Cold Steel - Several Hundred Hours of Nothing at All

I did it. I saw credits roll on Trails of Cold Steel IV - twice, since I saw the Normal and Not-So-Secret ending. I finished off the last of the Cold Steel games. I pulled down the series' shorts, bent it over my knee, and made it call me Daddy.

I'm finally free of that fucking series - at least until I pick up whatever the canonical next game in the series is, because as much as I hated my last hundred and fifty hours (!) with Trails of Cold Steel III and IV, I still very much love what the Trails series aspires to be. Let's start with the good before we work our way into the tremendously bad. Spoiler alert - it all boils down to a guy named Rean Schwarzer.

The Good

Last year saw me put Trails of Cold Steel I on the very top of my GOTY list and for good reason. First and foremost was the heart of the game. Several outsiders all come to a military school to become the test subjects for a program called Class VII, which teaches them politics, regional history, factional infighting, and of course, how to help people along the way. If you like Persona, it's shades of that, complete with days where you'll spend time points talking to characters of your choice to build a rapport with them.

Although the setup is familiar, it's brilliant in action, at least through the first game. It's an examination of mysticism versus industrialism, with a heavy background of class warfare and political intrigue that, if it had continued throughout the series, would have put it in the ranks of Suikoden for the best blends of political and flat-out wacky fantasy hijinks. Uncovering the mysteries at the school while the political factions, including a stupendous reveal of who the lead villain is along with their backstory, makes for genuinely intriguing stuff.

The party members and villains of the game are also top-notch. I didn't wind up liking all of them, but each and every one of them in the first and second games are well-realized with good character arcs about getting over their ingrained prejudices and working together towards a common goal. Not exactly a new theme, but it's a solid basis for a sprawling game like this. Each of the characters has a distinct personality, a region to explore, backstories to uncover. There's a lot of meat to their bones in this and the second game.

Very mild spoilers here, but regarding that second game and its side characters - there's a reunification scene early on in Trails of Cold Steel II where the voice actors, particularly the one playing Elliot, knock it out of the park. They bring a visceral, if all too briefly played, emotion that felt like someone pulling a homerun out of a player whose at bats generally consist of singles or doubles. If the series had held onto the magic of those characters like that, this blog would sing an entirely different tune.

It's also best in class (see what I did there?) in terms of its mechanics. It doesn't stray far from the established fantastic turn-based combat of the Trails in the Sky series, which might turn off some people looking for more than incremental upgrades to systems in RPGs, but those games are beloved for a lot of reasons and the mechanics are part of that. Personally I'll take a hundred old-school turn-based RPGs over a bastardization of action mechanics and a real-time system.

In any case, what also doesn't change is the series' flexible magic system, which has you slotting about ten or so different "orbs" (materia, essentially, if you're familiar with Final Fantasy VII or the like) in different schools of magic. There are only a few restrictions on what orbs each character can slot - generally you can stuff whatever you want to in about seven of the slots, with three reserved for specific schools of magic for each character. This allows you to essentially rewrite whatever that character's class is. Take Elliot, for example, a bard-type character who is clearly meant to buff and support other characters with his special abilities. But you can cheerfully ignore that, and actually make him a hell of a physical damage dealer by slotting in orbs that up his strength, critical rate, and so on. Because he has a staff that can hit multiple enemies, this is a completely viable way to go, turning him into what is essentially a walking shotgun.

Outside of Final Fantasy X's grid system for abilities, it's one of my favorite setups for character development in an RPG, and it thankfully remains that way throughout the entirety of the Trails of Cold Steel series. Little things are added each game, namely goddamn Gundam-like robot battles and a buffing system called Orders in III and IV that give your whole party a variety of short-term bonuses. These systems are easy to exploit, but that's the joy of it. The games don't actually get harder as you go along and flesh out your orbments and your Orders. They get easier. By the last third of every game, I felt like I was invincible, which is how it should feel as you've spent dozens of hours builidng up these tanks and mages.

And finally but definitely not least is a throwback to the song I posted at the top of this section. It's weird to single out just one bit of music from a game, but there you have it. That song appears frequently in the first two games at moments of mystery and mysticism, and it's one I would stop and listen to just about any time I was exploring a certain repeatable dungeon in the game. There's a reason I'm ending this section on mentioning it, because it embodies the heart and soul of those first two games, things that, sadly, vanish from the moment Trails of Cold Steel III starts.

Oh No. Oh No No No

Trails of Cold Steel III and IV are not bad games. Mechanically, they're better than I and II, with smart upgrades to fast traveling and the introduction of the Orders system, which further blows the lid off the combat mechanics by essentially giving you a free heal or boost in battle every few rounds. And there are ideas here that aren't terrible. Your new party member Juna is a highlight, the one and only truly well-fleshed out character introduced in the latter games, whose hometown has been annexed by the empire at the heart of the games and who is struggling with her feelings of duty towards her new classmates and her loyalties to her hometown. It's a great setup that unfortunately just isn't explored enough.

