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Kyaaa Rean-sensei (｡❤ω❤｡) |
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they turned rean into lloyd |
And so we finally finished Cold Steel 3 though we’re not quite done yet since it’s basically another 2 part like Sky where it leaves off on a nasty cliffhanger requiring you to play Cold Steel 4. In this game, things have somewhat calmed down and they opened up a 2nd campus of Thors and now Rean being 20 years old is a teacher there! It was kinda weird seeing him be a teacher since he was literally a student only a few months earlier but eh put on some glasses and he’s a hot teacher now I guess. 😂 He has a brand new class of students – who are only 3 years younger than him but his class is a tiny class of 3 (and later 5.)
Obviously we’re going to sound like a broken record at this point, but again it’s time for more of the usual from Falcom. This time we’ve timeskipped a year from the end of CS2 (rather than taking place immediately after like most of the sequels). It occasionally veers away from the same formula as CS1/Sky, which is usually when the game is at it’s best. The constant cycle of field exercises got sooooooo boring and formulaic at times in CS1, so the fact that initially it avoided that was refreshing. Unfortunately the game starts to lag hard once they revert back. It also made me realize how the Sky games at least try to hint a little at what’s going on behind the scenes, but the Crossbell/Erebonia games keep making you do the constant cycles of requests until you get the very end of the game and they start infodumping what the actual underlying story is.
Anyway fortunately the game has really toned down the Gundam fights, made easy mode actually easy so I didn’t really need to do much except blast my characters to level 99 and I could basically kill enemies in 3-4 hits. The battle system UI was also revamped completely and now you can pick attacks right on the characters themselves which saved SO much time not having to open up the stupid wheel and rotate it every time it was someone’s turn. I think that alone was a huge QOL improvement for the system overall. The robot fights were hilariously constantly denied as Rean would try to call Valimar and then one of his old Class VII friends would be like STOP RIGHT THERE, WE NEED TO MAKE A CAMEO TO SAVE YOU!!
The other BIG CHANGE compared to CS2 where they completely wore out their welcome with all the endless robot battles was that now they swung completely the other way and constantly had Rean try to bring out Valimar but get thwarted somehow over and over again. On the plus side, this at least made the robot battles feel like major setpieces rather than how in CS2 they made us dread them because “oh boy another 15 minute boss battle up ahead…”
So needless to say the robot fights this time were few and far between and when they happened it was usually an actual important battle and not every single battle of the game like in CS2. Sometime in the middle of the game it became REALLY draggy because it was constant “field practice activities” and just like the old school house, they made us run through some dumb laboratory dungeon as well. That felt like such a pointless filler, a filler that could have been removed and made CS3 and 4 into one game but…well Falcom amirite?
It also had the most blatant cliffhanger ending I’ve seen so far in this series. It cuts off like, RIGHT BEFORE you’d expect to see some kind of final boss battle! CS4 feels like it’s going to be what should be the Act III of the story that this game introduced. (Then I went back to our CS1/CS2 reviews and said the exact same thing about CS2, lol.) That said at least it didn’t have the endless string of non-ending endings like CS2. Yeah yeah I know, small indie company but the seams get really obvious as to why they need to make the games the way they do for business reasons even though it makes them unsatisfying from a story perspective.
As far as the characters go, I wasn’t really a huge fan of the new cast. Juna was way too Crossbell obsessed (and me and Kanade both agree that Crossbell NYC sucks). Kurt was too hard on himself and his goals to be like his brother. Mussy was way too lewd and I wish they focused more on her real background instead of making her this “hot for teacher” girl. Ash was always angry about something or other but at least that was plot relevant. And finally Altina had a huge change and growth of character compared to the last game so at least that was probably the character I liked the most out of the new cast. All our old class 7 folk had their growth spurts mentally and physically – even Milly! Still, I was seriously lacking in the Rean x Alisa department but uh hey not complaining that despite only about 3 scenes with them together, they still managed to sneak a kiss during the maximum bonding event. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)❤
They also clearly want to rotate in some new characters (still laughing at Yuna being SO EXCITED when they go visit Crossbell and everyone else is like “idgi this isn’t anything special compared to Heimdallr or Roer”), but again like in CS2 it constantly veers back to OH WAIT WE NEED TO GET THE GANG BACK TOGETHER. It’s also kinda weird because the previous Class VII characters get wildly varying amounts of screentime here. Gaius has almost none until the very end of the game, while Fie, Elliot, and Laura felt like they were showing up constantly.
The ending felt like some weird Evangelion ripoff and even when playing the Evangelion theme song at the end it felt somehow oddly appropriate. (Just in time for Gainax to file for bankruptcy!) Overall the game was still a huge improvement both system and graphics wise. It was great to see old and new characters again, even old characters from Crossbell/Liberl like Tita, Agate, Randy and Tio. Looking forward to Cold Steel 4 which will conclude my Trails journey for a while as by the time I finish it will probably be time for the FFXIV expansion.
The silliest part of the ending is EVERYONE keeps coming back to life! Like okay fine, there are “yeah but where’s the body?” situations but there’s multiple characters that are like “no seriously I literally watched you expire and then buried you, how are you back?????” Which also means when we see scenes where the characters are no crying over people dying and instead we’re like “lol no c’mon, they’re obviously not dead and will be back in CS4.” It had to be on the level of like “their soul was utterly destroyed” to make me think “okay they’re really dead this time.”
One last thing: the weirdest part of the whole game was how they CONSTANTLY reused the various seiyuus! It’s one thing when they grab someone to voice Dad A or Girl B, but people were voicing multiple notable characters. It was really awkward too when you get characters with like hidden identities or secret backgrounds and then they’re voiced by someone that’s already in the game and then you realize “no wait that’s not actually their alter ego, they just made Yasumoto or Yukarin do another character.” The worst example by far was one part where Sugita was having a conversation with himself because he was voicing both characters in the same scene. Meanwhile it was funny when Hirakawa would constantly do grunts for dying nameless soldiers.
Bread Master Lee 
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