cutscenes at all…

And fuck there is so many characters now, each dialogue and cutscene take fucking forever because Billy, Eddy, Mandy and Roger all have their snarky little comment to make on the situation and often time there’s like 60 or so character on screen and they all have to say something and it’s always the driest, blandest, most unimportant piece of dialogue why did you fucking Talk Elliot Craig ? NOBODY ASKED YOUR WHITE ASS OPINION ABOUT WAR ! YOU ARE A NOTHING CHARACTER SAYING NOTHING AND I HATE YOU ! AND ALL OF OLD CLASS VII FOR THAT MATTER ! GOD WHAT A BUNCH OF BORING USELESS CUNT I SWEAR TO GOD !

Act 2 is probably where the game starts hitting the shitting fan with this !

After saving Rean, the game’s overall quality and pacing take a complete nosedive never to return. I said in the last review that if we dug deeper we might reach China ?

But holy fucking shit, we haven’t just reached China, in fact, We dug so deep that there was no more ground to dig up and we’ve now entered an alternate dimension where the laws of physics have been broken and now everything works in “Kiseki Hours” where a single hour of gameplay progress amounts to 5 IRL time and nothing freaking happened !


Act 2 is just a pure narrative void, there is nothing of note that happen in Act 2, you’re just doing a lot of fetch questing, each worst than the last and you enter pointless conflicts with characters because this game is so starved for time and content that it starts throwing boss fight against some of the most random individuals, in fact most of the setup for boss fights in this game make no sense at all. As I was playing through the game I was even wondering half of the time : “Why are we fighting this person ? It’s completely pointless ? Why are we doing this ?” and that my friend is thanks to a really useful tool the authors have come up with to artificially spawn conflicts out of the blue !

Introducing

The Curse !

The Curse is a fascinating tool of narrative design that allows the writers to do whatever the fuck they want and justify any actions any characters at any moments might take !

In the text, it is said that the curse is something that acts on the human brain and forces them to obey their deeper instinct, but what it essentially does for the most part is turn everyone evil, violent and racist for seemingly no goddamn reasons. It also make characters act in completely uncharacteristic ways so you can have a fight with them or they can fuck you over to pad out more freaking time and justify you going through another boring ass dungeon and fighting another pointless boss fight !

But in reality, the curse is whatever the writers want it to be, yes sometimes it does make people evil and racist but sometimes it can make them addicted to gambling, sometimes it can erase memories, sometimes it can make animals aggressive and turn them into demons, sometimes it can make somebody mess their paperwork or lose their key, sometimes it can make a nun break a pot, sometimes it can force a child to run head first into the nearest kidnapper, sometimes it can power-up robots and machines and most importantly of all, sometimes it can turn your jacuzzi into purple goo which is fucking terrible isn’t it ?

The curse has no rules and no consistency whatsoever, the curse is seemingly the cause and the consequences of everything in the plot ! In fact, doing the sidequests makes the curse even worse as you realize that there are no concrete rules to the curse nor are there any concrete rules to how it works, how it affects certain people and not others or even how you’re supposed to cure people from it !

Elliot will use the power of music to turn a demon into a regular horse again and it’s never brought up ever in the actual main plot ? Bro if you can just get rid of demons like that why are we still busy fighting them in the first place ? The curse can also seemingly get cured by just “talking it out” with the person who’s affected like ok sure why not but also sometimes the curse just heals… by itself ! Magically ! With no real reasons behind it ! One time there’s a little girl who forgets who the SSS is but later without any side quest or extra scenes or anything, the girl just randomly remembers who they are and it’s ???



The only consistent thing about the curse is that it only spreads across the empire and respects the state's border but they never actually give a proper explanation as to why it works like this in the first place ? Why in the absolute living goddamn fuck is an ancient demonic curse from aeons past cares about the modern state borders of some bum ass country ? Like boohoo, poor little curse, it can’t get past a silly barrier ! I thought the Sept-Terrions were supposed to transcend the rules of the mortal realms and be these super-powerful artifacts !

I mean for fuck sake, the previous Sept-Terrion was LITERALLY ABLE TO REWRITE REALITY ! The Power Creep ceiling has already been met ! You can’t make something crazier than something which literally can ignore the rules of physics and rewrite reality how they see fit ! And yet, the game will always try to pretend that the Great One and the curse is the most dangerous fucking threat to have ever existed and seemingly the reason why the entire series happened up to this point !

Oh yeah because yeah, how about that ?

How about this franchise lore and worlbuilding being completely fucking wasted in favor of shitty JRPG plot number 5840 ?

