So, I was sick in bed these past few days and have been going through this. At times it was the perfect thing to distract me as I got better, and at other times I genuinely think it gave me a worse migraine and fatigue than being sick ever did.

CS2 is weird because its peaks are higher than CS1's right from the beginning with its awesome premise, but it meanders more than CS1 or any of the Sky games ever did. You have so many similar dungeons that go on and on and on, with the game often involving repetition of slightly similar events or places in other areas in the middle of the game, as well as its later portion. Also, the game seems to never want to end, there's an epilogue after the credits to the finale, and then the intermission before the actual finale. I didn't mind it that much though because I really liked the Intermission and Divertissement chapters, but the actual last chapter being that long was unjustified. At least it was pretty emotional near the end, and the point it was trying to deliver was interesting. Rean's rival of sorts is pretty nice too, but I wish they had more screen time.

Overall a fun game, I'd put it above CS1. It is more ambitious than CS1, but more flawed for sure. I did play the intro to CS3 and the graphical upgrades that come with Falcom moving on from the PS Vita and years of technical advancement, as well as the improved gameplay and insane music have me very excited to play more.

I thoroughly enjoyed this installment of Trails.
Fun gameplay, slightly improved from the first Cold Steel with updated mechanics, a larger roster of characters to play as and also COOL MECHA WITH TACHI RAHHHHHHHHH!!!! The incredible world building being expanded on, it's always nice seeing them mention the events of Crossbell since it's happening simultaneously with this Erebonia duology. Cast is solid, friends and foes alike. That DAMN soundtrack though... I love the battle theme and how it perfectly captures Rean's loneliness at the start of the game as he's separated from his fellow classmates. Then there's also this brilliant track Blue Destination that I just can not forget to mention and the list goes on..

Sucks that you have to play NG+ to access a certain scene, another down moment was the post-game if you can even call it that. THE GAME KEPT GOING LMAO. Not a huge deal though because I got to see my GOAT (you know who)..

It's a good follow-up from the first game, with some really high peaks and the final chapter as well as the epilogue had me in tears. I think I'm just too deep in and invested at this point since I've already started the next game before I even finished writing this review.

A marked improvement on Cold Steel 1 in many ways, primarily due to this game being way more gameplay focused instead of the filler that dragged CS1 down. For the most part I like the new designs for the characters, and it is an interesting direction this game takes in comparison to the standard Trails formula. That being said, the Epilogue drags this game down quite a bit as it just feels pointless.

You hit the finale and then have to play for 10 more hours beyond that (not complaining about the chapter in between the Finale and Epilogue, that was sick). Combat feels better and more challenging at times, the plot has actual substance, and the plot twists are fantastic as usual. If the music was better and this game had better pacing, it would be as good as the top Trails titles, but it was clear this game needed to wrap up what Cold Steel 1 started and setup new plot devices for the journey into western Erebonia.

I’m on RPG burnout now, I’m glad this was a good game after the disappointment of the first game, hopefully I hit CS3 before the end of the year.

EDIT: I lied, jumped into CS3 straight away

have a love-hate relationship with this game. it has SO MANY BAD DECISIONS. but it PEAKS SO GOOD TOO. overall it was not a very enjoyable experience when it comes to storytelling and pacing. everything other than that is incredible
music. gameplay. dungeons. SOME characters. all that peak but just the way the story is laid out hurts me so bad. the finale is genuinely one of the greatest in the whole series but once you reach it you get there with a bad taste in your mouth from a lot of the slop you got fed
you thought we were done? here's a pointless epilogue and the game just drags and drags it does not know when to end. cut some parts from the acts and cut some parts of the epilogue and it would have been 10/10 i understand why someone would love this game though

The weakest Trails games in terms of writing and pacing.
It's a rough game to get through, but it isn't as horrid as many people say it is.
It has fantastic moments and great ideas which were nicely executed.
I just wish the second half was cut down in half by removing all the filler in Act 2.

Thank for high speed mode for the PS4 versions.

Não tava esperando por esse epílogo, deu uma boa profundidade para este jogo. Um bom final de arco, agridoce como tem que ser, teve suas bullshitzinhas de anime (que honestamente estavam demorando pra chegar na minha opinião) e o jogo tem uma barriguinha no ato 2, porém pra mim é mais uma entrada extremamente divertida desta série muito única. Acabei me apegando muito mais a estes personagens do que eu pensava que eu iria, principalmente o Rean, achei que ele seria o Kirito (e ele meio que é... só que feito mais corretamente?). Vamo pro CSIII agora.

Trails of Cold Steel 2 : Fascinatingly Bad

Previously, in my journey through hell the Kiseki series, we covered the first game in the third arc of this now cult classic series and I concluded rather harshly and in length that it was indeed one of the worst JRPG that I’ve ever played.

In response to such vitriolic hatred for what is essentially a very mediocre bargain bin RPG of the week, my friends quickly responded to me with the following statement : “If you think CS1 is bad, I can’t wait for you to try the 2nd one, it’ll make you think it was actually a masterpiece” which instead of dissuading me from continuing on with the franchise actually got me curious about what that might entail.

You see, Trails of Cold Steel 2 had a bit of a rocky development history. Around 2012, the PS Vita was slowly but surely put on the front as the successor to the PSP, Falcom just went through what could be considered their 2nd golden age with the PSP with a wide variety of titles across both PSP and PC a lot of action-rpg of course since it was until recently their main activity as game devs but also the Trails series which was picking up some speed, so much so that the fabled “Zwei 3” was instead released as “Nayuta No Kiseki” to profit off of the Kiseki brand (a fruitless effort since it was one of the last RPG on the PSP and by that point people have already moved on to other things).

This transitional period was a bit rough for Falcom which had two big projects for the PS Vita, the first one was “Ys : Memories of Celceta” a (bad) remake of Ys IV and of course the next entry in the Kiseki series aka “Trails of Cold Steel”. However, in a moment of extreme “lucidity”, Toshihiro Kondo asked the team at Falcom to develop the game for both the PS Vita and the Playstation 3, marking the first time Falcom has worked on a a game for home console since the mid 2000’s (if you can count porting Ys VI on PS2 as making a console game).

This of course lead to a lot of undesired results, the game was a buggy mess on release with tons of issues running on both platforms and on top of that they had to cut corner everywhere because Cold Steel was simply becoming too ambitious for the studio to reasonably finish it in time, but no worries because they just decided to cut the last hours of the game and release it later as its own standalone experience. What was supposed to be one game probably followed by one more sequel like the Crossbell saga became a 4 game long epic separated into 2 sub-arc each, of which Cold Steel 2 was the second half of that first arc (yeah it’s a bit complicated to follow, I swear I’m trying my best here).

So what exactly is Trails of Cold Steel 2 ? Well imagine if you took the second half of Final Fantasy VI and made it an entire 70h game instead because for some reasons Falcom decided that it would be a brilliant idea to do the “Search for your friends'' bit from FFVI again making it the third time this has happened in the series and I really must ask myself.

“Does Falcom think we wouldn’t notice they’re just shamelessly recycling ideas from other titles AND themselves ?” Well perhaps.

But I don’t really mind, if it’s done well, it could still save itself from the plagiarism allegations and besides the series has its own set of quirks to compensate (for better or for worse).
I’m sorry in advance if this review is gonna be shorter than the previous one (post edit note : this is a lie) because honestly my thoughts on this game are not nearly as intense, most of what was bad about CS1 still carries over from CS2 there’s very little change between the two titles, it is for the most part a straight continuation of what was done previously and that’s gonna be the main bulk of the issue.

