Trails of Cold Steel 4 is the 4rd game in Nihon Falcom's Trails of Cold Steel (also known as "Sen no Kiseki") series and the ninth game in Falcom's larger "Kiseki" (or "Trails") series, which began with Trails in the Sky. This is the final game (thankfully) in this arc of the Kiseki series, although a game featuring the same characters and a lot of the same plot points was released last year in Japan and is scheduled for 2023 here in the US (Trails Into Reverie).
You can probably tell from the last paragraph that I have some not super positive feelings about the Trails of Cold Steel series (My review of Games 1, 2, and 3 can be found here, here, and here). I really loved the first two arcs of the Kiseki series - Trails in the Sky is tremendous, and Trails into Zero/Azure, which is now finally getting an official english release (but I have played with a translation patch), is a pretty damn incredible duology as well, even if the gameplay difficulty didn't come close to that of Trails in the Sky at times. Still, I loved those arcs because their characters were tremendous, the stories were very enjoyable if not super special, and I really enjoyed the JRPG gameplay, difficulty not being high enough for my liking or not.
Trails of Cold Steel has a number of very very likable characters, and some solid gameplay....but some serious problems with editing. There are just too many characters, there are just too many gameplay options, many of which are not really explored in any meaningful way and others of which are just blatantly broken. And every game just adds more and more, rarely taking anything away, such that it gets overwhelming and frustrating, which makes both the gameplay....and the story/characters (much of their development being locked away behind persona-esque bonding events that are just irritating) not fun as things keep going on and on. The lead character being the most bland and uninspiring of the first three arcs doesn't help.
Still I was committed to this series by this point, wanted to finish playing this in English (I knew how the plot turned out going in since i'd seen this played through in Japanese before), and was hoping at least that the cameo appearances by past arc characters would make things a bit better. The result is......well, let's say mixed.
Again, I play JRPGs for two things: Story/Characters and Gameplay, so I'm going to address and score each of these individually:
Story: 4 out of 10. Trails of Cold Steel 4 is an overbloated mess, filled with many of the touches that make the Kiseki series great....but also with so many moments that frustrated the hell out of me. Just like Trails of Cold Steel 3 was built like a second version of Trails of Cold Steel 1, this is built like a new version of Trails of Cold Steel 2 - so you start with an arc where your characters go back to prior game areas to reunite as a party, then you have the breakout from the enemy stronghold, then you have you flying around in an airship doing quests all over the prior areas - as well as some new ones to be fair - until plot events occur (with occasional giant mech battles in predictable places), with it wrapping up eventually with a final dungeon where you face bosses in pairs, with certain characters being required party members against those bosses. The result however is that the plot often feels like it loses momentum, as you feel obligated to do every side quest in between story events - in fact you have to in order to get the true ending - just taking time away from what could be a propulsive plot if those things were removed - even if a number of the side quests are well done and made me smile.
The game also basically adds as guest characters in significant roles most of the entire casts of the last two arcs - and while I love seeing those characters and finding out what they're up to, it also means that those characters appear, show some character development, and then have to take a backseat to this game's crew, even when they really shouldn't. And the main characters of this story, of which there are so so many (there's I think 16 main characters, plus about another 8 "guest" characters who might as well be main characters") that it just feels overwhelming....and so many moments of character development are locked behind the "bonding moment" system, which is just frustrating. The game gives you PLENTY of those moments, so you aren't likely to miss out on much in any given playthrough, but it just feels like the system force feeds you these moments rather than organically develops characters (it doesn't help that every female character's development is into a romantic option for Rean instead of something independent of him).
