For the sake of important context, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel would not rank near the top of any list detailing popular or well-known JRPGs in the West. For years this franchise has been a consistent source of games that are story-driven epics quagmired in relative obscurity. I would place The Legend of Heroes franchise’s popularity somewhere inbetween that of the well-known Fire Emblem series and the lesser-known Romancing Saga series. Developed by Nihon Falcom and published by Bandai Namco in Europe, the franchise’s most recent story arc ‘Trails of Cold Steel’ was originally a PS3 and PSVita game, that ended up on the PS4 ahead of the release of the third instalment in the series, which, for now, is a Playstation exclusive.
The first bits of context you need to know going into a Legend of Heroes game is that developers Nihon Falcom have been doing this since the 80s and have churned out a lot of games that mainstream reviewers tend to wrangle between a 4 and 6 out of 10. The second thing you need to know is that these games are not created as stand-alone titles. If the game’s numerical suffix is greater than one, you need to have played the previous game, with few exceptions. It’s also fair to say that most of these games are like interactive anime seasons with turn-based combat. Finally, a lot of the reviews for these titles have been unfairly viewed through the lens of ‘Triple-A’ titles. I mean no offence to either the studio or the publisher – but you are not that.
Trails of Cold Steel is the most recent arc and also my first game in the series since the original Trails in the Sky was translated in 2011.
Review
If future historians look at Japanese pop-culture in our time, they may find it odd that we are so demanding and expectant of our youth. Even if they are willing to look past ‘anime’ as a concept, they probably still have many, many questions about why almost all JRPGs feature some sort of martial-arts loving academic prodigy who acts and makes decisions like a wise, veteran leader. That cliché description is Trails’ protagonist Rean Schwarzer, the adopted son of a Baron in a world that is heavily dominated by nobility and underhanded political games. Trails of Cold Steel’s world’s very foundation is based upon a class system of Nobles and Commoners. This probably means something very different to the Japanese team who developed it, but to an Englishman like myself it feels very much like the class system in Victorian England prior to the Industrial Revolution and the foundation of a capitalist meritocracy.
That said, the plot begins in a very familiar and relatable way – provided you’ve played any other JRPG ever – Rean gets off a train to start life at his new school of Thors, a military academy in of Erebonia. You control Rean, and his classmates as they navigate life at such an academy and travel around the country gaining valuable life experience [read: becoming RPG besties].
Yes, it’s your standard JRPG starring high-schoolers, and touches upon almost every anime trope in the book. There’s a bit of Persona in here, a bit of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and even some Valkyria and Gundam thrown in for good measure. Originality of concept is not where this shines, but it certainly does shine… once it gets going. From the top here, I will say that the English localisation by Xseed Games is excellent, with only a few tiny errors. They are also likely to be errors that you won’t pick up on unless you have a better-than-average grasp of the English language or are a sub-editor by trade.
The first few hours of the game are… long, to keep things short. ‘Tedious’ feels too harsh, while ‘world-building’ feels far too generous, even though I’ve described it as both to different people. There’s just a lot of exposition to navigate, and you get tons of nouns thrown at you. Almost every other word of the colossal opening script is going to be relevant at some point later in the story, so paying attention from start to finish is key to your overall immersion. Some of these words are references to important characters, others are just throwaway tidbits or even just technical words like ‘Orbal’ which the game uses as their ‘dohickey thingymabob’ to explain everything you can do that no one else can.
What I took from all this is was that the game’s pace was going to be on the slow side, and I was right. It’s a long burn that slowly latches onto you and won’t let you go – provided you can get past the first period of prolonged chatter. If modern games like Call of Duty, Fortnite and Overwatch are like snacking: quick, satisfying bites that you keep coming back too, but won’t fill you up, Trails of Cold Steel is like Christmas Dinner: a long, laboured meal with a much better payoff, provided you’re willing to invest time and effort in putting everything together.
I can’t fault fans from outside the JRPG genre for bailing on this one. But if you’re a fan, and you know what you’re getting in for, that’s a different story…
Because, once you do get past the healthy dollop of foundation work and start fighting, character building and getting some free time, the game starts to feel like a genuinely enthralling experience. You have a huge world with a fair bit to to keep track of, as well as ten party members each with an assortment of associated characters, likes, dislikes and personality traits, but it all adds up to help the game feel alive. Trails of Cold Steel, ironically, feels like a warm and fuzzy place where things might actually be happening outside of the microcosm of the school, and that’s not something that’s easy to do.
Far too many games are guilty of narrowing down their worlds to be just the playable area. In doing so, they just assume what’s happening on the outside is irrelevant until they need another plot device. Trails of Cold Steel lays the groundwork for an entire nation’s worth of political intrigue in the prologue, and has developing plotlines, incidents with massive corporations, civil disruptions, and factions that all appear to be moving behind the scenes, acting with their own ideals and beliefs that don’t always align perfectly with the world at Thors Academy.
And that’s what makes it interesting.
