8.5/10


i’m gonna start with the bad first, because there is a lot i need to talk about there. specifically, the combat. hoo fucking boy, the combat in this game is some of the worst i’ve experienced. spoilers for FC/SC as well as a namedrop of an SMT 4A boss that could be considered a spoiler(but only if youre familiar with the game. It doesnt really spoil anything, but if youre extremely cautious the warning is there.

Combat- 3/10

Christ almighty this combat is awful. and before i get into my complaints with it and then get hit with a “git gud” i’ll list off a few things

-i was not underleveled
-i always bought the strongest gear every 2 locations
-i also updated my orbments when i felt they were getting too weak
-and no, i didn’t accidentally play on nightmare i played on normal

if you saw my FC review you’ll know i was not a fan of the beefiness of the latter half of the game’s bosses. how i just cheesed it through the difficulty lower and said fuck it. guess what, though? the beefiness returns, except this time, it is the entire game and by mid game you’ll be fighting enemies stronger than the final boss of FC and sure, while you scale your hp and strength to them, you really don’t? the game confuses strategy/difficulty with more hp. it is not difficult. it is not strategic. it is tedium. like honestly, against a 18,000+ hp enemy(which believe me you’ll be fighting a lot of them) you’re gonna be doing 500- 700 damage each hit, and if you’re lucky with a crit you’ll do 1000. and there are like, 3-4 of these things in each fight. i’m sorry, that’s not good game design. you want me to spend an hour + on each battle needing to hit them 60+ times? it’s just really really bad game design. and it’s not like they have weaknesses, either(or at least not regularly) so you can’t just rearrange your orbments of your party to target one specific weakness, because they don’t have any. if you decide to not use the godsend feature of the difficulty lower every time you die, you’ll be really, really, really fucked. let’s talk about that difficulty lower, for a second, though, because jfc i had to use it every boss fight after 3/4s through the game, and not just once or twice, at least 4 lowers. let me use renne’s tower boss fight as an example, and say, vishnu flynn from SMT 4 apoc.
Renne’s fight:
-it’s a surprise attack and she starts off with an s break that makes your entire party faint stat effect + an instant kill chance, which triggers pretty often. so you can’t have a chance to count your losses, heal and start a counter attack etc because the status effect makes your turns go poof for at least 5 turns. see the problem? oh right, you’ll be dead. where does that leave us? ah right, difficulty lower.

-thought that awful s break was bad enough. well, fuck you! if you somehow survive the s break, there are like 5 drones she has with her that have a gorgon laser attack which petrifies you. so even if renne’s attack doesn’t instakill, an attack after you’re petrified will.

-now, you could exit the fight, and buy items that block those stats for you, but let’s run the math. for a single fight, for 4 party members you’d need to buy 2 different items that cancels status effects, and iirc they are like 2k mira. you don’t earn mira through killing shit, though. you earn it through doing stupid ass fetch quests and other stupid fights that are needlessly tough, aka guild board quests. they don’t even pay out well. so let’s say you spend 2 hours doing 5 guild quests to get you just enough mira for both status effects items to be null. so that was 2 extra hours and 16k mira down the drain to help against stupid status effects, which doesn’t account for healing items or anything else you might need for that fight.
let’s look at the alternative

-chat on discord and let the difficulty lower do the work for you. absolute chad move, i just died over and over unfairly then, just as equally unfair i killed her and her petrify drones in like 5 hits

-that’s not all, though. there’s a second fight against this big ass mech thing that has 40,000 hp(have fun!) as well as renne for a second time. repeat the last step. can you tell how much fun i am having with this gameplay?!

-now let’s look at the vishnu flynn fight from SMT 4 APOC.


-there’s an absolutely killer boss theme. you get a full turn before hand, thinking woohoo let’s steamroll this bitch, then, antichton(heavy almighty damage that usually can instakill at that stage in the game) boom, your entire team is dead. sound familiar?

-theres no pussy settings in this game though, and you know how to abuse press turn and fusion by this point. so you start to experiment. figuring out patterns, figuring out doping(a skill which gives you like 3k extra hp temporarily) gives you a better chance at surviving it, putting on a few luster candies/debilitates, and then figuring out he doesn’t use antichton if you play your cards right and tetrakarn in the first turn. you learn through him kicking your ass in a natural way that rewards repetition, mastering and subsequently abusing press turn and buffs, and figuring out the exact play for each turn, fusing strong enough demons, etc. what do you ;earn in renne’s fight? Tedium, and needless beefiness, if played legit. Boredom and feeling like a cheater if you play like i did.

