The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV - Review @ RPG Site

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV Review

This review will mention spoilers from The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III

Despite how much I enjoyed The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, longtime readers probably noticed that the game was absent from last year's RPG of the Year results, and those that bothered to listen to the deliberations probably know why. If you haven't, you should - as always, when we decide which games are the site's favorite RPGs of the year, simply reading the list and a few summaries don't do any of the games, winner or not, any justice - but for brevity, Cold Steel III had a major cliffhanger. Of course, it was never going to be a standalone experience - I said as much in my review - but even more so than usual I didn't feel comfortable giving it a blanket recommendation until after The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV released, to see if the Cold Steel story as a whole could live up to its lofty expectations.

A year later, I've finished Cold Steel IV - spent 108 hours seeing the fairy tale through to its end. 108 hours, plus the countless hours that I'd poured into previous games in the series. 200 hours between CSIII and IV alone, sure, but also the 200 hours of Trails in the Sky, 150+ hours of Zero no Kiseki/Ao no Kiseki, and 100+ from the first two Trails of Cold Steels. I've invested nearly 800 hours into Falcom's behemoth of a story, and I'll be the first to acknowledge that my experience with the series comes with a significant amount of baggage. I've known these characters for hundreds of hours, I'm invested in the world of Zemuria and the heroes that fight to protect it. Although the title lacks the moniker in the west, when Cold Steel IV came out in Japan, it featured the subtitle "The End of Saga". While the game is nowhere near the conclusion of the series as a whole, it exists as the culmination of not just Cold Steel, but the "Phantasmal Blaze Plan" - a concept that has been part of the series' story since Trails in the Sky - the 3rd, in 2007.

[...]

Score: 5/10

Click to expand...

joxer said:

I'm trying not to read it as I don't want more spoilers than I already know (a certain person is not dead as presumed thus returns to the roster), but it's really hard to imagine what made a mediocre score.
Even if everything is on the average level, ToCS games always had a godlike music.

Click to expand...

Maybe you already scrolled down below to see my score, or maybe you clicked on the review from the sidebar having seen it there. I'd imagine, no matter who you are, that you probably thought the score was maybe a little too harsh. Indeed, there is a lot to love about parts of Cold Steel IV - but as I always like to mention in my review, it's about how the different parts of a game come together that impact my thoughts on the game as a whole. When I reviewed the Japanese release of Ys IX last year, there was never a point where it felt like I was forcing myself to play that game - nor, despite Cold Steel III's incredible length, did I feel anything like that there. There were multiple times in Cold Steel IV where I felt like I was forcing myself to play the game, just so I could see the ending, even if I wasn't having any fun. Moments where the story delivery was so painfully bad that I wanted to turn the game off then and there, and moments where I wanted nothing more than for the game to stop needlessly spinning its wheels so I could move onto the next story bit that would actually move the plot forward.

I was, if not confident, hopeful that the lingering issues that I found myself grappling with in Cold Steel I and II had been mitigated when I played through Cold Steel III. However, now that I've seen the whole story, I can only say that those issues never went away. Even if they appeared fixed for Cold Steel III, they were always there, just below the surface. At this point, if I wasn't already in too deep, I'm not sure if I would even want to continue playing the Trails series. I have very little confidence that Falcom will learn their lesson with how to pace their games, and with the scope of both the world and the series as a whole constantly growing I have no confidence that future games won't run into these self-same issues, but to an even greater degree. It's hard to come back from a fumble like this; the stage was well and truly set for Cold Steel IV to proudly bring the series to its next, and possibly final, phase. Instead, I can only hope that - somehow - Trails will manage to stick the landing with its final act, as unlikely as that now seems.

Click to expand...

The game takes place after the Great Twilight and events of Trails of Cold Steel IV. It focuses the intertwining fates of three protagonists operating throughout Zemuria: the hero, Rean Schwarzer; the liberator, Lloyd Bannings; and the Hermit, a masked person named C. The perspective of the game alternates between these three groups through the Cross Story mechanism.

Click to expand...