Because the foundations that CS1 established were so weak to begin with, it was really hard to get invested into what CS2 wanted to tell me with its story. One thing that I will say CS2 has over CS1 is that the story is a bit more “engaging”, it’s less about experiencing slice-of-life moments between the most boring RPG party you’ve ever interacted with and more so about following a terrible mess of a story that would make Nomura’s writing seem sensible in comparison.

I guess I’ll get the gameplay out of the way first since there’s a few new additions, the battle system remains almost exactly the same as CS1 with the little addition of the “overdrive” gauge, if you’ve read my review of Azure I’ve explained that this game had something called a “burst” gauge which could unleash a massive boost on your characters abilities, getting them priority moves, let them cast spell cost-free and acting as an emergency heal button on top of that, pretty much the “fuck shit up button”. Well overdrive is more or less the same except instead of acting for the entire party, it acts only for the two characters that are linked together on the field and also only acts for three turns instead of dropping down based on your actions.

This small addition is welcome and definitely make battles a little bit more dynamic but it still a very feeble addition with the only real strategic use being to buff your party very very quickly (and the main reason why I used Jusis way more often this time around) during boss fight to more quickly dispatch of them in one hit thanks to Laura aka “What if we turned One Punch Man into a party member” s-craft.

Because yeah, unsurprisingly, the game balance here is even more awful than it was in CS1. Again, I've played the game on normal like with all the other entries but here it almost felt like I was cheating the game and I probably should’ve upped the difficulty to give the game any semblance of challenge. The reason why the game balance is so bad here is because you retain most of your broken crafts and stats from the previous game, since this game acts more like a 2nd disc than a sequel. This means that you start the early game with what were end-game abilities.

It’s nothing new in the series mind you but here since the game is so craft-centric and they didn’t even bother to nerf your crafts like Azure did coming off of Zero, it makes the early, mid and endgame stupidly easy, heck the second you obtain the “Domination” quartz which doubles the damage output of any attack/crafts/s-craft first used in battle, you can pretty much destroy any bosses in one-hit with a turboboosted Laura.

Which further emphasizes how the changes made to the orbment system to make it more accessible/straightforward only made the game battle system a complete mess and while it is fun to break the game in half, it doesn’t necessarily make for an engaging combat system for more than 70 or so hours. Some fights required a bit more strategy like the cryptids which are superbosses scattered across the map but even then, it’s often not that deep either.
But now on top of the regular battle system, you have GIANT MECH FIGHTS !

Those were already featured in the last 20 minutes or so of CS1 but here they are more present, punctuating or sometimes concluding big stretches of the main story for spectacle purposes and while they definitely do a good job at making me hype thanks to the music and the presence of giant robots and all of the implications surrounding their existences on the battlefield, the actual gameplay is a bit rough… but if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve rarely seen any RPG 100% nailing mech combats so I’m not gonna hold it against the game for not perfecting the formula.

The fights are just a guessing game where you have to hit your target in specific areas of their body, that part changing depending on the stance they’re having, a pretty interesting concept bogged down by the fact it’s never obvious what part of the body becomes the weak point and that even if you do hit the weak point, you don’t have a 100% chance of breaking the opponents guards, meaning the best strategy to win most fight is to put yourself in counter stance and let the game break the guards for you. There’s definitely room to improve those fights, they’re a nice little distraction from the mundanity of the main combat system but they definitely need some tweaking to be more engaging and less gimmicky.

Now that we got the most minimal change out of the way first, let’s talk about the actual big ass elephant in the room which is, you guessed it, the story !

CS1 was meant to be an introduction to the world of Erebonia but if you go back and read my review of it, you will quickly notice that this introduction was not only lackluster but also presented in the least engaging way possible. From long drawn-out info dumps dropped in the worst places, the repetitive, dull and predictable structure of its chapter based narrative, its bland and shallow characters I ended up having little to no attachment to by the end of the game and of course a confused mess of a main political conflict backed up by Kondo’s new weird obsession with centrism and faux gray morality and complete misunderstanding of basic concept such as class warfare and the separation of power.

Out of all the 90+ hours it took me to finish CS1 only the ending portion was of any significant interest because that’s where the game started to have an heavier atmosphere with soon to be child soldiers dreading the very real possibility to be drafted and of course the introduction of the big giant mechs introduced earlier as well as the heel turn of one of our party member Crow who is somewhat of a rival to Rean in this game in a kinda Amuro-Char kinda way (which is equally as gay but not equally as good as that aforementioned dynamic).

We start the story in the mountain range separated from all of our comrades with an understandably distraught Rean crying over the potential loss of his friends and after a quick walk in the area, you get saved by your sister Elise who welcomes you to your hometown of Ymir.

Ymir which by the way is a place the team have already visited in CS1 and even fought an Ouroboros member one time, don't you remember it ? Of course you don’t because it was a chapter that was completely absent from the original game instead being repurposed as a freaking Drama CD and let’s be frank, nobody ever in the history of forever listens to those.
After an altercation with the local Ouroboros super bad guy working for the newly established “Noble Alliance” who acts as the main antagonistic force in this game, your sister and the princess of the country gets kidnapped so now Rean has to gather all of his comrades thanks to his giant robots convenient teleportation magic ability.

One thing I appreciate about CS2 compared to CS1 is how the game decides to shake up the core structure of a Trails game, not by much of course but enough to be noticeable. Instead of the game being separated in chapters, this time the game is separated into 3 acts, meaning the narration and overall game structure can be little more free form and if the first act is pretty straightforward (gathering your friends by revisiting previous areas), the 2nd act decides to do something that is in part interesting from a game design aspect but also terrible from a story pacing perspective.

See CS2 was originally meant to be the last 10 hours of the original game, this game’s final act and the entire game pretty much feels like one drawn out quest to gather up your forces and take on the bad guy which I guess is fine if like for Azure it’s the last arc of an otherwise pretty long and substantial game but here, you quickly come to realize that CS2 really struggles to fill its gametime with meaningful story content somehow even more so than the original game which was mostly about nothing.

But the few story bits there are, are in fact a bit more substantial, I just wish that they were actually good.

Starting with the character writing.

It’s no surprise that I value good characters in my stories and the first game completely failed at making me care about the massive cast of playable characters it had. But the Kiseki series is a long series of games with a solid sense of continuity and usually can surprise me with the way they shake things up and manage to make me care about characters I didn’t truly have any reason to give a shit about in the sequel.

But sadly, CS2 manages to somehow fuck up that aspect beyond belief, none and I mean NONE of the characters aside from the main protagonist goes through any form of development, arcs or anything of the sort during the course of the main story. The only character in this game that approaches something even resembling a character arc is Jusis and it just isn’t a good arc whatsoever. It’s an arc about having to come to terms with his family's shitty actions and fight for himself and what he believes in, pretty standard stuff and honestly not handled super well because of something about this game story I will develop in a minute.

Any semblance of characterization or even minuscule amount of development these characters are contained almost exclusively within their bonding events which means that for some reason, the developers thought that something as basic as character writing should be given to the discretion of the player and be completely optional and missable contents !



Alisa or Machias could be the most 10/10 characters to ever grace the medium and I will still have nothing to say about them because I didn’t focus on them at all when allocating bonding points and I certainly wasn’t going to save scum to see all character events which often times can be up to fucking FIFTEEN AT EACH CHAPTER TRANSITIONS. This design philosophy is not only completely asinine but also completely antithetical to the idea of good character writing or just good writing in a video game in general.

