Video Game Review: The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3

Trails of Cold Steel 3 is the 3rd game (Duh) in Nihon Falcom's Trails of Cold Steel (also known as "Sen no Kiseki") series and the eighth game in Falcom's larger "Kiseki" (or "Trails") series, which began with Trails in the Sky.  For those who are utterly new to the series, this is a JRPG series in a very classic sense - there aren't random encounters (enemies are visible on the map and can be avoided) but there is still turn based combat, a large cast of characters, side quests in addition to a main story quests which can be skipped if you want but add more story and benefits to a playthrough, the works.  The Kiseki/Trails series is known for its large often fascinating worlds, where often every side character has their own stories you can find out about if you want (regardless of whether there's any gameplay benefit to doing so) and the Cold Steel subseries is the third arc in the series, although the second arc was never released in the U.S., so this is really the 2nd for American Audiences (I have played the 2nd arc via translation patches).

Note:  As you might imagine, you will be pretty damn lost if you try playing this game before playing Trails of Cold Steel 1 or 2 first so don't do that.  You can skip the first Trails arc, Trails in the Sky, before playing this game if you want - this game makes far more references to the prior arcs than the first two, but you'll be fine without the knowledge from having played it.

I've really enjoyed this series, especially the First Arc (Trails in the Sky) and the Second Arc (Trails From Zero/Azure), but the first two Cold Steel games I was a bit more lukewarm about.  The games included a Persona-like "link" system, in which you had school segments in between exploring new areas (and in the 2nd game, you had the equivalent of the same thing really) and I found those honestly boring and uninteresting, and the games were honestly way too easy even on the highest difficulty - the games had a billion options and gameplay mechanics that could be abused, and uh even someone just fooling around with the game could figure out how to do so, which kind of robbed me of some of what I look for in a JRPG.  The plot was enjoyable, but too much of the gameplay annoyed me for me to truly love either game.

And alas Trails of Cold Steel 3 continues in the same vein....and honestly turns it up to eleven: this is a game filled with incredibly lazy game design and it shows.


For me, I play JRPGs for two things:  Story and Gameplay, so I'm going to address and score each of these individually:

Story - 8 out of 10:  The Trails/Kiseki series is known for its storytelling, and for the most part here, Cold Steel 3 follows that same trend.  The biggest issue the game has with the story is how repetitive it all seems, especially after the first two games.  They really bent over backwards to create a story that causes a feeling of hard deja vu frequently, with the structure built exactly the same as Cold Steel 1:  You follow a special class at a military academy, with segments at the school alternating with segments in different parts of the Empire of Erebonia, with the class having to learn to bond together through adversity.  You explore different parts of this country and see firsthand the conflict between the Nobles and the Commoner classes, while also running into dark conspiracies and terrorist groups with their own secret plans.  The one thing that is clearly different than the first game is that each chapter ends in a Giant Mecha battle, which was more of a second game thing.

That said, despite the structure being very repetitive, the actual characters and individual story elements are a lot of fun and are really well done.  The story features our hero, Rean Schwarzer, returning to school as an instructor instead of a student, and while that makes very little difference in how things play out, the new cast of students that we get to meet and play as are generally really great - from swordsman Kurt, who had been raised to expect to be the next in a line of protectors of the royal family until that was torn away, to former police trainee Juna, whose homeland of Crossbell (Home of the prior arc in the series) was conquered by Erebonia and harbors resentment towards the country whose military she's technically a part of and so on.  And the old main characters - Old Class VII - return as well and are playable even if relegated to secondary status, and are as enjoyable to see as before.  Add in some really enjoyable side characters - whether one time characters or characters who show up time and time again, like the school's insane military general principal - and you have a really great cast who made me laugh and smile repeatedly.

It's not a perfect cast - as with prior games in the series, the series has an issue of treating sexual harassment as a joke (one lesbian villain gropes another villain's breasts early on for example) and one of the main characters constantly sexually harasses our main hero by trying to get into his pants in basically every line of dialogue and it's REALLY IRRITATING.  But for the most part it works.

And the plot is enjoyable throughout, although fair warning: This is the 3rd game in 4, and as such it ends on a massive cliffhanger.  The prior two Cold Steel games explicitly limited travel to the East Half of the Empire, and here we move to the West, with repeat stops in Crossbell and Heimdallr to bring back old games, but in new forms - Crossbell (never seen in the west) is now in full 3D, while Heimdallr features a different set of blocks than the prior games.  It's not an absolutely amazing plot, and it again does feel repetitive in structure by act 3, until the fourth chapter throws things for a major loop which was a very pleasant surprise.