Yeah, remember the gnome shit from CS3 ? That was already pretty fucking bad wasn’t it ? Well get a kick out of this !

Every

Single

Event

In

The

Series

Was all part of some

ANCIENT

RACIST

GUNDAM

GOD



To rebuild itself and become ultra-mega powerful, Ishmelga is the name of the robot and the one who wants to bring the world to an end, with Black…. oh wait no silly, let’s make this antagonist even more of a fucking joke than he already is by making it a Dr.Jekyl and Mr Gnome situation, yes the leader of the gnome, the absolute mastermind behind everything, is just a random sockpuppet for Ishmelga ! And even Osborne is a sockpuppet for Ishmelga, but you see he did all the evil shit ever so he can STOP Ishmelga thanks to his son Rean Chad ThunderCock Schwarzer !

Remember the cool duality between Olivert and Osborne ? The whole class warfare story ? The Imperialism ?

Get the fuck out of here man, it was NEVER ABOUT ALL OF THAT !

It’s all a setup for a shitty mech battle tournament arc with the most non-existent stake possible.

None of the villains actually wants to win most of the time, you fight people that are sometimes evil, sometimes virtuous and sometimes nothing at all thanks to the curse making things more confusing

Osborne is a wet fart of a character and a complete disapointment, the guy went from a cunning manipulator to literally a bootleg Xehanort from KH3 with the exact same end goal of “doing all of this for the good of the world” which is just “stop the racism god to spread more racism”

Oh yeah, because speaking of Olivier ?

Well fuck you he’s alive, in fact everyone who died or disappeared at the end of CS3 are alive and they’re alive because GEORGE NOME actually saved them because GEORGE NOME is not all bad guys, he has good heart inside of his tiny lil gnome heart. Everyone gets revived and sometimes they even get shitty mind control masks and have chuuni names like “Red Rosweil” who is a resurrected Angelica with her memories erased but her PEDOPHILIA STILL INTACT

FUCK YEAH LET’S GO I LOVE THIS CLOWN ASS FRANCHISE !

Yeah right, let’s make all the characters make jokes about pairing minors and adult in the same franchise that has an honest to god CHILD BROTHEL SUB-PLOT ! Hey !

How about we make said CSA victim a victim of jokey funny lol super funky sexual harassment heh ?

Ah Angelica, she ain’t just a pedophile ! SHE’S OUR PEDOPHILE !

As for Olivier, well if character assassination was a sport, the guy would be a gold fucking medalist because goddamn what have they done to my man.

To be frank it’s either getting character assassinated so thoroughly that you might actually file a complaint for manslaughter or seeing all of your favorite characters come back with their personality stripped down to a mere caricature of what they once was just for empty fanservice moment that will only work on the lowest common denominator to try and make people think this game has anything of value as the “END OF SAGA” ! When in fact absolutely nothing of value is to be found here

The story is empty, the characters are empty, the themes are bland and generic, the villains are a joke and half of them don’t even want to win because of the shitty reasons they even do all of this in the first place !

Every part of the plot is an excuse to either pad out more time or to have a “cool” boss fight against some of the most random people ever that has no reason to happen

Irina, why are you evil ?

Oh you’re not evil anymore ? Ok let’s hug it out and forget about it

THIS GAME WAS WRITTEN FOR LITERAL 5 YEAR OLD

Everytime you think the story is doing something cool or half-decent, it’s canceled out by the game doing something stupid

And don’t get me started on fucking Rean

Rean, Rean, Rean, Rean…

Oh boy, you…

You fucking pointless, annoying shallow simulacrum of a character ! You are the worst of them all, I fucking despise your sorry Narou-Kei Light Novel Default Ass ever since the first game and even in this fucking game where you saw little to no actual development and even worse actually regressed just to have the same “your friends love you” magic friendship crystal thing plot from the second game !

You are everything that’s wrong with Japanese entertainment and the genre as a whole ! You’re like a pompous little snob that gets everything he wants, an harem of cute girl wanting to suck his dick at a moments noticed, a cool giant robot ready to get him out of any bad situation, some ancient cool edgy super power that often benefit you more than it nerfs you !

You’re the chosen hero of some sort of prophecy, the ultimate sacrifice and probably the sole reason why the world go round ! And yet, you ask me to feel pity for your sorry ass ? You stubbed your toe once and made it personal and now suddenly you go from shitty power fantasy guy to a relatable virtuous misunderstood hero !