A good JRPG always has at least one good, memorable character and this game has at least a dozen. Perhaps the crowning achievement of character design is that they manage to avoid making Rean an unlikable protagonist. There is a character here for everyone, and even the ‘love interest ‘party member that is funneled towards the forefront isn’t as insufferable as they always seem to be in other games of this ilk. The supporting cast feel like prominent parts of the story, something helped in huge, huge moments by intelligent writing that is so self-aware, it doesn’t feel the need to point out how self-aware it is. Aside from a few ‘anime’ moments where the writing looks the other way to allow some more typical ‘fan-service’ elements, it’s a well-told and fundamentally sound story that gives players a lot of different experiences.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that the quality doesn’t ever dip dramatically. It’s remarkably consistent throughout without ever feeling flat. This is without a doubt one of the heaviest and most dense text-driven JRPG worlds I’ve played in since the invention of the PS2, and the volume of dialogue (consider as well, this is a straight-up port from the Vita version) is commendable to the highest order. As the game ended, not only was I actively encaptivated by the story, but surprised that the game had another gear in which to go up into to make this an even more highly-charged experience than it had ever been at any point prior…
Until it stalled out. As I pointed out with my context section at the top, these games are designed to have sequels, which means that they can do naughty things like end on a cliffhanger that makes you have to go online and order the f***ing second game because you can’t stand not knowing how it ends.
I knew it was coming, but it still caught me off guard. Like a great TV series that closes out their season on a jaw-dropping climax that creates more questions than answers. That’s how you feel when you finish this, and it’s entirely debatable whether or not you’ll be able to replay it for the trophies or if you’ll need to let it settle for a day or two before coming back.
However, outside of the story, and mopping up the little bits here and there, there’s not a lot that makes replaying the game an inviting prospect outside of the usual JRPG factors like fan-service costumes and making slightly different choices in a New Game + mode. The game is still a PS3/PS Vita title, and the graphics tell that story. The only additional benefits on the PS4 version are all the DLC costumes and items and the ‘Turbo’ button. That said, as someone who didn’t own the Vita version, that feels like all you need. The game also never reached ‘Triple-A’ pricing, and I picked up a physical copy for £30 in late October – had I wanted a digital one, I could have got a better deal – so in many ways this price is a better reflection of how difficult it is to get a physical edition in the West, rather than the quality or appeal of the game. That said, this is certainly a remaster that I’m glad came with a ‘turbo’ button.
Much like in the remaster of Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age for PS4, the developers saw fit to add a button which doubles the gamespeed, cutting down on a lot of unnecessary camera panning and pseudo-cinematics within the game. I don’t know if these were made to be this long in the Vita version to hide loading screens, but they outstayed their welcome on the PS4. The Turbo Mode also really helps the late-game grind for levels, and any replays of the story. Using this function and skipping side quests and dialogues, you can finish a replay of the main questline in under eight hours.
The combat and skill system is very good too. Rather than the straight-up, turn-based back-and-forth, the game sees fit to give you the option to move around the battlefield as well, dodging area of effect attacks in exchange for not attacking. It’s not uncommon in JRPGs to let you do this, but it helps give you tactical options in battle. Each of the characters can also be fairly heavily customised as far as their roles go. Each party member can equip a Master Quartz, which determines the main effect that character has in combat. This can be increased physical damage, increased critical chance or even the restoration of EP or CP (the game’s Mana and Stamina). Each member also gets a selection of gems to augment further. These add more ‘arts’ for you to use in battle, and rarer gems give static buffs to the usual JRPG stats as well as certain effects. Once you’ve collected a few of the rarer and more powerful of these, you can create some very interesting builds. My favourite was to turn the game’s shotgun user into a status-effect machine. I stacked gems that give you a chance to deal effects like burn, poison, petrify, freeze, mute etc and used the multi-target ‘normal’ attack of the shotgun to create an economical disease spreader. But it never became too overpowered. As you might expect from a JRPG, bosses have higher resistance to status effects than regular monsters and it made sense to have other characters set up for raw damage and healing.
These options can be further customised with the weapons and gear you can buy, upgrade and equip on your party members. Gear isn’t as varied as the quartz and gems are, and there are no aesthetic changes as a result of what you equip weapon wise – so you just make your decisions based on stats alone. In total, you can only equip a weapon, armour, boots and two accessories. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to change how a character acts in battle.
The customisation options available are certainly appreciated for most characters, but unfortunately there are two party members that are limited in what they can do. They are designed to be the game’s caster/healers and can’t really move on from that role, as they are locked to using Orbal Staff weapons.
As the game revolves around being split into study groups and sent on field trips to gain combat experience, you are often dictated to as to which characters you can take with you. Rean is almost always available, so he’ll tend to be the member who gets the most attention, and you are usually given one of the two aformentioned staff users to act as that groups’ healer. The others, meanwhile, are a revolving door that you spend about half of the entire story with in different combinations.
Unfortunately, this is where the flaws in the game start to rear their head, and not in the way you’d expect.