Gameplay:  5 out of 10  - Let's get this clear:  I do enjoy parts of the gameplay in this game, which is why I played it for 100 hours.  Figuring out combat at first is enjoyable, and the dungeon at the end of the game's Fourth Chapter is really excellent, maybe the best in the entire series.  You certainly have a ton of flexibility for whatever playstyle you want, which has some serious drawbacks (see below), but at the same time means you will rarely ever feel forced to play in any particular way you may dislike.

But oh my god, is this such a damn lazy game in terms of gameplay.  Rereading my review of the second game, one of my problems with it was that the game featured so many mechanics and options that many of these options felt pointless and others felt so overpowered as to make the game hilariously easy at times, even on harder difficulties.  I played this game on "Hard", the 2nd highest difficulty, and oh my god was it easy - I failed one boss fight early, and after that never failed another fight again.  By the end of the game, I was basically just seeing how flawlessly I could deal with each subsequent boss, with the challenge being whether I could beat the boss without taking any damage instead of actually having a shot at losing

The reason this is is that, while this game is kind of the start of a new mini arc in the Cold Steel series, it keeps basically EVERY single mechanic from the prior games (TOCS2's "Overdrive" is missing, but that's it) and adds a billion more.  Some are absolutely pointless - one of our new main characters Juna has the ability to switch her attacks between her stronger melee attack and a ranged attack for example but you will 99% of the time just keep her on melee since there's almost never a reason you'd ever want to switch and no other character gets that same mechanic.  But most are just utterly broken - and so obviously so that it's easy to see how you can break fights even if you're not some speedrunner or min-maxer.

The big one here is the "Brave Order" mechanic, which I like a ton in theory - basically the brave points you get from hitting enemies with a critical/unbalance attack were previously only used to do additional attacks, but now every character can use them to perform a global buff of some kind: so a 20% damage increase buff, a "you move faster" buff, a "Arts (magic spells) cost 1/5 mana" buff, etc.  With Brave Points accumulated in theory by you matching the right attack types to the right enemies, there's obvious tactical benefits here....except enemies are never balanced in any interesting way to make that a tactical consideration and certain Brave Orders are sooooo powerful - instant spellcasting, extra guardbreak chances, - that they can just break fights.  This is especially the case with the new guardbreak mechanic, in which you can stun enemies if you drop their guard bar to 0 and do extra damage: so the final fights inevitably become using one Brave Order to break bosses before they can act, then using the bonus damage from hitting such bosses to kill them before they can move.

There's no attempt to balance these new mechanics at all, which is bad on its own, but is made worse by the fact that again every old mechanic returns, and they aren't rebalanced at old: so what was broken before is STILL Broken - whether that be delay attacks or the Chrono Burst spell which allows you to easily get basically infinite turns, etc.  And since the game lets you have double as many Master Quartz per character, which boosts the options available to every character, it's like having 3x as many broken mechanics as before.  These additional mechanics - the guardbreak in particular, but also the addition of items - extend to the Divine Knight battles - the gigantic mecha - so they're also less fun, even if they're less broken in general.  There's no challenge.

And my least favorite gameplay element, the school elements return and are honestly EVEN worse than before.  The good news is that there are less of them than before, with only four school segments, and you having less bonding points to spend with people.  The bad news is that the game has removed the tie between these bonding events, in which our protagonist spends time with the other characters and builds a relationship, and gameplay: they no longer affect your combat bonds at all, instead only applying to whether you get an extra scene at the end of the game in terms of romance/friendship.  So they just feel utterly pointless and a distraction from the parts of the game which are enjoyable, and while they ARE optional, as a casual playthrough I honestly felt like skipping them would surely lead to me missing out on something.  (If I do another playthrough, I will skip these entirely).

So yeah, Trails of Cold Steel 3 is a mediocre JRPG, only good for series fans honestly at this point.  And even those will be frustrated by this game, with the game's lazy design often involving us returning to past series locations like Crossbell and finding half of those locations not accessible for no reason whatsoever (hilariously, half of Crossbell is unavailable to visit, including one section of the City that is literally directly between two other accessible parts....and if you travel between those parts your characters essentially fast travel off screen).  Ill be back for ToCS4 for completion sakes but I don't have high hopes in this series getting better until we reach the next arc alas.