Kuro no Kiseki 1 is absolutely stunning and plays like butter. I am by no means an expert on turn-based JRPGs, but I've played a few, and oh my God, this has the best gameplay of them all for me. Trails gameplay has always amazed me and been my favourite, but this sets a whole new bar. They revamped the combat system and now allow you to move across the map with just your joystick rather than it being a separate move like before, making the gameplay and strategising even more interesting, especially in regards to AoE arts. But also, before you even get into your encounter with an enemy, you can engage in action combat to either have an advantage when you get into combat, or to go through groups of enemies and level faster if you feel the need to. Trails games aren't grindy in general, but if you choose to grind, it'll not feel like one at all in this game.

The technical impressiveness goes beyond combat gameplay. Persona 3 Reload, a JRPG by a successful company released 3 years after this game, still does the thing where if you enter a building on the street, you get teleported into like a separate level, and also the encounter system where you get teleported from the dungeon into a separate stage and then get back out once you're done. Not in Kuro. You enter buildings like it's nothing, and go in and out of encounters in the exact same room you were in, like it's no big deal. Which means that if you get into one in a narrow hallway, you will have less space to evade AoE attacks. It's amazing.

The music is very inconsistent in this one. Some of the stuff is downright amazing (as expected of a Trails game), like the boss themes or the jazzy city music, but otherwise you get letdowns like one of the normal battle themes that I found uninspired by Trails standards. And the OP is really fire and gorgeous.

Van is an amazing protagonist. Likable, a grown 24-year-old and in a unique line of work that sets him apart from other Trails and many JRPG protagonists, his "solutions" agency that deals not in black or white, but in gray, makes for some interesting stories and quests. His journey is really cool too, but that's impossible to discuss without spoilers, so I won't.

Unfortunately, despite initially seeming like the automatic best Trails, it has some issues I can't look past. The biggest problem is the pacing in the middle of the game, mostly in the penultimate chapter and the first half of the final chapter. There is so much repetition and padding, even by Trails standards. I was shocked after this wasn't a problem in Reverie and early Kuro 1. I think I finally started to feel Trails burnout because of this. Additionally, the cast is compelling, but sometimes the chemistry feels forced. Lastly, I won't hold it against the game for this, but it feels a little... too complete for its own good, unlike other first parts of Trails duologies. I played a bit of the beginning of Kuro 2 and it honestly feels like an unnecessary follow-up. Outside of those issues I can see why this is "a return to form" as a new arc for many, though I did like Cold Steel myself.

Ultimately, a seriously good game, this series continues to amaze.

i don't think i've ever experienced a game where, even after almost 700 hours of playtime, i keep discovering new things. it's insane, and the scale and quality of just about everything blows my mind. i keep making new characters just to try things i haven't before. the sheer scale and quality of this game can't be overstated, even if some things do admittedly start to fall off a little bit towards the end.
also, this is the only game to feature wyll ravengard, the love of my life. so five stars for wyll.

It is my first entry in granblue fantasy series and it was amazing, I did the main story, many side quests, all fate episodes, all documents, some challenges but I didn't do everything in the endgame content,٫ the performance of the game on PC is great, the graphics and the art style is amazing , the special effects are beautiful and the characters design are great, the music was top notch, I played it in the japanese voice acting and it was really great except the main character,
The main story is simple not deep not new but good it was fun with epic moments and the main Boss fights were epic , the enimes have variety, the main story was sadly short, the lore was amazing and the world building all made me interesting to play the other enteries , the dialogues and characters are very fun , I wish that I could switch characters in fight not before or after a fight in the menu, I did play it solo , I will try to play it co op another time, the gameplay was so much fun, the characters variety and all have their own ways to play,,
The cinematics were epic.
9.2/10

It's not as good as Torna, but then again what is?

A really nice DLC overall. I LOVE how they integrated exploration into character building and am amazed Xenoblade has never tried that before. You get a decent amount of world to explore, only one town but I got attached to all its NPCs, and all the best parts of the main game's battle system with some improvements and some of the fat trimmed out.

Story wise, it's again, not as good as Torna, but it still did a decent job of answering lingering questions in the main game and feeling self-contained. Rex and Shulk were handled well, and I felt Xenoblade 1 and 2 nostalgia was evenly-represented while not overwhelming the stand-alone narrative.

The main negatives are Shulk kinda sucks as a party member, he tried to be Dunban 2.0 but has limited aggro-drawing Arts, which is even worse when Rex is such an aggro-hogging death machine, along with a few slight hiccups narratively that I won't mention due to spoilers. It also didn't make me totally re-evaluate any main game characters like Torna did for my view of Mythra.

Overall, very worth buying if you like XB3, and some of Nintendo's best DLC. But again, it's no Torna.

Going into this game after waiting so long for a semi-official localization, I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the hype.

My fears were wrong.

Trails to Azure is easily one of the best games in the series, and is one of my favourite stories in any JRPG. After playing the Cold Steel arc, it's insane to see a story this massive NOT end up split into multiple games. The pacing is great for the most part, every chapter is important, moves well enough and has a great ending. My one complaint is the pacing is a little TOO FAST starting mid-Chapter 4.

This is all helped by a PHENOMENAL localization by the Geofront team. The dialogue writing is the peak of the genre and it brings the characters and setting to life in a way earlier fan translations failed to.

If I have any issues with the story, it's the way it uses certain characters. The Steel Maiden especially. Despite being one of the hardest and most dramatic fights in the game, she and her dungeon are almost irrelevant to Crossbell's plot: you could remove it without impacting much. I wish they'd saved her fight for Cold Steel, an arc where she's FAR more important.
Similarly, the villain who ended up a pawn in the grand scheme of things (the one you fight in a mech, to be as vague as possible) was far more interesting than the actual mastermind (the alchemist), and I wish their roles had been swapped.

The gameplay is mostly the same as Zero, with the addition of the Master Quartz system, which became a mainstay later. Some aspects are still being refined here, especially the "Bell" Quartz being stupidly broken (their nerfed forms in Cold Steel are still excellent, that should tell you something). I think the overall balanced suffered from Zero though. There, physical attacks and Arts were fairly even, while in Azure, it's Arts all the way past the midgame. It's also very easy to trivialize later bosses with "evasion tank" builds. Poor Randy and Noel drop off a ton later on.

Speaking of, my biggest gameplay gripe is the way the party system works in the final chapter. Once the party expands to 8, you're only allowed 6 at one time, the remaining two have to be left back at base and backtracked to whenever you want to swap them in. The issue is the "core four" SSS are always required, so the remaining 4 compete for only two slots... and one of these four is Wazy, who is so brokenly good you don't want to leave him behind, while another is very strong and a popular "waifu" among the fanbase. This leaves Noel and the final member in the dust, which sucks because both have good story moments.

Overall this is one of the best Trails games, and a great candidate for THE best, and I'm so glad I could finally play it.