The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (PS3) Review

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (PS3) Review

Date Released: 23 September 2013

Date Played: 30 May 2022

I tried with this game, I really tried.  Trails of Cold Steel is a spinoff series set in the Legend of Heroes universe.  This universe consists of fourteen interconnected games that span several subseries.  The closest thing I can equate it to is the Marvel Cinematic Universe where characters, plot points, themes, locations, and events all carry over between the individual entries in the various series and a deep knowledge of the lore and background of everything associated with it not only enriches the experience but is essentially required to derive enjoyment from playing an individual game.  This very traditional JRPG , published by Falcom, was met with high praise from the RPG community.  However, if you do some digging on the internet, you'll see that many people have the same issues I do.  The game has been followed by 3 direct sequels that apparently continue the story.

Story:

You play as Rean Schwarzer and his classmates from Thors Military Academy.  This academy resides in the Eribonian empire and is a central location in the overall Legend of Heroes universe. After arriving at the academy, Rean learns that the school is split between the nobility and the commoners, but he, and some select classmates, have been chosen to join an experimental group called Class VII.  This class has been selected for mysterious reasons and they are charged not only with completing their school work and military training, but also taking on a host of field studies, fetch quests, and other time wasting opportunities all over the empire.  

As you learn about the struggles of the various regions of the empire during your field studies, you'll see the class struggle between the nobility and their subjects, political espionage, shady pasts of the characters, masked villains, and the unavoidable "chosen one" concept that creeps into basically every RPG.  You're supposed to learn all about your classmate's backgrounds and their struggles and fears as you build relationships with them. This all builds up to a "twist" ending that you'll see coming about 20 hours before the story concludes. Sadly, the game ends on a cliff hanger.  So, you'll need to invest another 240 hours into playing the rest of the games in this sub series to see where it goes.  You'll need to spend over 1,000 hours to play all of the games in the Class of Heroes cinematic universe.  

Honestly, it's all extremely cliché and I feel like everything in this game has been done before... and better.  The story is just standard anime/JRPG stuff... the military academy, the political unrest, and mystery in the school are all done to death.  In addition to this, all of the characters are just generic stereotypes.  There's the pretty girl who gets angry and thinks everyone is flirting with her, the girl that secretly a ninja, the stand-offish noble, the stoic sword master, the overly flirtatious and heavy drinking older teacher, the protagonist with the mysterious background, the nerdy sidekick, the try hard that feels like he has to prove himself to the world, the genius that is top of the class and knows everything, and even the purple cat that always seems to show up at the strangest times. It's just... exhausting. 

At times, the game feels like a visual novel as there is way too much text and dialog that seems to go on and on.  Whenever someone says anything, every other character has to chime in about it and conversations that should only be a few sentences long are dragged out to an almost comical degree. I'll admit that I have much less patience for this now than I did when I was younger.  However, games like Persona are full of dialog.  Maybe even more dialog than this game.  However, the Persona games have style, interesting environments, likeable characters, and unique stories. All things that Trails of Cold steel lacks.

As I mentioned, most of the beginning of the game involves traveling to various regions in the empire.  These are guised as "get to know the region" missions, but really they all involve doing a bunch of fetch quests.  Go find 5 flowers, kill this monster, carry a letter back and forth, etc.  Then, suddenly, some event will happen and you'll have to go investigate and uncover some sort of secret conspiracy.  The town folk thank you, then it's back to school.  In between classes, you hang out with your friends, but mostly you do more fetch quests.  It's very grating and takes like 40 something hours to get past this part of the game.  Considering this is just the introduction to the game where you're getting to learn about your surroundings and classmates, it becomes very abundantly clear that this game has serious pacing issues.  Like, some of the worst I've ever seen.  That includes most JRPGs, which are notoriously slow. This game has no problem wasting your time.

The fans of this game will tell you that you really need to play the games from the other Legend of Heroes series to fully appreciate this game.  Well, I'm not going to spend 1000 hours of background research to gain slightly more appreciation for a game that I don't think has a very interesting story or characters.  They claim that the draw of this series is the "world building" and how all of the political turmoil through the various regions plays out.  Well, I don't like that either.  I just couldn't muster up any feelings about anything in this game.  Even if a game is tied to an overarching series, it needs to be able to stand on it's own.  And in the case of Trails of Cold Steel, that just doesn't happen.

