The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II

Have over 100 hours on this game on PS3. One of my favourite games of all time. XSEED is an incredible localization company for bringing this series to the West and to PC. 100% recommend

Talking about 1 and 2 but I've only got 2 on GoG. + I could use the save game from my steam version of ToCS 1 from steam without any issue. It simply works, no additional tinkering needed. + I'm pleasently surprised by how polished everything is, and that there is also the option to assign a turbo button that speeds the game up to 6x. + There are very very few RPGs with such natural and believable interactions between party members and NPCs. At times, it's almost like watching a good movie. It's pretty much the opposite of Octopath Traveler, which had rather bland characters with no interaction between the party at all. + Great world building and story telling. - Not a huge fan of teenie RPGs but the story, world building and story telling more than makes up for it.

Rean is back with improvement over the previous serie. The town is memorable, fight include more features and a bit customization to Orbal system. Some will feel annoying, some will be pleased with the changes. Must buy for jRPG fans.

Personally I don’t get the high praises around here…at all. Don’t get me wrong it’s still a good game I loved trails in the sky from beginning to end, I never really got the same from trails of cold steel, and there are many reasons for it, weaker character, weaker story and I really don’t think those giant robots work well in this game, it's always like someone pushed the stop button to insert a minigame. One of the most annoying things is the constant middle finger the game shows you in regards to the outcome of your fight. After overcoming a strong opponent, they stand up, you are in trouble and someone leaps to your rescue. If this wasn’t an interactive story/game that would be less of an issue, although if you count how often this happens even then it would get old rather fast. You are just robbed of your feeling of accomplishment. The game doesn’t make all that good use of the big cast of characters, you have 10 people, I used 4 of them, since having one strong formation makes things way easier. Near the end of the game I grinded a little more to get them all up to speed, which paid of in the 2 occasions you need them. I had some technical issues as well, the game crashed every time I use Alysas second S-Craft, some fights just give me a black screen, my game never spread out over my display staying small in the upper right corner and it just crashed in the middle of my second last quest. All in all this is a dull shadow of trails in the sky, but even a shadow of trails in the sky can be a good game.