RPG Revew: The Legend of Heroes -Trails of Cold Steel-

It’s time to go to anime army high school 🤓
tfw Azim Steppe deeto with your tsundere engineer waifu

Story

So the story of Trails of Cold steel is not a “continuation” but rather the events are basically happening at the exact same time as the Crossbell series. It definitely helps to have played the Crossbell games prior to this because when they start mentioning the mayor and all the war and gundams you will now know exactly what’s going on. RIP all the people who played these games as they got localized because they would have played Cold Steel series first as the Crossbell games did not get localized until last year. So now we’re in Erebonia, the empire ruled by Olivert’s dad but he decided to pass on being the next in line and in fact it’s now his little brother Cedric. Our protagonist is the adopted son of a noble by the name of Rean Schwartzer and he’s decided to enroll in the military academy to mostly get away from his family due to guilt that they received harassment about the fact that a noble adopted some random kid. In fact he hopes that his sister, who is the true daughter of his step-dad, would be the one to take over the family. So basically the entire plot is a bunch of noble kids, but they all got -THINGS GOING ON IN THEIR BACKSTORIES- and a lot of them seem to be “I’m not actually a pure noble because…” Anyway other than that, the rest is just typical anime highjinks including walking into a spoopy castle, having a school festival and because this is a JRPG, forcing us to go into a stupid repetitive dungeon every month.

So after the mess of the two Crossbell games, Falcom fixed a lot of those problems by…basically reusing the narrative structure of Trails in the Sky. Go to a new region each month to get your Bracer License field studies, then cut off the game on a blatant cliffhanger while we wait for the next part. The one twist is that rather than being able to freely explore the areas like the previous games it now has a Persona-style calendar where you can do a certain number of events during each day or set of days. This works out pretty well for a few reasons. The first is that well, since this game takes place at a school it’s an obvious way to structure things. The other improvement that it offers is that it makes it much more obvious what you can do at any given time. It was always frustrating starting a sidequest in Trails in the Sky only to realize that we unknowingly advanced the MSQ in a way that then cancelled those quests.

Because the game takes place at the same time as Zero/Azure, it kinda does a copout where it doesn’t really put much emphasis on what’s going on in the world around you because well, you already know this from the previous games. This does then make all the events in the game feel sorta fillery because you know that eventually there will be war breaking out, but first we gotta do six months worth of exploring the empty schoolhouse and field trips to get there (and that the vast majority of this filler in no way has anything to do with what you know is going to happen). Some of these at least help to introduce us to the new gang, but there’s still a loooooooooooot of mandatory quests that are just about running student council errands (and of course, the Tartarus schoolhouse.)

System

Same old trails system but this time in 3D. I still had to mod my game to one shot everything because I was just not having it. Even with that the game still took me 34 hours to complete and I only did maybe 3 side quests (which were finding a baby nuko and shipping some random side characters.) I will never like the trails system and I pretty much expect myself to mod the rest of my steam ports because I refuse to ever play it legit. There are often times battles back to back and unless you grind your weapons, levels, gear etc it’s a really miserable experience but hey if you enjoy trails combat more power to you, but I don’t think it’s for everyone. Since the game chose to switch to 3D graphics circa PS3 the sprites are still 3D when talking and honestly I kinda missed having the 2D sprites during the conversations like in all previous Trails games. While the design/colors of the 3D models looked similar to their 2D portraits, some characters – particularly adults – were just unrecognizable when they showed their 2D counterparts lol. The 2D graphics are super anime this time, and a huge leap since the original Trails in the Sky but I heard a lot of hard core Trails fans hate this aspect but I actually enjoyed it /weeb. System aside (since I hate it equally in every game), the only real annoyance in this game was just doing the same stupid dungeon every month and the same stupid teacher trial every month like template. The other annoyance was all the stupidly scripted battles and you didn’t know which ones you were supposed to win or lose so it made it extra difficult for me because the boss would just stay at 1HP and the game wouldn’t progress. 😇 I had to be like “oh this is where I’m supposed to die ok.” So yea that was pretty annoying and I really wish they had something in place that after x amount of time the boss would just move on to their next phase/cut scene regardless of what yours or their HP bar was.

The biggest improvement is that this time the game is no longer nonstop SEVERAL CUTSCENES WILL PLAY IN SEQUENCE like we had in Zero/Azure. Even though I did say that the structure of the game makes it feel explicitly fillery, it does at least pace the game much better than previously. Part of the problem with the previous games was that if you were beelining the MSQ you would do almost nothing but watch cutscenes (until I guess it’s finally time to do a dungeon or something), but this time because of this setup you know that you’ll get a little bit of a bunch of different stuff every time you decide to proceed with the MSQ rather than having to listen to people prattle on for like 40 minutes about trade policy negotiations. In fact because of the way the game is structured there really aren’t even that many battles. Even your monthly trip to the schoolhouse is just one floor consisting of roughly one or two connected maps. My biggest complaint though were the scripted battles because in the previous games they would have scripted battles, but still gave you the possibility of “winning” them (and usually getting some kind of bonus) while this time the game would be like “no actually you HAVE to lose”.

Characters and Shipping

Ah yes my favorite part to talk about. I just want to say compared to the Crossbell games, this was MUCH more enjoyable. Obviously it was very anime, but it made the whole thing really fun to stream. “Oh look the derpy heroine just bumped into the protagonist and then fell flat on his face with her booba while fuun-ing and mou-ing HA HA HA this is funny and so anime!” 😂 So I guess all the serious Trails fans were buttmad that suddenly their game became a weeb fantasy but I actually found it more fun than watching Lloyd or whoever else sit there expositioning in a 40 minute cut scene about politics in the last game. ಠ_ಠ Machias and Jusis (who I called Macchi and Juicy) were really annoying at first but they kinda grew on me by the end. In fact other than the template annoying bad guys, I thought generally every character was unique and handled decently well with their own unique back stories. I just wish we got to see more on Rean but I’m guessing we will see more on him as the Cold Steel saga progresses since after all it’s 4 games. You can have bonds with various waifus in the game but I picked Alisa because first girl rule and also Horie Yui bias.

“Obviously very anime” is exactly the point! Sky was “kinda” anime but mostly in the sense that JRPGs have a lot of anime blood coursing through their veins but this time the game was explicitly anime. (Crossbell of course was only anime in the sense that Lloyd was your typical potato-kun protagonist that somehow is knee-deep in salivating ara ara onee-sans despite being duller than a stump.) The team is also a big improvement over the Crossbell team if only for the fact that we get into them and their stories right from the get go rather than needing to do dozens of hours of fetch quests first before the game will even begin to cover the most elementary basics like “so what is Elie’s background anyway?” Machias and Jusis still suck though, get that shiat out of my party. They even had (so far) far fewer Seymours than the previous arc (albeit more C-mours).

Final Thoughts

Overall, I enjoyed this game and I’m looking forward to the rest of the Cold Steel arc. It reminded me a lot of what I enjoyed about Trails in the Sky and I didn’t fall asleep in it like I did during the Crossbell series. I was worried that the rest of Trails was gonna be like Crossbell and was regretting my purchases but I’m glad that Cold Steel changed my outlook.

This was probably in the series so far behind Sky 1. Hopefully the next one won’t have the same “ok first do another 20 hours of random requests before you can start looking for Joshua” problem that Sky 2 had.