Video Game Review: Trails of Cold Steel 2

Last August I reviewed The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, the fourth in the Trails (or "Kiseki" in Japan) series of JRPGs to come over to America.  As I said in that review (link here), the Trails in the Sky games (the first games in the series) are some of my favorite games I've ever played - excellent characters, a wonderful story, and excellent - oft challenging - gameplay that rewarded multiple playstyles.  So when the American publisher announced they were porting the Cold Steel games to PC, I was pretty excited, even though I don't play many games these days.

ToCS 1 was a game I wanted to like though more than I did.  The worldbuilding was excellent, but the constant school parts at the start of each chapter were grating and the characters weren't as great as in Sky, and the combat just didn't give me enough of that challenge I craved.  Still, I was intrigued enough to snag up ToCS 2 as soon as it came out earlier this year, and I've been playing it on weekends until I finished it this Saturday.  It suffers unfortunately with a lot of the same flaws as ToCS1, and remains a subseries of the overall Trails series that I can only recommend to dedicated JRPG lovers.


Plot: (Trying to spoil ToCS1 as little as possible): Taking place a month after the first game, Rean finds himself separated from his classmates, a bit weakened from the battle at Trista, and with a Divine Knight he doesn't really know how to use.  After the Noble Alliance attacks his homeland of Ymir, injures his father, and kidnaps Elise and Princess Alfin, Rean embarks on a new mission: to reunite Class VII, rescue Elise and the Princess, and find a third way through the Erebonian Civil War that will help as many people as possible - and finding a way to get back at C.

The Plot of Trails of Cold Steel 2 is about on par with the first game - we lose the annoying school sections, but the game replaces them with breather sections between each major part that involve the same Persona-like interactions with classmates to build up your links for combat and to progress character development between Rean and the specific classmates you choose on each playthrough.  Unfortunately, while we explore a few new dungeons and areas, all of these are just extensions of the previously visited areas of Erebonia visited in the first game, with the exception of the early base area of Ymir.  Essentially, this is the same thing we got with Trails in the Sky SC - same general areas of the country, with a few places you weren't allowed to go before now available and new dungeons in such areas.  So this wouldn't be a problem really, except that a large portion of the game feels repetitive of the last game's quests near exactly, which is not ideal.

Then there's the post-main-plot chapters - one of which essentially is a visit to the characters from the one Trails series not released in America (and thus of less interest to me, with no perspective either way on those characters), and one of which just feels tacked on.

Gameplay:  Trails of Cold Steel 2 retains the same gameplay as the first game, with two additions.  The first is the Overdrive system, which allows you to go into a special mode where two linked characters get a few free turns in a row (with instant casting magic) and get HP/EP/CP boosts for doing so.  You have to deal damage/get bonuses to build up the overdrive gauge, so it was natural to generally save it for bosses, where it was most useful.

The second is that most chapters end with battles in Rean's Divine Knight, Valimar.  These mech battles have been fleshed out from ToCS1, where they felt tacked on and random - here you have the ability to heal and cast arts with team members in these battles, so there are actual strategy choices to be made.  I still didn't love these sequences, but they were much better done.

The game however really furthers a problem from the first game - there are too many options available to the player and there isn't enough of a challenge to justify having so many.  For the second game in a row, with the exception of the final final boss, every boss is vulnerable, if resistant, to the delay status effect.  The end result is that most boss battles will turn near entirely on using delay attacks so that the boss never gets a turn, unless you get unlucky with resistance rolls. It was kind of bizarre to see the final boss actually be immune to these attacks, but even he was beatable by that point.  And the final dungeon leading up to the final boss is a major letdown, a randomly generated dungeon where each level has the same amount of chests and not particularly impressive monsters that lasts WAY too long.

Overall: Again I enjoyed ToCS2 enough to put 80 hours into a single playthrough, and I expect eventually to do one more runthrough at nightmare difficulty to see if I can find a real challenge.  So if you're a JRPG fan, the Cold Steel series isn't a bad choice, although I'd recommend Trails in the Sky absolutely first.  But if you're not a JRPG fan, even if you really enjoyed Trails in the Sky, it probably isn't a game you'll really badly want to pick up.