Since my love for these characters have been almost non-existent, I had little to no desire to learn more about them and if they wanted me to care, they should’ve given me something to chew on outside of this pathetic excuse of a social link system which completely misunderstood the appeal of such a system from a game which itself already had issues balancing it correctly, but at least Persona feels somewhat competent in the uses of such mechanics, CS1 and even more so CS2 are embarrassingly bad with their take on it.

It’s not even like the bonding events are all that good either, the ones I’ve focused on mostly for gameplay reasons (focusing on characters I actively use in battle for stat boosting rather than because I’m interested in them) have been for the most part barebones, bland and uninteresting.

How come a character like Laura even get past the conceptualization process, all of her bonding events involves her either talking about swords, swinging a sword or philosophizing about… you guessed it SWORDS. Her entire personality and arc revolves around the idea that she’s a swordswoman like she’s a knight class character from some 80’s RPG on the freaking NES and those usually didn’t TALK about their job so goddamn much.

And you can apply this to pretty much any characters in your party, somehow the development team sat at a table and probably pinned drawings of the characters on a white board and then glued sticky notes on them with random words and said “yeup that’s going to be the whole character !”.

Millium is a literal super-spy working for the government but all of your interactions with her will be about cooking stuff and generally be the resident pedo-bait character because this is yet again a very self-indulgent japanese RPG aimed at teenagers or creepy weirdos with reprehensible fetishes.

Emma literally is a walking plot device, her entire character can be summed up as “I knew about it but I didn’t tell you because of my secret mission as a witch” and then bla bla bla exposition and self-pitying about having to hide shit from us, weirdly enough that makes her the most relevant character in the story because she’s pretty much the spokesperson for all of the random lore shit the game plot gravitates around during certain key point of the narrative and she’s also related directly to one of the main antagonist and resident Team Galaxy Admin : Vita Clotilde, a witch that can manipulate people through her singing.

I could go on and on about the characters in this game but really who cares, if the game doesn’t even make the bare minimum to make them interesting or likable, why should I make efforts trying to analyze and discuss them in the first place.

They had two 70-90 hours worth of gametime to do so and they failed miserably so fuck it fr.
HECK EVEN TOWA, THE ONE CHARACTER I LIKE IN THIS DUOLOGY DOESN’T HAVE ANY MEAT TO HER BONES IN THIS ONE, I’ve still defaulted to her for continuity reasons (which further emphasize how dumb that bonding system is in a game series with a supposed one true canon) and because I like her the most but Jesus Christ they even managed to not make me care as much about the only character I had even the slightest of attachment to in this cast.

Which leaves us with our homeboy, our hero, our guy, our light at the end of the tunnel, our shining beacon of hope and righteousness ! Our Protagonist, Rean Schwarzer !

In the original game, Rean was… not that interesting, he was a rather bland, uninteresting character that I didn’t have much attachment or even strong opinion about, he was generic but I guess that in a world full of walking anime clichés passing off as real human being, he fitted in as a player stand-in and blank slate.

That’s not to say he had nothing to his name in the original, we saw the beginning of his self doubt and self-pity linked to an ever consuming desire to protect others oftentimes prioritizing the well-being of others before his own. We also had some hints about his inner powers, like how he can go beast-mode sometimes and have cool white-hair like the dude from Tokyo Ghoul (do people still care about Tokyo Ghoul ?). And lastly, he’s an awakener, one of seven chosen ones (to which we only see 2 of them) who can control the fabled Divine Knights, powerful ancient machines that can do cool magic robot things (and I’ll admit that Valimar’s design is pretty sick !).

But it’s in this game that Rean finally come into his own as a proper character and let me tell you, I wish he kept his mouth shut because Rean went from a character I was completely indifferent towards in the first game to one I actively fucking despise and perhaps one of the worst protagonist I’ve had the displeasure of playing in a JRPG.

Rean is a whiny insufferable little centrist who believes in literally nothing, wants to get involved with nothing in the story and just accepts whatever comes his way like a good little dog without thinking about his actions or developing a single thought or philosophy of his own… NOT A SINGLE FUCKING TIME. Rean lives in a world drought in conflicts and injustice. A world with a rigid class-system that divides the country he lives in. A country where an elite of people can decide on a whim to start a war on its own people in an attempt to push their domination. A world where a minority of its population have nothing but contempt for the people below and will literally sacrifice civilians to prove their superiority.

And yet, the game insists on painting a morally gray framework on such a basic class-warfare type of conflict with the noble alliance presented as “not entirely in the wrong” except the Noble Alliance does absolutely nothing commendable or justifiable for the entire duration of the game, if anything most of them are random cartoon villains who commits atrocious crimes (that you never get to actually see aside from that ONE time but we’ll get back to that) because of their pettiness and need to push their domination on the masses not just through propaganda but also through literal honest to god warfare !


You can’t get more nazi than the noble alliance and yet Rean will still be like : “Yeah but we shouldn’t interfere, we shouldn’t take a side tho, not all nobles are bad people” and I get that being a noble himself, he doesn’t have the perspective to really refute that status-quo but that’s what character development is for, it’s to make him see the injustice of the world and change his vision and work towards making the world a better place. That ideological nonchalance and hypocrisy isn’t just shared by Rean though, it’s shared by all of his comrades of Class VII who are too busy stroking his One Leaf Blade when they’re not busy being drones with no thoughts or personalities of their own.

Which brings me to my next problem with CS2 storytelling, it’s over-confidence in thinking you care about things. See, in most stories you have a build-up and a pay-off and ideally you’d want both of the ends of that rope to be equally as solid to create a good memorable piece of work. CS2 sadly doesn’t have that luxury and as such needs to ride on the very little highs left by CS1 which they weren’t many. What I mean by this is that CS2 being a sequel is normally a game all about pay-offs.

The entire first act is about reuniting with your long-lost friends and seeing what they’re up to in the turmoil of the war, these moments are meant to be filled with joy and relief at the sight of our friends being ok and fending off for themselves pretty well which on paper is great but since CS1 failed to deliver on any reason to care about these characters you just end up sighing when Machias becomes the first party member to join your party in this game because out of any character you wanted back in your crew, that dude should’ve been left to rot inside his freaking windmill.

And the thing is that the entire game has this sort of warm atmosphere to it but since the characterization was so poor in the first game and also didn’t get better with this sequel and at points even got worse, there’s tons of moments that just fall flat !

For example, there’s a scene in between Act 1 and Act 2 where Rean is having a little moment of self-pity, now that’s also something about Rean that just simply doesn’t work, his inner “demons”. During that scene, which is the culmination of hours of character build-up for the guy and a significant character growth moment, we learn that the reason why Rean protects others to the point of self-sacrifice is because of that one time he killed a bear as a child to save his sister Elise. Since then, he swore to be the baddest, strongest motherfucker around to protect others and … really ?

That’s the reason Rean is such a whiny piss baby boy sometimes because he feels weak for… killing a bear as a child ? Either I’m completely media illiterate and feel free to shit on me in the comment for this or the writers had absolutely no idea how to add flaws to the guy to make him feel more human or relatable. The conclusion to that scene is Alfin (Olivier’s adorable but slightly pedo-baity sister) telling Rean that you know… he’s not just the one protecting others, his friends also protect him because they love him. And then Rean takes that information as a completely shocking turnover realization followed by a text box telling you that you can now transform into Kaneki mode in battle at will now in one of the lamest directed and worst written “character realization” scenes you’ve ever witnessed.



