This is where I would need a mixed recommend button. On one hand, I recommend the game for anyone who wants to continue the story of the Erebonia arc and see it to its conclusion in Cold Steel 4. On the other hand... Cold Steel 3 has so many issues it actually felt like an overall bad experience. So can I really in good faith recommend a game I didn't enjoy? Not really, so my review is negative. In fact, this was the first Trails game that I immediately thought "I never want to play this ever again" once I finished it. So everyone needs to decide for themselves if it's worth going through this game to finish the story, personally it is, but it wasn't pretty.
Story and characters are very important elements in Trails games. A lot of my major complaints are about the story, plot structure, and scene execution, as well as how the game handles the different characters ESPECIALLY the villains. The character powerlevels are all over the place too, and they make zero to little sense anymore. I can't comment much on that front or I'd spoil but just know that I did not enjoy this part of the game at all. As always here are some thoughts about the game:
- Graphics: The game received a graphical update, but an artstyle downgrade. Yes, the graphics are better, cleaner, better texture, etc. The animations are way better too. However, I have two major complaints: 1) They added this ridiculous rimlightning to every character, to the point where it looks like someone is shining a flashlight behind them every single scene regardless of how the lightning is or if it's day or night. It looks terrible and the next few games have the same issue, but it all started here; 2) Even though the graphics are way better, the artstyle looks more generic, the facial expressions were not upgraded even though everything else was, and a lot of characters just straight up have the same face shape. For an older style game it looked alright but for a game with a graphical update it makes the character design look a bit cheap.
- A lot of the environments were nice and I liked a few towns quite a lot, similar to previous games.
- The new UI especially combat UI is so small... it was hard to see anything at the start, and honestly I liked how the previous UI looked more. I got used to it eventually.
- Combat: Here we go... this game introduces two mechanics: Brave Orders and Break System. Even after finishing the game I'm still not sure if this is a positive or a negative. What I will say is that the combat felt completely unbalanced once you figure out these two systems, even more than one shot Laura from the previous game lol. Most bosses and enemies are immediately broken and get their HP depleted to under half HP before they do anything. Brave Orders such as -90%/50% damage taken, 300% more break damage, give everyone insta insight for several turns... it's all broken and trivialize anything. Evasion is now even more overpowered than the previous game. Yes it's harder to achieve full evasion, but counterattacks grant Brave Points which now can be used to spend on the new overpowered mechanic. Not only that, but in order to compensate for the player being overpowered they made bosses heal HP... several times even... to the point that you need to burst them down or they keep healing. It honestly just feels bad and I didn't like it at all. Maybe you enjoy the combat more, I most certainly did not, it needs a lot of balancing which I heard is better in the games after this one. If you could become overpowered in Cold Steel 2 due to build variety, here you are overpowered due to the combat system itself not being balanced properly (and there's still some very overpowered master quartz builds in the game too).
- During a certain area, the game was so badly optimized that I went from 120 fps to 60 fps during combat. In fact, I suspect the devs forced me to play at 60 fps to get stable framerate in order to hide how badly optimized it was. Not fun having reduced framerate on a high end PC with 0 problems with any other game at very high fps.
- The game crashed on me twice and I lost progress. Unlucky me, but it didn't make me happy. First Trails game to crash on me.
- You can now equip two Master Quartz per character and there's a lot more of them. Build variety is improved which is amazing.
- You have A LOT of characters in the game who you need to get to learn and juggle between, which was overwhelming at the start. You do get to know them better eventually, but there's a lot of characters in your party that don't even allow you to customize equipment or quartz anymore as long as they join.
- Even though i did not enjoy the story execution, I did enjoy some parts of it, especially during the middle of the game. There are plenty of shocking revelations and good moments, cool places to visit and epic sequences for you to enjoy sure. But I can't get past a lot of plot decisions were outright terrible and how the game does a lot of hyped up characters very dirty.
- There's a new ingame Trading Card Game that was pretty cool, you can challenge different people. Fun!
- Harem trope. It started back in Crossbell, but now it's the worst it has ever been.
- The soundtrack was way worse than previous games. I cannot remember more than one track on the top of my head. It ranged from bad to not that memorable, save a few good tracks maybe. Big shame.
There's a lot I could get into about the story, but I won't. So I'll just post my usual tier list.
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TRAILS GAME TIER LIST
S- Sky SC, Cold Steel 2
A- Sky 3rd, Cold Steel 1, Azure
B- Sky FC, Zero
C-
D- Cold Steel 3
Yeah this is about how I feel right now... I don't want to play CS3 ever again, but I'm glad I played it so I can move on. A lot of people have CS3 as their favorite Cold Steel game. I'm not one to judge and we are all different. Personally it's the worst game I've played so far. Sorry. I might up it to a C or something eventually, who knows, but for now D it is. This game alone makes me question if I'm going to keep enjoying Trails as much as I enjoyed the older games, I really hope so as I have many games left.
EDIT: I thought about it some more and I just want to point out clearly that I think my main dislike for this game, besides everything else I mentioned, is really from me not liking the game looks at all. If the game looks good to you, you'll probably enjoy it way more than I did. To me the artstyle is very poor and brings my rating for this game down a lot. The same will happen to the next two games as they look the exact same, but hopefully they will still be better in the other departments.
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Next up is Cold Steel 4, believe it or not I'm actually looking forward to see how the next game ends the Erebonia arc and how this new combat system can be balanced better. Excited!