Which is sadly and bizarrely the common thread of the last two games of the series. These are fat games, every single one of them, and they balloon terribly as more and more threads are piled on and more characters are introduced. The most egregiously awful part of these games is that they eventually - maybe inevitably - collapse under the weight of those threads.

It's remarkable how little the characters develop throughout these gargantuan games because it's such a massive, headscratching failure on the part of the writers and director of the game. Instead of giving the new Class VII character arcs, they're given a conflict and a resolution usually in the same span of time you spend exploring their individual territories. Unlike the first two games, where there's organic growth and furthering of the friendships, here the writers give everyone a single defining trait and... well, leave it at that.

If these were shorter games, that would be fine. There's more than enough in those moments to leave me satisfied if these were one-off games. But they're not. You will spend a hundred hours doing baking contests and swim-offs and tracking down so-and-so's relative and none of it matters. Not a bit of it. The things that should matter, the excellent, if overwhelming, number of villains, your party members, the great political intrigue of the first game in particular, are all pushed to the side in favor of the series' tendency to relyl overly much on padding and twists.

Everything of note about the last two games is shoved into its final hours, making me wonder what the hundred previous ones were for. The plot does introduce some interesting questions about the game's universe at large, but instead of using its 100+ hour narrative to explore those questions and their philosophical implications, the questions are shoved into a two minute long sequence following a boss fight. That's the whole problem with Trails of Cold Steel III and IV condensed into one perfect example. Don't come into this series expecting meaningful answers or plot development. Instead, you'll wander aimlessly until the writers finally get to the point, and when they do, it's over faster than me on top of your mom. HEYO SICK SELF-BURN.

The games too lose their heart and charm and in a hurry. I get wanting to mix things up on the character front. There wasn't a whole lot that could be done with the old class VII by that point and it did make sense for a lot of them to move on. But within just hours of Cold Steel III's start, it's readily apparent no one developing this game cared about the new characters, with the aforementioned Juna coming close to being an exception. They are remarkably bland, stay bland, end blandly. Their existence is made even more baffling by the third game's insistence on reintroducing characters from the first two games at a pretty steady clip, making me wonder why I'm using these new impostors to begin with.

But if that game's reliance on fanservice is annoying, Trails of Cold Steel IV's first third chokes on it like a freshman coed at her first college kegger. Every minute of the first third of the game is spent reintroducing the most minor and banal characters from the first two games like they're Kramer sweeping into Jerry's apartment. It's done so often that I just started hammering the skip button any time someone from the first two games was introduced that wasn't a party member or a villain. I'm not kidding you, this happens probably forty to fifty times. It's fucking insane. I don't care what happened to the guy who used to hang out near the library in Trails of Cold Steel I. I don't care abot what the girl who used to cook in the cafeteria is doing. And these sequences go on for MINUTES.

It is the worst kind of fanservice pandering because it serves absolutely no purpose. It slows down the narrative to a grinding halt and buffers a game that needed no buffering whatsoever. This begins to extend to your party members too, because while it's cool how many old party members and guest characters become playable, there is astonishingly little done with them, especially in comparison to the first two games. You get a few character bonding moments with them, but most of these are inconsequential. Again, it feels like the writers substituted a sense of needing to stuff the game with more content instead of meaningful content.

But all these problems pale in comparison with the series' two biggest glaring problems. First...

Are We Seriously Not Acknowledging These Are Child Soldiers?

I'm being mildly facetious with that headline because hey, this is a JRPG and teenage heroes are par for the course, aren't they? But it does speak to one of Trails of Cold Steel's most glaring, baffling problems - its refusal to acknowledge its own best ideas.

The best example of this is the aforementioned Juna's home city, Crossbell, which was facing a crisis of self-identity before the conflict in the games and which is brought front and center when one of the game's villains becomes its governor-general. The writers seem to understand the potential for this strong narrative and it seems like it'll be a central conflict of some related games set in that city, but the potential material as pertains to this series is sadly underutilized.

That's unforunately true of just about every intriguing aspect of this series as a whole. One of the "villains" has a romantic link to Rean Schwarzer, the main character, which is teased at in every game. You'd expect it to build to something, and it very nearly does in a scene near the end of IV that comes close to actually doing something meaningful with this story that's being built up. But no, Trails of Cold Steel stubbornly refuses to explore its most interesting character developments and biggest ideas in favor of nothing of substance. Sure, there are some teases of future conflicts in other games to come bearing the Trails name, but in a series that spans roughly 200-400 hours, it's insane to not spend some time having the adult caretakers of these characters - their instructors, their principals, the generals, anyone - ponder the situation they've put what are essentially child soldiers into.

I'm not saying Trails of Cold Steel should be some deeply philosophical game, but they clearly intended in the first game to delve into these political ramifications more in-depth than what the series eventually falters into. It's disappointing to see its rich political and cultural possibilities be waylaid for fantasy, because the evils that men do are far more interesting to me than some insubstantive fantasy creature pulling the strings.