Are you fucking serious ? Are we talking about the guy who is disliked by nobody to the point that any vagina equipped individual in a 100 miles radius of him wants his divine blade inside their baby room going “wait a minute… people … like and care about me ???”. I swear on christ that this isn’t a fucking joke, I’m not making a bit here. It’s been a while since I’ve read or watched any of those “Light Novel” related media but oh my god, I love anime but fucking hell it’s stories like these that make me remember that yeah… anime can also be… that bad.

If you really wanna play on a real flaw the character has, why not play out of the fact that the dude is an indecisive fuck who has so little awareness of himself and the world surrounding him that he can’t pick a side or form a single thought of his own that isn’t “let’s go class vii, we’re gonna do it!” and it could potentially lead to some catastrophic situation down the line.

Rean is such a nothing character such a bland power fantasy schmuck for teenagers to project themselves onto that they relied on the oldest trick in the book by sticking a good old “trauma” to the guy to make him somewhat more relatable, because every kids these days have self-doubt so it’s cool and relatable you know ! It’s cool when the character that exists to be my ideal fantasy also has doubts about himself, he really is just like me ! A random whiny zoomer with no thoughts and no real conflict in their life but still want to pretend they’re making a difference while the only thing they’re good at is changing nothing at all and being a pretentious little shit that need to stay the fuck out of adult space because they have nothing to add to society aside from their ADHD riven rant on basic morality while never acting for the good of anything but the small little problems that only concerns them and them alone.

A problem which is even made worse by the fact Rean has a rivalry with another character, Crow ! Crow in the previous game was revealed to be a terrorist dead-set on killing off Osborne for some misdeed he did to the people of Erebonia and while his reasons for living a life of terror and danger is somewhat justified by his circ…

Wait…

What did you say to me ?

They’re not ?

Oh but of course what did I think, that this was a good game with a good inside political, ideological or philosophical conflict ?

Silly me, I almost thought I could develop empathy for an antagonist in this freaking series. Nah, Crow’s backstory is that his home country got annexed by Chancellor Osborne, not because of a violent cold raid but simply through a simple business manipulation tactic that he won fair and square. His grandpa wasn’t even killed by Osborne directly or indirectly nor did he kill himself off of the guilt of losing their territory to the hands of the Empire. His grandpa simply had to retire and live the rest of his life in regret sure but he simply died of old age at least. Heck, Crow even says it himself, he doesn’t think Osborne is that bad of a guy, he simply killed because he got involved with the wrong people in a moment of his life where he was lost, afraid and unsure about how to live his life… YOU’RE THE LEADER OF A TERRORIST GROUP MY MAN HAVE SOME FUCKING SPINE WOULD YOU ????
He even warns us before dropping his backstory that “his story is just yet another sappy story, don’t mock me please” like Falcom themselves are excusing this sorry attempt at character motivation and backstory.

In fact, why the fuck does Crow and his crew still hang out with the noble alliance and helping them committing atrocious war-crimes, his goals and motivation doesn’t seem to align with the noble alliance and he has already accomplished the goal he set for himself by teaming up with the noble alliance so why the fuck does he still commit warcrimes on account of the Alliance… oh yeah probably to fulfill some dumb prophecy about the war of the lions that the people at Phantom Brigade reject are looking to activate for their stupid anime villain plan.

Kingdom Hearts has a better ambiguously homo-erortic rivalry relationship between an MC and his lover rival and if you’re worse than freaking Kingdom Hearts writing, there’s something severely wrong with you as an author.

But could Crow be any better than this ? Yes of course he could, if he had a rival who actually believed in something but since Rean doesn’t believe in anything but solving only the issues that affect him and his friends I guess we’ll never have the Amuro-Char of the zoomer generation but oh well.

Cold Steel has this tendency to try and make you pretend that you care, it doesn’t actually make you care through clever writing or proper scene direction and good dialogues, it only does it in clichés and a complete lack of talent, that whole section I just mentioned took place during the time where the game literally forces to go talk to every single person on the Noble Alliance ship to try and see the other side and understand their point of view. They never actually show you anything, they just tell you stuff in hopes that you would feel even an ounce of empathy for the people on board except for the fact that the noble alliance has really nothing for them aside from either “Osborne did some mildly bad shit to me back in the day”, being literally hired mercenaries or being Ourobozos which might as well be hired mercenaries but see, they’re only helping because of “THE PLAN” ya know, can’t wait to wait another 30 years or so for these chaotic neutral fucker to boast about how strong and powerful they are and how cool and intriguing their “plan” is… (can you tell I’m just tired of Ouroboros at this point, this game as some new members showing up and I’m not even giving a damn… Oh well… I guess Duvalie is cool).

The game always fails at making you feel for anything in its story, world or characters. The game takes place in the middle of an actual honest to god civil war but you never get to see any of it, the world is mostly unchanged, cities and towns are running pretty much the same as usual except you see a soldier from time to time to remind you that this is a war.

Act 2 of the game in general is this gigantic narrative void where the story goes to a halt and turns into a fetch quest hub of epic proportions where you fly around in your airship left and right to do side-quests, explore the world and kill some superbosses. Pretty much doing anything but progressing the story or exploring the consequences of the war (which aren’t even shown since most cities are just kinda… fine and NPC are not all that bothered by the situation either), nah instead you’ll be finding someone’s horse or find ores to craft a neat sword for your cool robots in a McGuffin hunt that only pads out the game story even more.
Act 2 is neat in concept, having a more open structure inside of a Trails game isn’t something this series is known for but the actual content and things you do in those fetch quest are just boring and doesn’t change from the typical mmo-type shit you’d expect from a shitty modern JRPG and the length of that second act is freaking absurd too which only further emphasize how little actual story the game has when out of a potential 70h game at least 30 of those hours are dedicated to… literally nothing !

Most of the action is taking place on the western front but since Rean and his crew doesn’t wanna fuck with the war, they never actually go there and only take back random places because a friend of them was conveniently placed their to be kidnapped and making Centrist Che Guevera intervene.

Yeah isn’t it strange how Rean and his crew is all about not picking a side and not intervening but all they do since the start of the game is infiltrate military bases, do sabotage and other stuff to mess with the noble alliance which just helps the imperial army anyway.
You can even just run around Imperial Army camps no worry, they’re not antagonistic to Rean’s group, heck your party literally has 2 spies working for the (for now) deformed reformist faction which isn’t even something Rean doesn’t know yet it rarely if ever get brought up during the course of the game. Nothing is here to put into question Rean dumb behavior and position in this war. I just think this is actual insanity, Olivier even gives them the key to a literal warship to just go nuts and do whatever.

There is no nuanced political framing here where one camp is so obviously evil that the game fails so hard to find situations to make you feel that what they do is justified and not every noble is evil…

Which leads me to talk about…

The Celdic Incident

So in the middle of the Act 2 Fetch Quest grind, one of the towns, Celdic, gets destroyed by Jusis’s father, a tragic event that claimed the lives of…

check notes

1 random NPC and a couple of non-important, non-habitable buildings… ?

Well whatever, I can’t believe my man Otto freaking died, they must pay for this ! Quick ! Rean ! Activate your sperging power to find a way to psy-op yourself into intervening yet again without you explicitly making the conscious choice to do it… oh wait ! Rufus the 2nd in command of the army and Jusis’s brother made a call, they need to stop Jusis father because he only did this for himself, not for the noble alliance cause, we don’t actually kill people in the noble alliance… at least not on screen !

