---SPOILERS--- In the first third of the game, bad guys engage you in boss fights. Then after the fight is over it turns out they were just holding back and destroy you in a cutscene, prompting another character to come in and save you, this happens multiple times. In the final dungeon of the game, the same bad guys engage you in boss fights, then after the fight is over it turns out they were just holding back and destroy you in a cutscene, prompting another character to come in and save you. This happens three times in a row. Nothing more needs to be said, the game is a complete waste of time.
The character customization system (basically materia) is significantly dumbed down from the previous games, made shallow, restrictive, and boring. Characters are stock and completely uninteresting. The cast is bloated to the point where nobody has any room to grow or develop. You could remove like a third of the party members while changing very little about events. Use of tropes and cliches is very sloppy, the game opens with one typically associated with bottom of the barrel anime (haha the tsundere fell on the hero and buried his face in her boobies and shes upset for several hours!!!). The graphics are very ugly both technically and aesthetically. Whenever the game tries an action scene it’s usually embarrassing to watch. Problems from the previous games are doubled-down on. Pacing is sluggish, made excruciating by the school sections that you return to after every chapter and run through another floor of a filler dungeon. I would be OK with large stretches of nothing significant happening if I liked the characters, but I don’t because they’re boring. Combat is plain and very easy. Animations are slow to the point where holding the turbo button basically throughout is a necessity. The script is mind-meltingly repetitive, I took 2,265 screenshots of characters laughing at everything and that’s far from a definitive count. What moved this game from a 2/5 to a 1/5 is the ending. -vague spoilers for the ending follow- The ending is less a cliffhanger and more the story just stopping. The conflict that’s been building up all game starts, and then the game stops immediately after, find out what happens in Cold Steel 2! This is all revealed to you in an “epilogue” after the final boss where the game just dumps 3 hours of shit on you. -vague spoilers for the ending end- If you want a worthy successor to the Trails in the Sky trilogy, this isn’t it. If you just want a decent JRPG, this isn’t it. Would not recommend unless you want to waste 80 hours.
