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.