Well huh… ok then time to fuck him up !

During that entire time, we get to see noble citizens having nothing but contempt for the low-lives of Celdic because they deserved him and also how dare they put Jusis dad in prison ! He was a good governor ! A true noble at heart (a literal war criminal).

So… are we going to have a scene where Rean reconsider his point of view and realize the system is fucked and promise himself to find ways to change it by casting his outdated system of beliefs and make real progress ?

Well no… but maybe closer to his political alignment he would try to reconcile the two sides or find a compromise, well he can’t do that either because centrists never provide solutions, they just observe, say “well that sucks” and move to the next McGuffin dungeon.

This is the closest CS2 has gotten to portray any consequences of this conflict and yet it still amounts to a footnote at best before moving on to the next section of the game.

For a game that take such obvious cues from FFVI in terms of structure and story setting (with the world being fucked over and our heroes having to gather their forces), they never quite understood what made that part of FFVI so memorable and good to begin with...

In FFVI, the world is dead, it’s destroyed, you start the second half in control of Celes stuck on an island with Cid, an old dude and the closest thing Celes has to a family, you go outside your tent and the world is dead, the music is harrowing with a feint empty wind being heard on the overworld even the random monsters you fight die on their own as even they can’t support the corrosion brought forth by Kefka during his rise to power. You're tasked to go get some food for Cid, something you can actually succeed at but the context of the situation will likely make you lose Cid…

Celes, overtaken by all of her bottled up feelings and anxieties and loosing all hopes commits freaking suicide in a freaking 90’s Super Nintendo game, you miraculously survived and back on the continent by that point the game tells you nothing more and your free to see what remains of the rest of civilization and it’s not pretty, eventually, you get back with Edgar and then Setzer the only 2 other mandatory party member to finish the game and with hopes of defeating Kefka by gathering all your forces the most beautiful Airship theme plays out as you go on a quest to “Search for your friends” !

Everything you can do next aside from taking on the Kefka tower is completely optional but highly recommended if you want the best ending and of course because taking on the Tower with 3 under-leveled character is suicide meaning that all the thing you do in this game is to prepare yourself to defeat Kefka, no matter how innocuous the activity may be. When you meet your party members back it’s not just a sappy reunion, it’s more complex, most of the characters are still carrying over the traumas of the days the world wasn’t completely fuck and they now need to find a new place in this new fucked up reality while dealing with the remnants of the demons of their past and grow as persons all of this leading up to your confrontation with Kefka.



Heck, nothing state in the game that taking on Kefka will magically heal the planet, Kefka already won, it would take years for civilization to rebuild itself, you’re just taking one burden off of the people on Earth, it’s an ending that is equally as bittersweet as it is hopeful GOD I LOVE FFVI SO FUCKING MUCH !

NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES ITS STRUCTURE AND GAMEPLAY LOOP IN COMPLEMENT OF THE STORY ! NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES THE UNIQUE TOOL OF THE MEDIUM OF VIDEO GAME TO TELL A POIGNANT STORY THROUGH A COMBINATION OF MUSIC, DIRECTION, GRAPHICS, MECHANICS TO MAKE YOU FEEL SHIT FOR THE CHARACTERS AND THE FATE OF THE FUCKING WORLD ! NO TIME WAS WASTE HERE, EVERYTHING FUCKING MATTER AND THE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY DO STUFF TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER AND MOST OF IT IS TECHNICALLY OPTIONAL SHIT BUT WHO CARES YOU WANT TO DO EVERYTHING AND YOU’LL MISS OUT ON STUFF BUT THAT’S OKAY IT’LL MAKE YOUR NEXT PLAYTHROUGH MORE INTERESTING AAAAAAAAAAAH

SEE FALCOM ? THAT’S WHAT YOUR STUPID VIDEO GAME LACK ! IT LACKS AMBITION, IT LACKS FINESSE, IT LACKS ALL OF THAT SHIT YOU STUPID MONGREL HOW DARE YOU EVEN TRY TO EVEN ATTEMPT AND PRETEND TO COPY FF VI WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN REACH 1/100th OF ITS BRILLIANCE WITH QUINTUPLE THE RUN TIME AND A BIGGER SCRIPT THAN IT HUH ???

Hey you wanna know what all that stupid fucking fetchquesting leads toward the reconquering of Trista, you know the hub-town from the first game ? That’s an exciting moment the entire game has built toward I wonder how it i-

ITS ASS

The army just… leaves for no reason and task the hostages (?????) to run the school and keep it under control, so Rean and friends take on this occasion to go there and low and behold, the noble hostages just confront Rean.

“But this is pointless ?”

“Yeah we know, but we still need to fight because pride of the nobles or some shit”

So you do a boss fight that had literally zero reason for happening and then everyone nods, the hostages were actually fine the whole time and it was just a playful fisticuff for the older students and… Trista is taken back… ending act 2 on a very anticlimactic note…

Hope you enjoyed the 35 or so hours you wasted on Act 2 that lead to this…

The game… really doesn’t give a fuck… it’s insane, there was zero effort put into the actual story.

Yeah sure, you still have Falcom sense of details in NPC dialogues and books but… not the main fucking story, it’s just… wild as shit to me I can’t even begin to process how much this game doesn’t give a fuck and constantly cucks you from experiencing a little catharsis.
It just doesn’t care, even the neat idea of making this game set during the same time as Azure is just an after-thought and the conclusion to that leads almost fucking nowhere and impacts the story very little.

This nonchalance not only translate during the story but even boss-fight, most boss-fight you win in this game by the skin of your teeth (that is a joke, the game is Press Laura to win what did you expect), your characters are on their knees, the boss is going “mmph, that’s all you got ?” then you get your glory stolen by the adult cast which are all way cooler and way stronger than you, you’ve been doing all the heavy lifting but at the end of the day, you guys are just a bunch of students heh ?

I get that this is part of the series to make you understand that the MC will never be the strongest dude around and there’s so many people equally as strong if not more but it wasn’t so in your fucking face before and to lead to something so anticlimatic…

Heck the ending of the game ends on a barely moving death scene (aaaw) followed by the big revelation ! OSBORNE IS BACK AHAHAHA…

Wait a minute…

But we already know that from Azure ?

Wait a minute…

The game just reveals shit to us that we already knew ?

So all of this was for nothing ????

Anyway, Osborne comes tells Rean that he is his real father and then look at Ourogoonos and tell them to fuck off while stealing their plan like a chad because he planned this entire war on himself this entire time to turn Rean into a national icon for his newly establish fascist ethnostate.

Rean of course… agrees to participate in doing warcrimes for the reformist because… well huh… gotta help daddy I guess ???

Look fuck this game

And like a bad joke, it even keeps going after the credit because you thought the final chapter was the final chapter ? Well no you dumb fuck, there’s 2 MORE EPILOGUE CHAPTER

One is … legitimately the only good part of the game because you get to play as Lloyd and Rixia ! OH MAN I MISS PLAYING AS ACTUAL PEOPLE IN THIS GAME THANK GOD ! AND YOU EVEN GET THE CHANCE TO KICK REAN’S ASS WITH LLOYD FUCKING BANNING 10/10 GAME ON FUCKING GOD !!!!

