overdrive's The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel review

I guess it really does come down to taste. Since September last year, I played Cold Steel I&II, went back and played the five earlier games, now I'm on Cold Steel III and I can't get enough. And yet, nothing you've complained about I could really disagree with. Especially the handling of that antagonist - that really was one area the plot dropped the ball. But the guy was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things anyway.

I just love how big and expansive it is. Never felt the conversations were too long or the story too bloated. It is definitely slow-paced, though, but I don't think that means it is badly paced.

And for all that Cold Steel is a starting point, you do miss some things, like the events happening in Crossbell that get referred to, as well as that new mechanic that turned up right at the end being pretty decently set up in the other arcs.

I think I would have loved this game if it had been a bit shorter. As it was, my rating dropped about three points from, say, the second chapter or so to the end. The repetitive side quests played a role in that (although you could say that a number of those were of the optional sort you weren't required to do) and most of the end-game was just hard for me to get through. While the student festival was a cool thing as far as making the world seem alive and real, when you're fatigued a bit by a game, having a couple extra hours of stuff to get through that's little more than world-building can get a bit painful in that "I just want to finish the game, not take dates to a bunch of exhibits and then sit through concert preparation skits and the concert itself!!!!" sort of way.

I think the thing that most told me that things had stopped working out for me as they had been was just how much mileage I got out of the "restart battle with enemies weakened" option against bosses down the stretch. Early in the game, I didn't touch it, even against the fairly early Old Schoolhouse boss that's pretty tough. First time I brought it out was against Nosferatu, as his helpers were just wrecking me. And then I was basically wielding that as a weapon in the C6 battle with "C" and the final boss of the Old Schoolhouse in that "Oh, these bosses are tough and have help? Well, let's neuter them into helplessness!" sort of way. When I've reduced myself to the "remove all difficulty; just coast through" stage, there's a good chance it's because I'm tired of a game, but I've invested so much time that I'm not going to simply abandon it.

It's too bad. I really liked a lot of this game. The large cast of characters, with TONS of them having some sort of significance, even if it was just something minor like the one student who gets more and more frustrated due to being outdone by the jerk noble upperclassman at fencing until his noble friend comes for help because he won't talk to her any more because he's projecting his hate for that guy on all nobles. The entire Crow plot arc was well done, I thought. I mean, if Rean can play the typical "epitome of awesome" RPG protagonist by making friends with everyone and being great at solving problems and stuff, why not have an antagonist who can fool everyone all of the time, as well? Especially when they do so by being such a dedicated slacker that no one would assume they're a criminal mastermind.

Do have to laugh that you mentioned Crossbell as one of those things where you are out of the loop if you start with this game. When they went independent and characters were talking about how some bank guy was behind it, well, that was one of the times I did go online to figure out who the hell they were talking about.

Yeah, that make boss fights easier thing is an interesting safety net. I like it, because I feel we're beyond the point of punishing failure with a game over. I'm glad the game never kicks me back to the title screen to laod up my last save (and since you can save any time, you're never quite sure when that last save was). My usual pattern for a boss fight was to retry a couple of times if I died, but if I continually died, then I'd make it weaker. Some bosses are really tough if you haven't built up your party right, and even then it sometimes comes down to luck, like do they just keep hitting you with status ailments over and over, or do you remember to save a couple of S-breaks for a critical effect, or to interrupt a bunch of consecutive enemy attacks...