-vishnu flynn took me a week to beat. hell, i even made a personal strategy guide for me on how to beat him step by step. it still took hours of extra work on fusing demons and mastering his patterns, but the difference was it was challenging and strategic , it wasn’t tedious or downright impossible otherwise. you even get to continue to use those demons you fused afterwards to overpower the basic encounters the next few areas. then, with renne all the extra shit goes down the drain.

this is most bosses in the back half of the game just tedium and beefiness confused for difficulty. its like the equivalent of fps bosses on higher difficulties being bullet sponges. perfect example:the final boss having 99999 HP.

it is not good game design to normalize 60k + hp encounters when you deal less than 1k damage normally.

the dungeons are also awful. there’s no map, and they go on forever with no indication if you’re going the right way. you just gotta hope you find the way out.

something i like about the combat, though is that you consistently have 4 party members.

before i forget, the animations for attacks take way too long and you can’t skip. it’s like watching a quarter of supernova’s animation every single time.


i think i’ve made my point clear enough:the gameplay in FC and much more obviously in SC relies too much on beefiness for “””strategy””” and “””difficulty””” and ends up being a tedious mess. it’s safe to say i will be playing on easy for trails The Third. i’m not too sure on if there’s changes in crossbell, but i definitely know there’s major changes in Cold Steel and i for one will welcome them with open arms when i get to it.


now then, how does this game still manage to get an 8?

Narrative Structure-10/10
It feels like they’ve wrote 4 games in advance. almost every name drop in FC was explained masterfully in SC and all the Chekhov’s guns are fired off. I loved how they structured this game, and it’s pacing is really good.


Worldbuilding- 10/10
Same with FC, there’s so much fucking lore and world building here it’s incredible. it’s like the writers were transported to a different planet, lived a millennia there, came back to earth, and then wrote down all the stuff that happened. it’s so rich, expansive, there’s national secrets, there’s international crises, so many things that feel real, like they’d actually happen. not many worlds i’ve seen have as much depth as our own. and the best part is this is only the second game out of what, 11?

Story-8.5/10
Uhhhhhh this review was written out of order and this is the last part of the review i need to write and i dont really have a lot i want to say. I really liked the search for joshua, i thought it was really fun, and the climaxes for the story were also consistently good. A few scenes were predictable, but overall the story was based and definitely a lot better than FC. im curious as to where The Third will go, because the cover art only shows mah man kevin and 2 people that look like estelle, but are probably not estelle. Dont tell me, pls id rather find it out on my own. Legit looked at the cover halfway through SC and was like “joshua dies and estelle becomes a nun for the church and helps kevin out. That is not a possibility anymore, glad i was wrong. Still pretty curious as to where Liberl’s headed next.
Characters- 9/10
really great characters here, with great backstories. Though there are a few lines that didn’t age well and are definitely of it’s time. i loved learning about joshua’s backstory. or loewes. i thought there was something fishy about oliver, but just like schera exclaimed, “i thought he was an intelligence agent!” but nope, he’s a fucking prince lmao. i was laughing the entire way through between their confrontation, especially between cassius and oliver. kloe’s arc was also really great. estelle... meh. was never a big fan of her and then they turn up her unlikeable qualities in this game, but she still has a few great moments. loved her speech to joshua on the beach. renne was also meh, the weakest of the enforcer personalities. i didn’t really care if she left the society or not, she was an annoying dumb child.

i loved the dynamic between walter and zane/kilika. schera’s dynamic with luci was nice too. tita was cute as always. i think the character lighting round is over.

music- 6.5/10
pretty average, generic, serviceable, and most of the standout tracks are from FC. i wish they used the aureole theme from the first game more often, i love it. the crescendo with the orchestral screech at the start gives me chills every time.



to close, i really despise the gameplay. i really love, or almost love, everything else. i was going to give this a 9, but i needed to weigh how much i didn’t like the gameplay more. i think one point off of what i’d give it if the gameplay was serviceable is a pretty generously high score, it goes to show how much i like the other aspects. i’m cautiously optimistic if they’ll keep up the great world and story in Third Chapter but we’ll see. i’m gonna take a break from the series for a while to build up nostalgia and to ward off burnout.

if you don’t care about good gameplay, give it a shot? i don’t know why you’d read a spoiler review if you’re looking for a recommendation, though. or why you’d not start with FC.