Followed by several hours of the worst fucking final dungeon you’ve ever played through.
Yeah in the last chapter of the game, you go through a randomly generated multi-floor dungeon where you fight recycled bosses from the main game AND a swap color of the final boss of the first game who literally tells you that doing this dungeon… was actually pointless, he literally says it verbatum, I’m not making this up ! Gotta love Falcom’s brand of cheeky humour ahahaha…

I kneel Kondo, I really am kneeling hard, one last final goodbye to the cast and …

OH NO FUCK OFF KONDO ! WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO PLAY ON NG+ TO GET IMPORTANT LORE FOR THE NEXT ENTRY WHAT THE FUCK MAN WHAT THE ACTUAL SHIT I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD THIS GAME SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS

RAAAAAAAAAAAGH THIS GAME SUCKS

So you’re probably wondering why I’m ranking this slightly higher than CS1 well…

For 2 reasons :

Witnessing a story failing at everything it sets out to do in marvelous over the top fashion is somewhat entertaining in its own twisted kind of way
As mentioned earlier, I like what this game does structurally compared to the rest of the franchise (any game where you get to fuck around in an airship and built up an home base by recruiting people has a few more points in my book) and even the dungeon design has seen a significant improvement that I hope to see come to fruition in the rest of the series so there’s that.

CS1 was literally just “white noise : the video game”, homework to do to experience true gaming in the sequel and I must admit that at least CS2 didn’t commit the sinful crime of making me bored to death, there’s definitely a good game buried under all of this trashy nonsense…

But you won’t find it here…

Which leaves me to my conclusion…

Why would you play this ? Yeah the obvious answer is to experience the next chapter in the epic Trails saga, especially if you’re a fan or a masochist like me looking to satiate my curiosity but in general… Why ?

The few good things that CS2 does and heck even what it’s trying to do story wise are things you have likely seen done better in other titles some of which I’d consider true work of art worthy of your attention. Trails is being championed left and right as this life-changing franchise but all I get almost everytime are some average at best game with good ideas and good feelings behind them… But CS1 and CS2 only exacerbated the problem with this franchise, I actually now regret to have been so harsh towards Azure or SC because man, at least they tried, Cold Steel is just chasing trend, taking ideas and throwing them at a wall to see what sticks and if they could bait out the fishies with some good old waifu war.

But if it was only the anime bullshit, it’s also a mediocre attempt at political commentary ? I guess ? Even ideologically speaking, this game is spineless to the point of no return and is constantly trying to sound and look smarter than it actually looks but doesn’t have the balls or the shoulders to carry the boats and the logs ! The writing team behind this game must’ve felt so fucking proud for this last plotwist !

“Hey guess what it’s actually about how centrism is bad because it helped the bad guy !” and it could’ve been almost clever except it’s not and even after that revelation, Rean continues to be a good puppy dog with no spine, no thoughts, no choice no freaking nothing god I hate that character.

So yeah gameplay aside which sucks anyway, there’s the structure and yeah, it’s fun, I must admit I wasn’t completely bored playing this. But… is it really enough ?

If I wanted to play a poor’s man Persona, I’d play Persona
If I wanted to play a game with heavy political writing and a complex nuanced geopolitical setting, I’d play any Matsuno game
If I wanted a game about going around the world to gather people and grew my forces by doing tons of side-content, I’d play FFVI
If I wanted both of the previous statements, I’d play Suikoden which also has the benefit to be like Trails with each entry building off of the previous game in cool ways like .hack did too and those games are also damn good.
Heck I’d even throw Chained Echoes a modern indie RPG that did all of what I just said aside from Persona way better than what CS2 did

Heck if I wanted to play a series with a rich lore to chew on and a solid continuity with charming characters and humors, creative gameplay systems and some surprisingly insightful and dare I’d say ballsy attempt at delivering political messages

I’d play fucking Rance, yes… Rance, an actual honest to god porn game with the most reprehensible protagonist and content in existence but which has more heart and soul poured into it than anything I’ve ever played in my life.

I’d rather fully admit to being a degenerate and a Kingdom Hearts fan (which I am… I know… shocking) than playing Cold Steel 1 or 2 !

CS1 and CS2 are just a copout answer to a regular game recommendation, a good person will direct you to the good restaurant but the weirdoe cultist member who only knows the confine of his cult temple since childhood will tell you that you never eat better than at Veggietales.

Heck by the the time it took me between finishing the game last month and writing this shitass review, FFXVI came out and it had many similarities to Cold Steel especially in terms of structure, pacing and quest design (and not in a good way if you ask me) but by god, after playing FFXVI, CS2 barely was thought at the back of my head, it’s like a version of CS2 that actually worked, with an interesting story, a war setting that takes itself seriously, a badass anarchist hero and some seriously kick ass boss fight that is humanity pilled as fuck.

CS2 was a fascinatingly bad experience and I can’t believe I’m too deep enough into this shit to not hop on CS3 and … CS4 (that one seems to smell some exquisite taste of ass that I just can’t wait to experience)

So TL;DR : Play FFXVI, it’s on PS5 right now and it’s fucking awesome and Clive uses Rean’s asshole as an onahole anytime of the day

Trails of Cold Steel II is a direct sequel to the original Cold Steel game and as usual with these Trails games reviews, talking about the story without spoiling elements from the first game is nigh on impossible so if you haven’t played Cold Steel I to the end, the best avoid reading this review for now.

Right with that out of the way, Cold Steel II (CS2) is the second Trails entry originally released for the PlayStation Vita. Its story picks up directly from where CS1 finished and in typical Trails fashion, this game heavily reuses assets and elements from the first game and builds on top of that with a few things to keep the game interesting and change things up a little.
The regular battle system now has the Overdrive mechanic, similar to the burst mechanic from Azure where once you build up a gauge, you can unleash a series of attacks without response. In CS2 it also guarantees unbalancing the enemy and allowing a follow up attack to happen as well as eventually giving you two Overdrive gauges to fill.
For those who finished CS1 you’ll know about a special kind of battle introduced right at the end of that game and here in CS2 we get to experience a lot more of them! Divine Knight battles sees Rean piloting a giant mech and clashing with other giant mechs in battles that are pretty simple in nature but something I loved because I am weak for giant mechs. Divine Knight battles basically boil down to figuring which part of your opponent to hit depending on what stance they’re taking. You can target the head, body, arms and if you pick the right part you can unbalance the enemy and hit a follow up attack but if you choose wrong you can end up missing and being hit with a counterattack. Eventually you’ll gain access to having a character assist you by using Arts and powering up your mech, Valimar, with his own unique Orbments but ultimately as I said, the battles are pretty simple and basic in nature.

Other new aspects include new towns like Rean’s hometown Ymir (a place where an event took place during the first game but only covered in a Drama CD and referred to multiple times in this game), plenty of new and well crafted dungeons to explore, and the best thing of all - A SNOWBOARDING MINIGAME! No joke, I beat every course for it because it’s probably one of my favourite minigames in an RPG ever. Aside from that, this game is more about continuing the narrative they built from CS1 than doing a bunch of new things.

