👎 As much as I've been enjoying the Trails franchise, this entry has been a time consuming disappointment.
It appears that CS3 is a setup for the events of CS4, a repeat of what they did with CS1 and CS2. In other words, it's a padded time filler, where you are once again placed in a school, following school related events. Most of it is meaningless and it's only in the last few hours of the game where anything of import is revealed.
There are now too many characters, and it's affecting the game. There's so much switching in and out that it's affecting the consistency and continuity. There are so many characters, that at some points you have to manage three different groups in dungeons; it might sound like a treat but it gets tiring after a while as the presence of too many people dilutes focus and character development and story. It gets a bit silly at times because some of the friends will disappear for a bit, come back, and have to explain that they're caught up with the current story because another friend told them about it. Repeatedly.
There are now so many characters, that several of them even [i]look[/i] the same, and I was having trouble telling them apart. I think they really need to reign it in.
It feels a bit stupid at times too, because everything is focused around Rean, the main character. It seems it's impossible to have a simply platonic friendship, no, every woman in the game must be attracted to Rean, every guy finds him interesting and wants to be his friend... it's a pointless pseudo-harem-for-gary-stu for no reason.
Not just friends, but there are also many, many gray characters standing around in cutscenes with eyes closed, explaining that everything is going according to plan. Repeat ad nauseum.
When you do eventually get to fight the much hyped enemies, it ends with no conclusion, except for them brushing it off and quipping that they might have to get serious now. There is no satisfaction from the story-fights against the 'bad guys', and no real conclusions. Towards the end it gets even sillier as you have to face a series of 'enemies' for no reason other than to trim down the size of your main group.
New fight mechanics have been introduced, but I think they took it a bit too far... it's now at a point that arts have become useless, you can just dump all points in speed and overpower everyone.
The story is trying to keep its cards way too close to its chest, and there are numerous threads going on. It's very difficult to follow the story for most of the game, until they spend some time explaining some of the backstory right towards the end.
Speaking of cards, there's a new minigame involving card deck battles, and it is boring as hell.
For some reason the music this time feels generic, and unmemorable. None of them were awful, but they weren't great either. They were just there as background... a departure from the rest of the Trails series. The only track I like was 'Alley of Silence'.
👍 There are still some things the game does do well.
There's a turbo mode so you can speed through scenes; the game is so long that they had to introduce it.
The graphics are well improved, and the environments are still nice to run around in.
Fishing doesn't suck, it's well designed!
The combat [i]is[/i] still satisfying, it's now mainly centred around criticals and speed, and it can be satisfying to overpower a powerful enemy with 'bursts'. That said, it's a shame that arts users are not really needed, but they still exist and only take up space.
The clothes don't suck, thankfully, and for many characters you can now get costume drops while playing, which is quite nice! There are also alternative hair colors you can get for some of the characters but they just make them look out of place.
➡️ Overall, an unsatisfying entry in the trails series, it's an excessively padded filler with the real story towards the end. The 4th entry will probably be enjoyable, but this current filler has left me fatigued.
