The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III

As a game of running around, fighting things, building characters, and having small character moments, ToCS3 excels. There are endless possibilities for choosing and equipping your party, fights are complex, interesting and varied, and the characters are mostly very nice. The aesthetics are very fine too. About the only complaint is that it starts getting easy as you go along even if you don't use any game-breaking techniques. The problem is everything else. It has a big, epic story which would probably make a good anime. Unfortunately, it doesn't make much of a game story, forever failing to connect with the gameplay, robbing the player of control, or even negating what the player has just done. Most of the time, after winning a big fight, it will turn out you didn't actually win it after all. There's endless material of characters just showing how impressive they are (outside of gameplay) or telling each other how impressive they are. It also keeps making you do things which are far less interesting than the main gameplay. The mecha battles are formulaic and boring, the protagonist's habit of deciding to fight people on his own (even if he isn't properly equipped at the moment) is infuriating, and if, like me, you think collectable card games are an abomination even in an advanced capitalist society where their existence makes sense, tough luck. The fishing kind of works, but why is anyone but Rean banned from catching the big one? Oh, and can we have at least one character who understands and can state the actual problems with feudalism? And sometimes after a big fight, I just want to save the game and close it, instead of having two more big fights and tons more story to see. Despite all this, I would still recommend it based on the strength of the core game. The fast forward function and occasional use of the scene skip options are extremely helpful in minimising the damage from the rest.

Not a compliment.

...While Steam does. I wouldn't be surprised if NIS America's entire catalogue would be at risk of getting removed, since they could think "GOG doesn't sell". Regional pricing exists due to people in those regions often not being able pay the full price converted from USD, and NIS America threw away the regional pricing for most of their titles on GOG (and they also ignore anyone that asks them about it).