So story, after C revealed his true identity, killed Chancellor Osborne, and occupied Thors Military Academy by kicking Rean’s ass so bad he had to flee for his life, the tensions in Erebonia have boiled over into civil war breaking out. The Noble Alliance led by Duke Cayenne has teamed up with the Imperial Liberation Front, Ouroboros, and Jaeger group Zephyr in an attempt to wrestle control of Erebonia from the Reformist Faction and in the month that Rean has spent out cold after fleeing Thors, the Noble Alliance have managed to occupy a large portion of eastern Erebonia as well as take the Imperial Royal family hostage.
It’s a very interesting set up to the story and one that sees many of Class VII’s families on opposing sides and leading to our characters having to make tough decisions. Jusis in particular has it tough with his brother being one of the key figures in the Noble Alliance and his father pushing his luck in trying to become the leader of the group.
As for Class VII themselves, they’ve ended up split up after having to flee Thors and the first portion of the game is centred around regrouping with Rean’s classmates. This is where the very long build up of the first game started to pay some dividends for me as I found a lot of the reunions to be very touching because of how much time I had spent with Class VII. Seeing Rean bear hug Machias put tears in my eyes and Alisa pouring her heart out to Rean was such an emotional moment. It’s also nice seeing Class VII out of their school uniforms and in unique clothing, being free to show off their own styles and personalities a bit more.
Aside from gathering all of Class VII, Act 1 of the game shows off a few clashes between the two armies at places like Garrelia Fortress (spotting a lovely new destroyed look after Crossbell annihilated it) and the Nord Highlands, and Ymir village gets attacked by some Jaegers. We also get to have some clashes with Ouroboros and the Noble Alliance as the game spends time introducing a lot of new characters like Ouroboros Enforcer McBurn who exudes a massive amount of power and Zephyr’s Xeno and Leonidas who are part of the Jaeger group that Fie was once a part of.
After the whole of Class VII have reunited we get an Intermission chapter which serves to let us find out a little more about the many people working with the Noble Alliance as well as get Rean to a point where he can control his unique power the game lovingly dubs “ogre power”. We caught a glimpse of it in the first game but it’s more prominent here. Ogre power basically changes Rean’s appearance to have white hair and red eyes and essentially it gives him a few turns of having boosted stats in battle.
Act 2 of the game focuses more on gathering up all the other students from Thors Military Academy and liberating places like Celdic and Roer from the Noble Alliance. These missions were my favourite part of the game as it was great seeing characters either rescuing their families from being held captive or standing up to their families for the atrocities they’ve been causing. It’s not perfect, the clashes with V and S sum up the Imperial Liberation Front as the biggest set of underwhelming villains I’ve seen so far (C is the only interesting about that group for me) but ultimately the freedom introduced from being able to go anywhere in the east of the country and liberation missions made this portion of the game a lot fun for me. I also really liked that the game allows you to walk from one town to another if you want to. You could see that the world was designed to be connected in CS1 but the field trip limitations meant the world felt disjointed while in CS2 as you progress further and further, the limitations on where you can travel are loosened and it really starts to make Erebonia feel a bit more like Crossbell and Liberl when you can walk (or use the motorcycle introduced as a transport option in this game) from place to place.
It ends on a high note with a great set of battles between Rean and C as the two fight for their ideals and we have to deal with Duke Cayenne’s mischief as he ends up feeling a little bit left out because he’s another kinda meh and backgroundy villain. The revelations and twists in the finale are once again fantastic and memorable for the most part (though I’m still struggling to take the revelation of Rean’s biological father seriously right now) and it quickly rearranges the whole civil war and the whole point of it in one fell swoop.
On top of that there’s a pretty meaty post game section that is a delightful treat for long time fans that have been playing the games in release order. The Epilogue is a nice send off for Class VII as they go their separate ways but that portion of the game drags on a bit longer than it needed (I’m not sure why they felt the need for a bunch of quests and another dungeon). By the end I had a few moments where tears had filled my eyes and when games can do that to you, they are a bit special. I loved my time with Class VII and I will miss seeing them all together as a group.

So the broad strokes of CS2s story on the surface is pretty solid and one I largely enjoyed but once you dig a little deeper there’s a lot you can pick apart here so this section is going have a lot of complaints about things that do kind of matter but at the same time didn’t stop me from loving the game.
CS2 is about a civil war but for the most part it feels kinda of…. Like a background thing? In the east of Erebonia the Noble Alliance have so much already under control that aside from a few skirmishes, there’s little to actually indicate a war is happening. One burning down of a town results in a grand total of 1 fatality and ultimately does little to sell the fact a war is happening. The Noble Alliance end up letting Class VII liberate so much of the territory they’ve claimed with no retaliation that it’s unbelievable until the bigger picture comes into view at the end. The war is apparently much more violent in the west of Erebonia and a few of the more powerful characters are off fighting over there but like CS1 that is something more interesting happening somewhere else that we don’t get to see. It’s just incredible how out of the way the game goes to limit the fact a war is happening.
Cast bloat. CS2 like CS1 has a cast of important characters to the point it doesn’t know what to do with them. Bardias and Le Guin are introduced in Act 1, leave a strong impression on Class VII and then don’t show up again until near the end of the game by which point you’re like who are these two again? Cedric, an Imperial Prince is almost completely forgotten about by the cast and even his own sister Alfin, as no one seems to care that he potentially needs to be rescued all the while Duke Cayenne is getting him ready for his schemes. Laura fades so much into the background in this game that she’s basically a talking sword. It’s just too many characters for the game to deal with.
Olivert, someone who is a very important character to Erebonia and plays a large part in the Liberl arc, is so underutilised here to the point he barely shows up in the game at all which is shocking to me. He spends most of his time fighting in the west off screen and has a couple of dramatic appearances but in a game with 17+ playable characters, HOW IS HE NOT ONE?
Class VII are supposed to be a third faction in this war but that only works if both the Noble Alliance and the Reformist Group are factions that need to be opposed, instead the Noble Alliance are the aggressor force in this war and as such Class VII is almost always working alongside the army to stop them that the whole third faction thing holds so little weight. We’re working alongside characters like Claire who has direct ties to Osborne while claiming to be neutral and having no one from the Noble Alliance side helping us outside of Rufus using us to help him deal with out of control members with the Noble Alliance.
For all the build up and importance given to the liberation of Trista and Thors Military Academy it is probably the most underwhelming moment in the game.
I understand Crow being a classmate and friend to Class VII but there's nobody wanting to hold him to account for his terrorist actions while Rean makes a big deal about trying to save Vulcan and Scarlet to make them atone for what they've done.
The story does well with what it explores and the cast of characters are fun enough to help carry it through the cracks that appear throughout. Yes, I have a lot of issues with how certain aspects were neglected but ultimately it didn’t detract from the fun I was having with the game.

On the soundtrack front this is largely the same OST from CS1 returning with a handful of new battle themes and a new opening song. The vocalised ending song was very powerful and was subtitled when it played to help drive home the emotions it was portraying.

So all in all, despite a few missteps with its story here and there, Trails of Cold Steel II was a step back up in quality after Cold Steel I for me. It manages to keep its narrative exciting and engaging throughout as well as throw in some really nice surprises for the long term fans. It manages to carry off its emotional moments well and use the foundation that Cold Steel I left for it to push most of its characters in interesting directions and leave an impact on the player.

Excellent game but feels like a stop gap in the middle of the series.

If you haven't played the first game in this series ( The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel ) then it is highly recommended you do so as this game carries straight on from the end of the first game.

I don't want to say too much about the story as that would spoil things but needless to say we once again follow protagonist Rean Schwarzer and his classmates from Thors Military Academy in class VII as they struggle to find their place in a country that's ever changing. The story, cast and writing are what made the first game so great for me and it feels just as strong here with plenty of opportunities to bond with your classmates as well as find out more about the many other characters and politics of the country of Erebonia. The dialogue has many funny moments, some sad as well as the odd corny line but overall it works really well.

