Yesterday Trails of Cold Steel III was finally released in English, coming out 2 years after it was initially published in Japan. I got my copy and have played a few hours of the game, continuing where I left off with the demo last month, and I am really enjoying the game a lot so far. I've been helping my students figure out what clubs they should join, meeting all the locals in the city of Leeves and reuniting with a few of my old classmates. Just like I said last month when the demo was released, it is really nice to return to the world of Cold Steel after such a long wait from the previous installment. Even though I've been playing the other games in the Trails series since finishing Cold Steel II back in 2017, I have an attachment to Cold Steel's cast/setting that I just don't have with the other games (even though I enjoyed the other entries a lot).

Anyone else playing through Cold Steel III at the moment? Also if anyone is curious about the game and has questions, I'd be happy to answer anything about this specific game or the series in general.

It’s very good though I already deeply intrinsically dread the ending of it because there’s one left and I know how Falcom does things.

@efesell: Yeah, since there is one more game after Cold Steel III, it will most definitely end on a huge cliffhanger. Hopefully this release does well and NISA localizes the fourth game in a reasonable amount of time. Cross your fingers that we don't get another situation like Trails in the Sky SC where we have to wait 4 years.

@bowl-of-lentils: Second Chapter had a number of..complicated issues that led to that delay so I'm not too worried about that part of it at least.

My copy is arriving tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it.

Trails of Cold Steel was my first real entry in the series too, so it does hold a special place in my heart as well. (I had played a decent chunk of Sky first, but it didn't really grab me at the time.) Despite not being entirely satisfied with everywhere the story went in 2, I'm still excited to see how things go from here.

Also I'm expecting the wait for 4 to be roughly the same as from 1 to 2, assuming nothing goes wrong over at NISA in the meantime. I haven't heard any complaints about the localization from early reviews, so that's a good sign.

Yeah thankfully the, fairly reasonable, concerns about the localization have not borne out. It seems totally fine to me and most importantly it is consistent with everything that has come before it.

@efesell: I was following news of SC's localization since FC was released and yeah that game had quite a journey. My hope is that 4 will release next year but realistically if that was going to happen I bet NISA would have already announced that they were planning to translate 4 along with 3. So I'm expecting 4 to come out in two years around 2021.

@zeik: Cold Steel III's localization is very solid, I am about 10 hours into the game and I have zero complaints so far. In fact I think that if you started 3 right after finishing 2, you wouldn't know a different company had localized the game besides seeing the NISA logo during startup.

So far playing through the English version my only complaint is some characters don't have the same voice actor, and Kurt's VA is very similar to Sean Chiplocke in some dialogue.

Milliums VA isn't the same and it really bugs me. Which is funny because in Cold Steel 1 I couldn't stand Millium or the voice acting at first.

@aristotled: I also prefer Millium's old voice, but it was Ashley Burch, so I'm not at all surprised she got replaced, since she went union since the last one and these games don't use union dubs.