The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV

Long story short, Cold Steel as a whole is one big nosedive off the proverbial cliff, and IV only cements it. The ingredients for a good story are there, but this dish is most certainly peculiar. The Good: - Numerous call backs to old Trails. - Ample options in character builds. - Quality of life improvements. The Bad: - Bloat. The cast, the dialogue, the plot; everything suffers from padding for the sake of padding. A story that could have comfortably fit into two games took four to complete, making the entire series as a whole a funeral march for pacing. The almost two dozen playable characters all struggle to have more than a single distinguishing character trait each, leading to most of the dialogue being meandering waffling and exposition. - Rean. This guy couldn't be more obvious if he had "Gary Stu" tattooed on his forehead. The most enjoyable part was Act I, where he's out of commission and the cast were trying to be characters instead of just the Rean fan club they've slowly become over the last three games. - Curse & Magic. "A wizard did it" might as well be the motto of this game. Need a character to be evil? The Curse. Need characters to know something? Magic. Need the villains to obstruct you and pad the game out? Magical curse-science. The Ugly: - "Difficulty". I played this on Hard without links or orders, and it still felt like easy mode compared to Azure or Sky SC. Insane healing items are abundant and it's simple to have a team with effectively infinite EP. - Repetition. Every boss fight plays out the same. Reduce an enemy to 50% health -> they chimp out and S-craft you. Then, it's back to phase 1. In timed battles the hardest thing is getting all the scans, not actually winning. - Poaching. A lot of moments and story beats come straight from previous games, where they were usually done better. - Music. It's not bad, but it also fails to stand out. Don't expect to find the next Silver Will or Inevitable Struggle in this game.

The devs are based, unfortunately they aren't the ones handling translation. NISA game removed all references to femininity and most mentioning of gender. They removed mentioning a character being fat in a conversation specifically about that person being overweight. They also add a bit of emasculation. This is in addition to the usual cringe of loose localization, i.e. 'localization is an excuse to do whatever I want' style of localization. NISA has a long history of being pro-censorship and anti-japan. The game may be great but the translation is terrible.

Frankly, if you enjoyed the previous games at all, then buying the finale of the Cold Steel series should be a no brainer... But here's a few reasons to convince ya. - Much like Cold Steel 1-3, 4's port is fantastic (like literally perfect... other devs should learn from this) - Story/Writing's is phenomenal. I personally felt that the story just got progressively better in each successive Cold Steel sequel. Quite a few few jaw-dropping moments happened in 4. Some of our favorite & lovable characters from earlier Legend of Heroes games make cameos/appearances. - Gameplay/Combat kept getting better with each new Cold Steel title & I personally think it peaked at 4. (Brave orders & Robot battle mechanics introduced in 3 were refined and overall really fun to spice up the franchise's classic combat system) - Super long game that never got boring (Each Cold Steel game took anywhere between 100 & 150 hours for me to finish) That's all i got. And for crying out loud, if you haven't played any of these games (Cold Steel OR Trails in the Sky), at least give the first one a whirl. I don't really write reviews, but the Cold Steel Series was just too much fun.

Trails is my favorite series. But after finishing the Cold Steel Arc I think it's the weakest story so far. The gameplay is great. The returning characters are great. The music is OK. But Cold Steel is over extended. Class 7 is too big and the characters are watered down. The mission to mission stuff can be good but drags on too long and the overarching plot feels cheap to me. It's worth playing and the gameplay is good, but the writing was stronger in the earlier entries.