YOU ARE NOTHING REAN

JUST A SHITTY LITTLE CENTRIST CUCK WITH LITTLE TO NO ACTUAL AGENCY AND NO IDEOLOGY TO CALL YOUR OWN ! YOU’RE TRYING TO FIND THE “THIRD PATH” AND WHAT EVEN IS THE THIRD PATH HUH ? WHAT IS IT ? THE THIRD PATH THROUGH ONE OF YOUR 3 ROMANCEABLE STUDENTS CUNT ? ARE YOU A DISCORD MOD REAN ? ARE YOU DONE BEING A SISCON BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY SMIDGE OF PERSONALITY THE WRITERS HAS GIVEN TO YOU ???? OH I SHOULD’VE PROBABLY ROMANCED ELISE ! YOU CERTAINLY WOULD’VE LIKED THAT YOU SACCHARINE PUPPY PERVERT !

FUCK OFF REAN

YOU ARE THE WORST

FUCK YOU !

WHY SHOULD I KNEEL TO SUCH A SHITTY CHARACTER LIKE YOU !

YOU’VE EARNED NONE OF MY SYMPATHY

YOU’VE EARNE NONE OF THOSE FUCKING DOGSHIT FRIENDSHIP SPEECH !

YOU’RE SO COOL AND SO STRONG AND MAYBE EVEN STRONGER THAN CASSIUS BUT YOUR HEART IS BROKEN WELL MAYBE YOUR ASS SHOULD’VE ALSO BEEN BROKEN BY BAITING ALL THE FUJOSHI INTO TURNING INTO CROW’S PERSONAL POWER BOTTOM ONAHOLE BECAUSE THAT’S ALL YOUR FUCKING WORTH !

YOU SHOULD’VE DIED ! OH I WISH YOU HAD DIED AND THE NORMAL ENDING WAS THE CANON ONE SO THAT YOUR FUCKING FACE WOULD NEVER FUCKING SHOW UP IN ANYTHING EVER AGAIN !

God and all of the bonding events, god what happened to this franchise man ? It used to actually be about something and now it’s all gone, it’s all a mess for dirty perverted otakus to fap to !

AND I’M A DIRTY PERVERTED OTAKU WHO FAPS TO THIS STUFF !

This game wants to be an eroge so fucking bad man and I swear to god, this game would’ve been better off dropping the pretense and have H-Scenes

The bonding events in this game are a lil more fleshed out thanks to them being the conclusion to some arcs

BUT WHY IN THE FUCK MUST IT ALMOST ALL END WITH THE VAGINA EQUIPPED INDIVIDUALS WANTING REAN’S COCK ? LIKE WOW THAT FUCKING LAURA BONDING EVENT IS SO BAD ! Rean’s all like “I wanna kms” and Laura push him against the wall AND FORCE KISS HIM

THIS GAME IS A COMEDY ! IT’S A PARODY ! IT’S NOT SERIOUS ! IT HAS NEVER BEEN SERIOUS FOR A SINGLE SECOND !

And it ruined several previous entries, because it can’t just be a shitty game on its own, it’s a shitty game that ruins the credibility and my attachment to this world ! No I don’t care what’s the deal with McBurn, he was the very definition of some 14 years old OC and his presence in the narrative is amount to nothing and you fight this guy FUCKING 11 TIMES LIKE FUCKING CHRIST AND IT’S ALWAYS THE EASIEST SHIT !

Man the ending is also a fucking mess bro what the fuck is this ! You need to collect some magic crystal in some deadass cavern so it can help you contain the racism god in your friendship crystal so you can kill him and end racism forever ISTG, I’ve seen scooby-doo episodes which are more thought out like this

Man I’ve wasted so much time on this franchise and all for this ?

And you can’t even be too mad at this because they’ve put some genuine effort sometimes, they’ve put some effort in how the story is told through the NPC points of view and everything but why should I care about Falcom’s nailing the details when they fail so fucking miserably in the things that actually matter ?

Fuck Trails man…

You guys are the scientology church of JRPG fandom

It’s all those great promises of grand epic storytelling, political writing on par with Gundam and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, an endless amount of depth and generosity and attention to detail

But all you get is disappointment, all you get for your investment is some shitty ass JRPG plot that’s borrowed from like 10 different sources that did all the things that Trails did but miles better, it’s the oatmeal of JRPG !