And the plot and character development of antagonists is just an utter mess. The series has had some serious moments of darkness, with characters facing off with big evils.....but this game just cannot commit to allowing for any antagonist to actually wind up being an evil guy who must lose. Like yes, you can have bad guys with understandable motives, but here, every bad guy winds up being mind controlled or whatnot by the big bad, a magical curse/mecha that turns out to be responsible for the most part for every bad thing that has happened in the series. The story frequently has to feature ginormous infodumps to reveal this - one really notorious one just basically is a half hour long cutscene of reveals for why all the antagonists aren't really responsible for their actions, even ones who should have no connection to the magical area making the reveals. And again Rean Schwarzer, our main character, is just not that interesting - he's not as fun as prior protagonist Estelle Bright (Trails in the Sky), not as pathological as Kevin Graham (Trails in the Sky the 3rd),, and not with a driving force towards justice as Lloyd Bannings (Trails to Zero/Azure). He's just bland, and the hero because he is, and well....I'll be glad in two games when we're done with him.
There are some great character moments here, and enough things to make me smile - there are plenty of signs of what was once great about this series here. But it just needed an editor to cut out a ton, to say we don't necessarily need every bit of fanservice, and to get the plot to commit to the darker tone it was trying instead, of basically becoming a cheesy fairy tale even more than ever before.
Gameplay: 6 out of 10: Okay let's start with the good: Trails of Cold Steel 4 takes the gameplay of Trails of Cold Steel 2 and largely improves it. You can now fast travel all over the game world without having to go back to your airship, which makes things much faster (although you can no longer change characters without doing so, which is a baffling choice). The trial chests from Cold Steel 2 return, although now they don't power the Overdrive Mechanic (removed) but instead power up character Brave Orders, and they provide fun mini battles with two or four person parties, although none of them are particularly challenging. And now the game gives you a clear idea of when you need to defeat enemies in certain time limits (or have to defeat them at all) in order to gain bonus credit (AP). The game also gives you a notice each time an area in the world has new things or dialogue to find, making it so that even without a guide, you should be able to find every quest or plot point and nearly all book items (needed to make the ultimate weapons) if you so choose. They very much took some of the more frustrating parts of ToCS2's gameplay and made quality of life improvements, which is much appreciated.
On the other hand, the game is laughably easy, and I was playing this time on the hardest difficulty from the start. Combat again gives you a billion options from the start, and while the first act features a few battles that are reasonably challenging (especially to get the bonus AP) with what you have at the time, by the time you get to the second act and have access to a full choice of party members, no battle should be difficult at all. All the overpowered mechanics from TOCS3 return (You can even equip master quartz, which provide huge buffs, as secondary quartz on multiple characters now), although the ability to guardbreak bosses is toned down....but you don't really need it. Again you get to the point where, without even looking up any guides, you can easily find ways to kill basically every final boss without taking any damage whatsoever, except for the rare instances the game forces you to use extra characters - or worse, guest characters. Playing with the guest characters is a real treat story wise, but while their loadouts are powerful, you can't change them, and thus those loadouts are often suboptimal or make no sense for the characters and make those characters worse than your own regular characters. And again, so much of how to break this game is the SAME as how you broke the last three games (Chrono Burst is still broken!) so it's not even a new challenge on how to do it.
And oh god please let the bond system die a horrible horrible death. As with the last game, the game separates the bond system, where Rean gets to experience character development with one of his classmates/students, from the gameplay, with it only affecting what items you might get at the end of game and what romantic options you get. But the romantic relationships are just so poorly done, and the game gives you SOOOO many bonding points that it feels like a chore to do them, as if the game is insisting that you have as many romantic options as possible. I wound up at one point actually not doing all of them, even tho i could've actually done them and skipped the cutscenes, just because I was fed up.
So yeah a lot of the gameplay still feels like a chore, the battle system is fun but way way too easy in the same ways as earlier, and the best part of the gameplay remains the two minigames - Vantage Masters, the cardgame that returns and is fun even if the AI is so stupid - and Pom Pom Party, which is Puyo (and returns from Azure) and a lot of fun to play. I played way way too many of these minigames, not least because it had good rewards for doing so....but I didn't mind.
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