I've genuinely never been more bored by a Trails game in my life. The only reason I'm giving this more than a rating of 0.5 is because I'm told CS4 is worse.

The story was the stupidest thing I've seen, the dungeons were incredibly mindless to explore, I was unengaged for like 70% of the game.

This was utter boredom for that 70% of the game, and somehow makes me like CS2 more, which is surprising since I THOUGHT I hated CS2 when I finished it, but I'm now wishing for a pre-CS3 world.

I will praise this game's political writing, character writing and battle system though. Probably the best battle system in any Cold Steel game, some of the enemy design kinda stinks but learning to break this system is pretty satisfying.

This game engaged me whenever anything political was going on. I think Falcom knows how to create a world, their worldbuilding is still on point. Any time any political figurehead was onscreen I was incredibly engaged with what was going on.

The characters were good. I like that the main cast was fairly small, in comparison to CS1 and CS2. It gave them more time to focus in on each of them, and I really quite like how they portrayed an older, more experienced Rean.

I can't praise this game any more than that though, ANYTHING else I say about this game will be me criticising it. Literally everything else was either boring, bad or just plain stupid.

Worst Trails game so far, and I'm looking forward to taking the piss out of CS4 when I play it.