I didn’t mind being told who I had to take with me, as all the playable characters are interesting and you’re never given a group that isn’t viable for the task at hand. However, when a character is removed from the group they return to ‘default’ weapons and equipment and unequip all their rare gems. This is almost understandable on your first playthrough, as the game simulates what the group that Rean isn’t in has done on the field study, and gives those characters weapons and armour that land on par with the basic level available in the previous chapter. This is so that no one is underleveled or geared, and that for any bits where you can choose your partner you don’t have to always pick the ones that you’ve spent the most time with. You can pick the best match-ups for the task at hand.
However, in all subsequent playthroughs you have to manually re-equip all the ‘best’ gear each time a character rejoins Rean’s team, and this extends to accessories and gems as well. I found this to be a very annoying part of the game, as even on the first playthrough you’ll have plenty of gems for each character and won’t need to take them off one member to give them to another. Plus, if you’ve specifically designed the spear-user or gunblade-user in the party to be an evasion-based counter-attacker (which you should) you need to manually reassign all those gems and accessories whenever they come back to Rean.
The game has an ‘auto-assign’ button which automatically assigns gems with the push of a button, but it seems to work based on rarity rather than a specific build, making it a quick, but fundamentally flawed, way of equipping characters.
Systematically, the game doesn’t have too many other problems, but it certainly was begging for a quality of life update and a few more options, such as the ability to lock gems and equipment on a specific character, and a more open layout design to the map and individual areas. Everything felt quite linear, even when you were doing off-the-beaten-path quests.
Another thing I didn’t like was that the cutscenes weren’t fully skippable. Similar to Persona, you can speed up the delivery of the text and really fast-forward a lot of dialogue-heavy moments on subsequent playthroughs. This is certainly better than them being completely unskippable, but given the sheer volume of dialogue and exposition at some junctures, the option to just press a button and it be over is certainly an attractive prospect. Even at full-speed fast-forward there are sections where you watch exposition fly by for minutes at a time.
Finally, a note on combat. I touched on the systems earlier, but the truth is there isn’t actually a lot of combat here, relative to the amount of ‘game’ content. There are bits in every chapter where you are unleashed upon an area with monsters and are free to roam and mass murder at will. But the game also has just as many moments where you are in a non-combat zone, and are instead problem solving using a means other than your sword.
This didn’t feel out of place to me, but it really is a strong shift away from a lot of other games I’ve played in the JRPG genre which always want you to feel like combat is just around the corner. There is never that sense here. You always get a fairly decent story telegraph that fighting will be necessary in an upcoming area.
A note on trophies
One final note I have is that this game’s trophies are quite well balanced, they force you into at least one subsequent playthrough, which is about what you’d expect for a story-driven JRPG that gives you arbitrary choices and features multiple ‘endings’. However, there’s a huge roadblock trophy that got under my skin and really hurts this game for trophy hunters. It requires that you play the game for 100 hours. My first playthrough took around 45 hours to finish, my second and third took me to 70 hours in total. At that point I’d got every other trophy.
This one just feels like it was set at an unnecessarily long amount of time, particularly when you’ve finished the campaign three times and are still 30 hours short. You’d never naturally stumble across it by just playing the game even if you went for every other trophy. Why not change it to be ‘get every party member to level 99’ or make it so that you have to finish the game on one difficulty to unlock the next (like Star Ocean or Devil May Cry). By my estimation these would take about the same amount of time, but feel more goal driven.
Conclusion
For a PS Vita title that has been remastered for the PS4, there aren’t too many major flaws or holes in Trails of Cold Steel, but it does have an unstated cap on how good it can be because of the limitations of its origin console. The majority of my issues with the game are niggles that tend to get fixed as a series goes on. But, I am a little disappointed that the PC or PS4 versions didn’t have a few of the quality of life improvements that they could have, given that these were released years after the original localisation. Turbo mode is the big quality of life update that was needed to make this playable multiple times in 2019, and due to my own incompetence it took three replays of the story to get most of the trophies. I would not have put the time in if I couldn’t use the turbo function.
One of the main reasons that this series isn’t talked about as a JRPG in the same breath as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest or Monster Hunter (Pokémon is in a league of its own) is partly down to presentation. Those titles are backed by larger studios and can work more on non-gameplay essentials such as menu design, text and font and voice acting. The writing here is superb, it knocks every Final Fantasy since VII into oblivion by comparison, but it really falls down on the aesthetic side of things. The majority of the game is told through plain text boxes with a generic font and the menus and notebook would have felt dated in 2007. The game also has a few resolution issues at times that are no doubt to do with the game’s port from a lesser console.
I am a gamer, but first and foremost I am a fan of storytelling. This has been the case since I fell in love with the JRPG genre in the late 90s. What Trails of Cold Steel delivers may feel like a cheeky cliffhanger ending that almost forces your hand into buying the sequel, but I don’t really care. This is storytelling and world building at its absolute best and I can’t ignore the journey that got me to that cliffhanger. The world might croon over great TV or epic novelisations, but not as many people are shouting from the rooftops about gaming’s resurgence as a storytelling medium. I can honestly say that this was a deeper and more interesting narrative than 95% of the big budget dramas that pervade streaming and other TV services. If you like getting involved in a great story, this one’s for you, but if you just want to mindlessly power up and pummel something you might want to look elsewhere.
Fatelighter 