Gameplay:

It's a JRPG.  There aren't random battles.  Instead you wonder around in the dungeon and can see the enemies.  You can attack them from behind, a la Persona style, to gain an advantage in battle.  After that, things take place in turn-based combat like you would expect.  There are a few gimmicks that you need to use to be successful like linking your characters together to give them dual attacks and such, and positioning your characters to avoid area of effect attacks, but in general it's just the same old attack, skill arts, spells, and items. You also have S-breaks, which are powerful attacks, that the characters can unleash if they have their gauge full. Skills are done through slotting gems that you collect into your Arcus.  The game goes all into how Arcus technology works and tries to explain how it's possible.  But, in the end, it's just putting gems into gem slots like in almost every Final Fantasy game. I enjoy turn based combat, and thought that the battles in this game were decent enough.  They aren't good enough or innovative enough to carry the whole game though.  Not by a longshot.  

The game can be a little challenging as you're getting the hang of the combat and the enemies hit pretty hard. Luckily, you don't really need to grind too much. In fact, grinding doesn't work very well because leveling up is so slow.  It's better to just try to hone your tactics and methodically move your way through the dungeons. Most enemies have a trick or weakness that you'll need to exploit to be successful. Once you reach the boss and take them down, you'll be awarded with enough XP to put you around your target level for the next section of the game. Some of these boss fights can be difficult and slow.  So, when you fail, it really feels like a kick in the teeth. Fortunately, if you fail on a boss fight, they give you the option to try again with the difficulty of the boss turned down.  I know this is an answered prayer for a lot of players and I'll admit I did it a couple of times when I was getting tired and ready to put down the controller.  On top of this, you're able to save anywhere in the game (outside of the lengthy cutscenes) so if you're diligent with saving, you shouldn't lose too much progress.

I was struggling with the game at some point and looked online for advice.  Most of the advice in the game involved exploiting its weaknesses.  Things like, "equip all of your characters with delay runes so the enemies never get a chance to attack", or "the only way to make money is to spend 5 or 6 hours crafting omelets with one of the characters and selling them."  It seems like this is one of those games where more people are interested in "breaking" the game rather than mastering it. 

There's also a minigame called "Blade" that is a card game you can play with your friends.  It's very simple and a lot of fun, and honestly was my favorite part of the game.  I wish it was expanded upon more and served as larger component in the overall game.

Presentation:

The game looks really bad.  I know it's a PS3 game from 2 generations back, but it looks rough for even a PS3 game and would look more at home on the PS2.  The characters are very anime looking and have very few features, the environments are bland and textureless, the animations are clunky and awkward, and everything just feels flat and lifeless. If it weren't for the character's hair and the color of their eyes, I don't think you could tell them apart.

The music, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic.  This especially includes the combat music which is some of the best in the game and is catchy as can be.  The different regions you visit in the game all have unique themes and the music changes to suit them.  It blends harmoniously well with the different environments and I don't recall hearing anything that I didn't think was great.  It's a stellar soundtrack for sure and is one of the best parts of the game.  

The game luckily has English voice acting to go along with the text.  It's pretty well performed, but feels like your typical anime delivery.  The girls are either shy and quiet, or overly cutely.  The guys are quiet and stoic, or overly aggressive.  There's very little in between these two extremes and you can tell the voice actors did their best to give life to these flat and uninspired characters. 

Conclusion:

I had such an unexpectedly boring and unfulfilling time with this game that it made me question if I even liked RPGs anymore.  I have played dozens of them, and before this, I would have considered them a "loved' genre of mine.  Maybe I'm too old for the cliched anime stereotypes and the cookie cutter story... or maybe, it's just bad writing.  It's hard to tell.  The characters, the story, the world... everything in this game just did nothing for me.  I don't want to have to play fourteen 80+ hour long games to feel like I "get" what's going on in the world that the developers have created.  Those sorts of things should be a bonus, not a requirement.  One person online said, "the biggest draw of this game was the promise of things to come in the next games."  Ugh... no.  

It's not a bad game.  It's a completely fine, boring, everyday, cliched, standard RPG.  There are a million just like it.  However, the enormous Class of Heroes world is unique.  If that's something you're really interested in diving into, this game may be for you.  If you're looking for an interesting one-off story with cool characters and exciting locations... this may not be your cup of tea.

I have a really high tolerance for terrible games and have literally beaten thousands of different games.  I'm not sure how many JRPGs I've finished... but it's a lot.  This game was so boring that it took me 6 months to work my way through it.  Mustering up the energy to play for even a couple of hours at a time was a real chore.

Final Status: Played

Final Score: 5/10 (very mediocre)