The gameplay is largely the same as the first game with some tweaks. It's a turn based role playing game so battles are fought with characters, enemies and monsters taking actions in turn based on their speed. You can use up to four characters at a time in battle though they can be swapped out for other members on their turn with a penalty of a delay till the new characters next turn. Each character has access to various options from basic attacks, using items and fleeing to more interesting such as casting various attack, healing and support spells called arts, as well as special attacks unique to each character called crafts (or S-crafts for the super powerful versions). The battle system is fun with a lot of customization options in the types of spells each player has by equipping various gems called quartz as well as various armor and equipment has a lot of effects on how well your team will do. I found normal to be a little too easy if you stack your characters right but there are harder difficulties to play through if you want a challenge. Either way the combat system is pretty flashy and the crafts are especially awesome at times.

Visually while the character art is superb the games graphics are sadly lacking this being a cross PS3/Vita game. It feels a bit like a PlayStation 2 game in places with pretty basic textures and objects. The character and enemy models are however pretty detailed and the game runs very smoothly (I played the PS3 version). They do the job though they aren't exciting, fortunately the music and voice acting more than make up for it on the sound front. The music is simply wonderful, many of the songs were in the first game but there are a lot of new tracks too. I simply love the soundtrack. The English voice cast return to reprise their respective roles and do an all round great job. I really love the casting for each character, not just class VII but all the vocalized characters are excellent.

So a lot of praise for the game then. It isn't however, perfect. It doesn't feel like a sequel so much as a 1.5. While there are new places to explore through the game, most of it is set in exactly the same towns and dungeon areas from the first game which is a real let down. I can see why they did it in relation to a lot of the story but it just feels too much of a retread. There is also an issue though it's minor of referencing a drama CD of an un-played event from Cold Steel 1 and also a slightly big reference to Trails of AO and Sero which at the time I played this hadn't been released outside of Japan (they still haven't though an unofficial English patch was made for PC versions and the games are coming now in the next couple of years). Both may leave the player with a huh? briefly but don't get in the way of the story or plot very much but should be noted.

In conclusion if you liked Cold Steel 1, I strongly suspect you will like II. I spent 150 hours playing through it and it's well written, sounds great and is fun to play. It may retread some old ground but it's still extremely fun.

Recommended.

+ Great characters.
+ Interesting story.
+ Fun battle system.
+ Excellent music and voice acting.

- Too many areas are revisited from Trails of Cold Steel 1, feels padded pretty heavily.

Kickass game with the exception of Act II beinf a little awkward but this doesn’t stop this game from being great still. Aside from that, this game is awesome. It shines the brightest during the finale and epilogue chapter which leads into Cold Steel 3 where you could say the quality increases tenfold but I'm talking about Cold Steel 2 here.

Cold Steel 2 is one of the games which have aged better as I have played through the series and building upon the past games. The reveal in the finale was one of the greatest plot drops, including how much work was put into this story and how it is executed perfectly later on. The epilogue as well from how much it builds upon Reans character and the hype for the future.

Finale: "Forward, Relentlessly"
Divertissement: "The Occupation"
Epilogue: "Winter's End"
The best stretch of chapters since Azure and this is where Cold Steel really picks up. These last 3 chapters does so much for the story it's insane.

“Okay, we’ve talked long enough. Let’s go. I won’t let anyone interfere! This is going to be our final battle! “

“That’s exactly how I want it to be! We’ll fight until we can fight no more… until our strength runs dry and our SOULS BURN OUT! “

DIFFICULTY

⬛ TOO EASY, GARBAGE
✅ SOULLESS
⬛ SOUL

Trails of Cold Steel II…. where to start.. Well I think the game is just Bad. Literally it’s beyond saving me, but since Trails fans won’t probably like that, let’s start with the development of Cold Steel II and why the game was beyond saving from the beginning.

We are back in back 2013 and Cold Steel I was in development, stuff wasn’t going well, Falcom struggling with working on PS3 and PS vita hardware at the same time, Cold Steel clearly wouldn’t be finish for September, so what they can do? Well they can completely remove the final chapter of it and transform it as a whole game later. So Cold Steel 1 release, the game have many problems on launch etc, but non-relevant for the review. Then you arrive at the moment that would be the climax pre final chapter like in Ao and the… the game end here ? So this is where Cold Steel II start, a final chapter in Ao no Kiseki scale transformed into a whole game, what could have go wrong…. Everything.

Between the game trying to feel for stuff that clearly need more character developments before, whole character development lock behind bonding events, stuff that was cut from CS1 because of the same reasons as cold steel becoming relevant to the story and just confuse people who didn’t read the material outside of the games, strange love interest stuff that shouldn’t happen in a series with a supposed one canon (Ao have the same problem, I’m not Crossbell is perfect mode dw) a broken battle system clearly not intended to have characters at this level at the end etc.

Even without talking about the systems and development, I think too the main story have so many flaws everywhere, like it’s literally impossible feel anything about the noble alliance because of how much they were showed as cartoon villains, why I should care for that dude death ? Because they gave us a backstory about Osborne being bad guy toward him like 2-3 hours before ? nah this won’t make me feel anything toward him or anyone else in the noble alliance. Timeline being completely broken and don’t make any sense at some points because of the calendar system and the game happening at the same moment as Ao, like Duvalie going constantly between Erebonia and Crossbell like this ??? Oh yeah about the villains, the game turn way too much around a structured repeated system that all the villains are always in mode “I’m holding back lol” because apparently each act part in act 1 needed a “ouroboros” members at the end with the same schema. I think too the game should have end at the finale and the divertissement probably being the intro of CS3 and plan more some stuff to have avoid shit like black record in NG+ or the whole last section with an ass dungeon with the most useless boss in the whole series.


I could probably keep going on I guess, but I already expect that review to be memed on by some big cold steel defenders and probably use it as a reason to on Crossbell because a of Crossbell fan attacked some cold steel game, don’t worry I won’t review CS4, I’m not using my energy for that game lol.

~ DIFFICULTY ~

🔲 My grandma could play it
🔲 Easy
🔲 Normal
🔲 Hard
☑️ Dark Souls

~ GRAPHICS ~

☑️ MS Paint
🔲 Bad
🔲 Meh
🔲 Graphics dont matter in this game
🔲 Good
🔲 Beautiful
🔲 Masterpiece

~ MUSIC ~

🔲 Bad
🔲 Not special
☑️ Good
🔲 Beautiful

~ STORY ~

🔲 This game has no story
🔲 It's there for the people who want it
🔲 Well written
☑️ EPIC STORY!!
🔲 You choose your fate

~ PRICE ~

🔲 Free
🔲 Underpriced
🔲 Perfect Price
☑️ Could be cheaper
🔲 Overpriced
🔲 Complete waste of money

~ REQUIREMENTS ~

🔲 You can run it on a microwave
🔲Average
🔲 High end
☑️ NiSA computer, haha..

~ LENGTH ~

🔲 Very Short (0 - 3 hours)
🔲 Short (3 - 15 hours)
🔲 Average (15-50 hours)
🔲Long (50-90 hours)
☑️Umineko⁉(90-110 hours)
🔲 No ending

~ FUN ~

🔲 I'd rather watch paint dry
🔲 Hard to enjoy
🔲 Repetitive
🔲Actually pretty amusing
☑️ Ride of your life

~ REPLAYABILITY~

🔲 It's a one-time experience
🔲 Only for achievements
☑️ If you wait a few months/years
🔲 Definitely
🔲 Infinitely replayable

~ WORTH BUYING ~

🔲 No
☑️ Wait for sale
☑️ Yes