Having gone through the show in 2020, what I will say Re: Hunter x Hunter is that for me at least it was a very hot and cold show at times where some arcs felt very formulaic or well trodden and others were among the most amazing things I had ever seen in a Shounen fighting anime. I definitely came close to dropping it at a few select points, but I'm glad I stuck with it because the payoff for the Yorknew City, Chimera Ant, and Chairman Selection arcs honestly left me pretty staggered and if nothing else have left me perpetually wanting whenever I try other Shounen.
What I feel like Jeff missed with the vtuber/wrestling comparison is that for the vtuber, streaming IS the equivalent of wrestling , so it's largely irrelevant that "wrestlers don't stream in-character" because the actual equivalent would be something like the vtuber using their digital avatar in some capacity other than streaming.
@broshmosh: Sky is very, very Estelle top heavy, for better or worse. She's a fan favorite MC for good reason but any time she's not the focus of attention I feel the rest of Sky's cast (outside of one spoony blonde bard) struggles to make their screentime compelling.
I think the other games after Sky do a better job with their principal characters outside of the MC; Lloyd and the rest of the quirky police squad he is a member of in the Crossbell games are immensely fun characters with a lot of depth and life to them and every one of them can carry a scene by themselves, and while Cold Steel is very MC top heavy like Estelle/Sky, I feel that series does a better job of making everyone mesh together outside of their interactions with Rean and feel more compelling.
Again though I think it's fine to see this and not find it indicative of something you'd enjoy, it is at the end of the day more or less exactly what it says on the tin: a bunch of JRPGs that are very pleasant but also rather tropey that are setting out to tell a lot of small and large stories in service of developing a big setting. It feels like the realization of the dream of PS2 JRPGs with episodic releases; I think Trails succeeds where games like .hack, Xenosaga, or Suikoden kind of failed.
For me it's also just very exciting to see it mentioned at all; Falcom games have famously (to me at least) never got much dialogue at GB and as time has gone on I've felt myself becoming more and more disillusioned with other mainstream JRPGs like Persona or Final Fantasy, so Trails has been a bit of a beacon in the darkness keeping me interested in the genre.
@broshmosh: The best way I feel I can put it is that, it's not Trails is particularly noteworthy, special, or original in what it accomplishes for its plot beats or characters. If I were to list out the various story developments/twists and character archetypes they would probably sound fairly generic or cliched.
What I feel sets it apart when taken as a whole is that Falcom injects a degree of earnestness into both that world and its characters that feels very endearing and investing. They want you to get to know the locations and people and care what happens to them, and put in the legwork to make that narratively work (which means it takes a long time). You can tell they genuinely adore that setting and want to see all of its various components feel "alive" and want to have the characters that they (and we the players) spend a long time with get to see satisfying arcs play out.
So you get a game like Sky FC, which yes is fairly slow, chill, and laid back, but it lays a huge groundwork for *why* you should care about what happens in Liberl. Another JRPG would have you spend like, 20 minutes in your hometown before it gets burned down or whatever, but Rolent (the location Jan was in for this stream) becomes an important location that your revisit from time to time; NPCs that you met there will show up elsewhere and even have their own ongoing mini plot threads if you bother to speak to them. It all makes it so that when it does go south, you have a reason to care what's actually happening.
It's definitely not going to work for everyone and I would ABSOLUTELY not recommend it to people who were not already attuned for enjoying JRPGs in a vacuum, but it's proven to be a franchise that I feel able to get invested in in a way that frankly I have not in any other story-heavy game series.
The idea of Jan, who has never played a Trails game before, potentially having his introduction to it all via Cold Steel 3 is kind of blowing my mind. In the end of the day who really cares, all that matters is that he and/or the audience has fun, but as someone who is a big fan of the franchise I can't help but think that Cold Steel 3 is particularly and uniquely structured to be both impenetrable and frustrating due to being a game that just doesn't even really have anything happen in it until the very end and relying on recurring characters for almost every big moment. Even Sky FC, the first game in the whole franchise and infamously one of the slowest, still told a relatively "complete" story and at least there virtually every character was a fresh introduction too. I can't help but think that Jan if he were to see it through would be both lost and not particularly satisfied with the half-assed attempts CS3 does to set up the events to lead into CS4. I'd still love to see it in a vacuum if nothing else to get the series more exposure, it'd be certainly better than the current coverage the series gets with GB (which is none).
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