Reviewing this game after playing Cold Steel 4 has given me more appreciation for the ideas in this game that weren't terrible (few and far between). I found next to nothing interesting about this game. Huge chunks of it feel like complete filler, with most of the characters having the soul sucked out of them. It's also truly impressive that this game managed to retroactively make Crossbell worse through a series of very simple but very stupid decisions. Many of these problems would carry over into the subsequent games, and at times are much more glaring than they are in this game, but this was the first Trails game that was a complete disappointment for me and I've never really gotten over that.