Cold Steel made me understand why Nintendo Youtubers don't like JRPG's

Cold Steel made me understand the POV of people who started KH with the HD collection and didn't like/get it because they never grew an autistic attachment to it when they were young

Cold Steel made me even more of a leftoid than I ACTUALLY am

Cold Steel made me trauma dump to my therapist about it

Cold Steel is my videogame on a stick that's the rival of all those AVGN rip-off

Cold Steel actually worsen my mood the more I played it

Cold Steel reminded me that anime can be cool but they can also be mad cringe


I’m done writing this review, I was going to do a serious one but get a shitty rant instead, just talking about this game puts me in a bad mood !

I don’t care if Reverie or Kuro gets better ! I don’t want to touch another one of those games for a long time if ever ! I’m not even invested anymore ! Not even ironically ! This game is a mess ! And this series is a mess !

STAY AWAY FROM THIS SERIES ! IT'S POISON IT'S ALL POISON ! THERE'S SO MUCH BETTER THINGS OUT THERE ! I SWEAR AND BEG AND CRY FUCK THIS !

FUCK

FUCK

FUCK

FUCK

ASSBALLS

FUCK

Anyway…

Hop on Rance

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

Ar Tonelico is kinda good. It's pretty neat. It's like really nice.
It's a genuinely incredible artistic and musical direction put into a fairly fun gameplay system, with somewhat annoying dungeon design and borderline nonexistent difficulty.
The plot itself is nice and conveys its general themes of understanding and harmony between people fairly well, but the highlight of the writing comes in the form of both main girls' cosmospheres, and the general handling of the struggles, development and relationship with the main protagonist.
One fairly pervasive issue with the game is its insistence on making you backtrack through previously visited areas fairly often, especially in Phase 2 and a little 3, but it's more of a light blemish than an all-encompassing problem to me.

All in all, I'm glad to have played it, it's a lovely little game that might not break any new ground but I know I'll cherish it in some small part of me.

I've genuinely never been more bored by a Trails game in my life. The only reason I'm giving this more than a rating of 0.5 is because I'm told CS4 is worse.

The story was the stupidest thing I've seen, the dungeons were incredibly mindless to explore, I was unengaged for like 70% of the game.

This was utter boredom for that 70% of the game, and somehow makes me like CS2 more, which is surprising since I THOUGHT I hated CS2 when I finished it, but I'm now wishing for a pre-CS3 world.

I will praise this game's political writing, character writing and battle system though. Probably the best battle system in any Cold Steel game, some of the enemy design kinda stinks but learning to break this system is pretty satisfying.

This game engaged me whenever anything political was going on. I think Falcom knows how to create a world, their worldbuilding is still on point. Any time any political figurehead was onscreen I was incredibly engaged with what was going on.

The characters were good. I like that the main cast was fairly small, in comparison to CS1 and CS2. It gave them more time to focus in on each of them, and I really quite like how they portrayed an older, more experienced Rean.

I can't praise this game any more than that though, ANYTHING else I say about this game will be me criticising it. Literally everything else was either boring, bad or just plain stupid.

Worst Trails game so far, and I'm looking forward to taking the piss out of CS4 when I play it.

Poor performance isn't really something that bothers me in games, provided that the game isn't literally unplayable because of it, and so the minor frame rate issues and somewhat poor graphics never really got in the way of my enjoyment with this game. With another charming cast, combat that has been well-translated into 3D from Rune Factory 4, and a story that felt more engaging than the ones from the other Rune Factory games I've played, Rune Factory 5 continues to show how modern Rune Factory is some of the most fun that the farming sim genre has to offer. My only real complaint with this game is how, in removing a lot of the grinding present in the previous entry, the main gameplay loop becomes somewhat less satisfying, as it is no longer urgent to be constantly crafting better weapons and armor to progress with the story. Normally, I'm all for streamlining gameplay and cutting down on grinding, but the grinding is part of what made Rune Factory 4 so fun, so to see it be toned down here is somewhat bittersweet.

Lloyd Bannings is such a bad fucking character and it's only upsetting because I can't even like Zero the same way I used to largely because of it

Love to make a character entirely about "I overcome the odds" and "I have a mystery backstory" only to have that mystery backstory be the worst written thing you've ever seen

I just watched someone play CS1 after being immensely disappointed by Azure and they immediately lost their mind over Class VII having like
Actual growth and conflict and any writing whatsoever that isn't "We must overcome the barrier...we must save Crossbell...🙂"

im so toxic cause any time someone livetweets Azure I'm just desperate to see them get to CS1 instead

Kiseki discourse would be a lot simpler if Azure fans just talked about their game like this instead of calling you slurs for thinking it's the worst one

Azure fans when characters are written to have flaws, emotions and struggles like actual human beings