Alright so i wanna preface by saying cold steel 1 and 2 were my first games in the series. This is probably the biggest factor as to why at the time, and ever still now I cant dunk on this game as much as is probably deserves. Cold steel 1 and 2 is written with new fans in mind, but they were also set up as games that would take place concurrently with zero and azure and thus make the phantasmal blaze plan make sense and maybe even at the very lest set up what will happen with everyone after the end of the civil war. I think what they were trying to set up here which would later become the rivalries would be a lot cooler and make a lot more sense if something happened that at least explained what happened in this game, if we were told by vita that she was trying to have a rivalry without the ebon knight getting involved or that osborne stealing the phantasmal blaze plan just meant he was gonna initiate the rivalries himself if we were just told this it would have made this eons more tolerable, but it isnt and we arent told anything really. When I first beat this game I was talking with a friend of mine about how I can't tell if this game is fucking amazing or dogwater trash and even now I still am like damn. The whole thing with rean and olivert being written to find a "third path" which just ends up with them siding with the imperials most of the time anyways and btw if youve played azure all of this shit is long winded and pointless since you already know osborne is actually alive and he wins, and you probably already guessed that we wins by "baiting the noble alliance and its backers (ouroboros who is using the noble alliance for their own whims)" so it can get tiring but where this game shines is when the finale ends and the intermission and epilogue hit. It was so fucking cool to me that this game ends with a "yay the country is back to normal" but rean and all of class 7 lost especially rean just getting mentally fucking suplexed after all of that fucking "we are a third path that takes neither side" was just so refreshing and i was so interested in where the story was gonna go with everything, poor writing and villains withholding literally any information included. I could write about act 2 being padded and rean rescuing his friends in act 1 and say what everyones said and talk about rean and crows relationship which really was not focused on in cold steel 1 to be warranting this kind of bond but its one of the only parts of cold steel that i think keeps it from blowing itself up. If i had not started the series with cold steel 1 and 2, and if it had not had the constraints of being a game that took place concurrently with an actually well written set of games, than I think I would have dunked on this game so hard but man I loved this game I loved this games soundtrack I loved finale - the epilogue and I thought they had such an excellent setup for the next two games which turns out to not be true but I wouldnt really know that for the next 6 games. man the crow rean burger date, the bonding event with rean and sara after the stupid vulcan thing. It is hard for me to put into words how mixed i feel about this game cause ive kind of just been rambling but you know it sucks but its also the rean lloyd fight and god they cant write this in a unformulaic way but god damn severe blow what a track and you know how cool that you wont know what the rivalries are till act 2 of cold steel 4 but it god would it have helped to know, at least as a player, but you know im endin it here this game to me as a second trails game id give a 4 stars what a fuckin cool arc if it was my seventh trails game 2 stars easy ngl

TL DONT READ: essentially, i love this game but theres a lot of weak points that previous games dont really have that make this experience seem even weaker by comparison. However, if you do not have sky-azure under your belt I think this can be considered a pretty solid game, especially finale-epilogue which I think is the most interesting part of the whole cold steel arc personally