The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (PS Vita/PS3) - Video Game Review
I have been meaning to get a review out for this one as I intend to go through the entire series. I played through most of Trails in the Sky on the PlayStation Portable (it's also available on PC), but never got around to finishing that series. Despite that, I think this series has a great deal of potential so I am very interested to see how the sequels go. For those that are new to the series, I recommend at least trying Trails in the Sky, but you don't need to play those to properly enjoy Trails of Cold Steel.
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Where You Can Find It: I played the PS Vita version of this game and have heard that the PS4/PC versions have slight additional content in them.
General Information
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (aka "TCS" from now on), is a turn-based Japanese roleplaying game that was developed by Nihon Falcom Corporation and published by XSEED Games on September 2013 in Japan and later in America in 2015. It is part of the long-running Legend of Heroes series, which has its origins in the Dragon Slayer series from the 1980s. As you can imagine, there's a deluge of titles related to this series, however TCS is a new starting point. TCS was ported to the PC in 2017 with a remaster that came to PS4 in 2018 (in Japan) and 2019 (in America). As of June 2020, the series has four installments with a possible fifth game in the works.
I have heard that the TCS is considered the "poor man's Persona" and can quickly understand how those rumors originate. There's a lot of stylistic and mechanical comparisons to Sega's Persona series. I will say that I don't mean to detract from the quality of this game, but if you have to choose between Persona and TCS, you need to do Persona first.
The Story
Rean Schwarzer is accepted to Thors Military Academy as part of an experimental new class, named Class Seven. While at school, Rean and his Class Seven schoolmates will unearth the mystery behind the old schoolhouse, as well as take part in a series of field trips around the country of Erebonia. Along the way, Rean will work with the student council to help out his fellow students and the nearby citizenry, as well as combat the nefarious Imperial Liberation Front (who may as well just call themselves "Cobra" as they come off as knock-offs from G.I. Joe).
The story has a ton of atmosphere as there's a great deal of discussion on politics, elitism, and industrialization. The novel thing behind Class Seven is that it is the first class in Thors Military Academy's history that includes both commoners and nobles, so the game spends a great deal of time exploring class equality. The overall style of the game is presented in something akin to early 20th century Earth, but with some minor steampunk additions.
The story is pretty damn long, but it kept me engaged for the most part. There isn't much player-agency, which disappoints slightly as I would have loved if the game gave you options on whether to side with the nobles or commoners as this remains the primary backdrop of TCS. Rean even feels as though he was designed for this very purpose as he is a noble, but of low-birth.
Although I found most of Class Seven to be wonderful, I found at least a couple of the main characters gratingly painful to play with. First and foremost, I could not stand Millium. Her voice is annoying, her character makes no sense, and I frequently hoped/prayed she'd betray the party so I could rid the world of her presence. The game has a slight issue with Mary/Gary Sue tropes too as both Rean and (strangely enough) Alisa's maid, Sharon Kreuger, are frequently shown as nearly perfect. All the ladies dig Rean, and he rarely demonstrates the capability for failure unless the plot demands it. Sharon sort of takes the wind out of things from time to time as she's clearly stronger than anyone else in the entire game and yet settles for playing nanny to a bunch of teenagers. There were more than a few times where I wondered why Class Seven had to deal with terrorists when we could just dispatch our over-powered maid instead.
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My attitude towards Millium through the entire game
The main focus of the game is obviously combat, which is turn-based like Final Fantasy 10, but with a bit more added to it. Some actions will enable the user to go again earlier than projected and some turns come with automatic buffs like a slight health boost or even enabling the user to one-shot an enemy. The integration of a Social Link system makes it that whomever Rean is better friends with will provide further buffs like follow-up attacks and even using some colleagues as a human shield from certain attacks. I really enjoyed the game's combat through and through and consider it to be the game's best quality.
Not how I remember school-life, but I'll take it!
Outside of combat, Rean will be performing quests/tasks for either the student council or while on his many field trips. Most of these are fairly run-of-the-mill, but I found that they also really helped flesh out the world of TCS (especially so at the beginning of the game). Unfortunately, these quests sometimes hurt the story and pacing as I never understood why Rean felt compelled to help the student council as he's not actually a member of it. Most aggravating though was that some quests were only available if you spoke to a random person in town at a specific time. This meant that every time the time advanced in-game (story-specific), I would have to go talk to every person in town just to make sure they didn't want Rean to fetch them flour or find their lost child! This got especially monotonous at Thors Military Academy as I got increasingly annoyed with have to go talk to the same people over twenty times throughout the game. To be clear, unless you're a completionist like me, you don't necessarily need to worry about these small quests.
From a visual perspective, I really liked the European industrialist style and found the actual graphics to be pretty good overall. It's definitely not going to blow anyone away, but there weren't any bad designs either. I'd argue that the game could use more detail in a lot of visual areas, but it does what it needs to do.
The Best of the Best: The cooking mechanic in this game was fantastic. I frequently stopped caring about the state of the empire so I could track down the perfect way to cook a hamburger or learn the recipe on how to make my own noodles! Also,
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Crow understands the important things in life
The Worst of the Worst: Millium. That is all.
Calhooey Score: 6/10 - Good
Would I Recommend? This is a neat little title that offers a lot of material. I think that if you like turn-based combat and a relaxing story, you'll get a kick out of this. This game has a lot of potential to reach the same peaks as other JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Persona.
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- The ending of this game felt truly absurd and frankly pissed me off a little bit. All my time spent training and upgrading my team felt wasted when the final boss-fight forced me to learn an entirely new combat system and fight in a giant suit of armor.
- The slap to the face was, after beating Crow, the narrative completely disregards that and has Crow win for narrative sake, which made me wonder why I even fought him in the first place.
- Speaking of Crow, I was pretty pissed that he was Comrade C all along. The story of Crow somehow pulling off being Comrade C while running around with Team Rean stretched things a bit too far at certain points when I started to really think about it. I can forgive the twist for that though, but what I can't forgive is the idea that someone who's not even old enough to legally gamble is somehow running a terrorist outfit comprised of adult mercenaries, badasses, and killers. I'll admit that I was annoyed that my favorite character turned out to be the bad guy, but it just didn't feel completely earned to me...
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