The best I can say is that someday, I hope this game inspires a game developer to make something better than this, to not be afraid to delve into the deeper topics that could be had with a game like this while keeping it as thoroughly entertaining as Trails is capable of being. Maybe my disappointment in this aspect is solely mine, but it is a disappointment. I just don't care about meaningless twists and the breathless blue-sky writing of the last two games in this series, the fourth especially.

But let's twist away at the last to talk about the elephant in the room.

Fucking Rean Schwarzer.

Magic Dick Is A Fucking Dumb Character Trait

The main character of Trails of Cold Steel, the guy the whole house is built on, is a walking meat suit named Rean Schwarzer, and whooooo boy, am I not alone in my dislike of him.

Rean is dry white toast. He's the plains of the Dakotas. He is a 2012 Camry with 80k miles on it. He's a plain white undershirt, your granny panties, your shower flip-flops.

He is there but he is so insubstantive as to be nothing, of no importance, absolutely, astonishingly flavorless.

I keep wanting to call him the worst JRPG character of all time. It would be hyperbole but not by much. Rean is defined by his goody-two-shoes nature, a stalwart refusal to say or do anything but the right thing. He is a big bland ball of nothing but one attitude throughout the ENTIRETY of the four games with the exception of an all-too-brief act in the fourth game where he's being literally tortured (hooray!) by internal demons. When I tell you I hoped the bastard never came back to the game, I'm 100% serious. He is emotional quicksand for all the other players in the game.

The writers never seem aware of this. Instead of making Rean an interesting character with flaws and hopes and fallacies, they make other characters interested in him. Why? Because... uh... he's a goody-two-shoes? They just seem to all eventually like him, despite his hammy holier-than-thou monologues and lack of ability to get truly mad or emotional about anything. It's no joke that every woman in your party wants in Rean's pants. You can romance just about any of them, from the one character your age who actually looks seventeen or eighteen (Laura) to the industrialist inventor Alisa (who is mildly ickier due to looking like a tween) to your teacher (ick but at least she looks of age, and plus, hot teachers are hot, not gonna lie)... but also to wildy inappropriate characters even for Japan, such as your female students later in the series or the child-looking companions from the first games. It'd be funny if it wasn't fucking gross. I don't mind titillation in games but a male teacher hanging out on a beach with a bikini-clad character clearly designed to look like a loli strains my patience for Japanese freakiness.

Even if the characters all looked of age, there's still the gigantic glaring problem of having only about four or five true steps forward for relationships in the game. I'm so goddamn tired of that in JRPGs anymore, the oblivious hero, the wistful looks of his or her paramors, the advancement of the relationship only as a means to introuce emotion into a certain stage of the plot and then only at a snail's pace. I don't mean that Rean and other JRPG characters should be straight-up banging throughout the entirety of their games, but for fuck's sake, how about an actual honest-to-God adult relationship in one of these games? How about seeing a character not act like a shy ten-year-old?

In short, Rean is the worst of anime and JRPG cliches. Imagine a reading a book about a completely by-the-book police officer solving a crime. You follow along with him as he cheerfully reforms drug dealers, killers, and psychopaths with just a monologue and the power of friendship. Now imagine reading that same book for three hundred hours. By the end of it, you'd give up a firstborn just for him to do or say anything of interest. That's Rean Schwarzer. A boring lukewarm glass of water from the very start to the very finish.

So Why Am I Excited To Play The Next Game?

That's an easy question to answer - because like with Tales of..., when Trails is good, it's phenomenally good. Despite the fanservice, I love this universe they've created. The countries feel distinct, the players well-realized and mapped out, and the villains behind the scenes show promise of maybe becoming more of a central focus, though I doubt we'll ever truly get a satisfactory conclusion on that end. Gotta keep gamers hooked, after all.

But most of all it's the heart of this series, something indefinable but present. What Trails in the Sky II did to humanize its protagonist Estelle, one of the best JRPG protags of all time, Trails of Cold Steel started off to do with its politics and intrigue. It made them accessible and interesting, even if it was for just a game. I genuinely want to see what the next Trails game will do right, because as much frustration as I have with the series, those great moments far outweigh even the slogfest of its worst.

I'll be leaving Trails behind for a good long while - Ys is calling my name, as is the Mana series and that remake of Final Fantasy VII - but I'm genuinely excited to come back to whatever game is next. Trails to Azure or Through Daybreak, or Zero, or Reverie, I'm not sure. Because despite everything I've said, all the shit I've talked and felt about Trails of Cold Steel III and IV, this is still a series I'd highly recommend. What it tries to do is incredible. What it falls into is disappointing. But those scales definitely wind up tilting more towards "fascinating and fun" than "pain in my ass," though how much enjoyment you get out of it is going to be tempered by your patience with the fanservice, the slog, and a main character who belongs in a meat grinder.