The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV

Overall, I don't like it. This is currently my least favorite Trails game. There are a few good aspects here and there, but they are far overshadowed by the game's many flaws. And worse of all, the game hardly does anything unique compared to the others. The strengths are the same things the other games did well (namely the combat) while its weaknesses are the same just dialed up to a much greater degree. ----- The core gameplay is still good. Its an improvement over CS3, using the same system but with a few tweaks to the balance that made it a lot more bearable. The game really curbed the biggest issue I had with CS3's combat where half the bosses could just heal almost as fast as you dealt damage and added a few other tweaks to the break system and how orders strengthen over time that also contributed towards a slightly better balance. Its still an easy game, but its no longer punctuated with the occasional annoying & ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fights that popped up so often before. Its still flawed compared to earlier Trails titles (god only knows how impossible it is to balance a game with 20 something characters) but at least its better than the other Cold Steel games. I don't care much for the gameplay. It's still a simplification of the Sky/Crossbell orbment system and the gimmicks it attaches aren’t enough to make up for other issues. But at least its serviceable. The gameplay's biggest issue by far is all the bloat. There are way too many playable characters constantly joining and leaving the party and it makes forming a cohesive team way more annoying than it needs to be. While much of the tedium is mitigated by an auto-equip feature that gives you a useable (but not very good) build, its still quite annoying to juggle so many people especially near the end when almost every character has to be used at least briefly. At least the party has a few reserve slots so you can tuck the unwanted members away and just use your main team, though this did sometimes mean I had to leave out one of my core party members when someone else was forced to occupy a party slot. ----- So the gameplay is alright. Not good, but not flawed enough to really push me towards outright disliking the game. The bigger issue for me was the story. CS4 is the longest Trails game I've played, yet it also feels like so little actually happens. The whole of Act 1 is just reminding us what happened in CS3, Act 2 is gathering all the relevant characters by revisiting every previous location, and its only in Act 3 that it feels like the story is actually going somewhere. Throw in just how many characters there are, how many locations you have to revisit, and how much background info the game feel like it needs to repeat and it all feel unbelievable bloated. I won't talk about Acts 1 and 2 since nothing important actually happens in either, but *maybe* you could say it was worth it if Act 3 was good enough to need all the buildup. But its not. Once again, you revisit a bunch of old locations, explore a new dungeon, and fight a boss battle against another [spoiler]Awakener until they each finally get the closure to their character arc... and those closures all suck. I still don't care about Rutger and don't see why anybody else would, Cedric is just weird, and Arianrhod's motivations turn out to be stupid after she's been built up for like 5 games now. And don't even get me started on how Osborne's entire character is ruined by this game. Since Sky 3 he's been shown as a ruthless antagonist who will use any method available to get his way. He's power-hungry, but his means of gaining power have revolved around curbing the nobility, establishing a meritocratic government, and generally making people's lives better. Its a complex dynamic that made him a genuinely interesting figure to pin down.... and now it turns out all this political crap was just a farce so he could summon and kill the evil monster. That was his goal and its way stupider than all the things he did to accomplish said goal.[/spoiler] The most interesting part of the story, a major war between all the continent's countries against Erebonia, falls flat. [spoiler]It only starts near the very end and stops immediately after we beat Osborne. Despite its buildup in the earlier sections of the game, Musse's master plan to defeating Erebonia is just to have everyone work together and fight a conventional war.... which is the most basic and obvious plan you could ever come up with. And the buildup to the war can't be taken seriously with how much its driven by *the curse*. Need somebody to do something irrational? Oh no, they have *the curse*! Need the population to go along with anything the plot requires of them? Oh no, *the curse* is effecting everybody! But of course all the important characters actually agree with your party and hope you win, but they won't actually do anything. Would it be too much of an issue if Vandyke, Craig, and Vander actually supported the war for non-curse related reasons? Or if they actually agreed with Rean and worked behind the scenes to do something against Osborne? No, they have to still be good guys and agree with Rean but still go along with the evil plan anyway for.... reasons. Duty and honor, I guess?[/spoiler] ----- I don't have any particularly complex thoughts here, but that's largely because CS4 isn't a particularly complex game. And while that can be fine on its own, it makes for a terrible end to a 4-part series and leaves an even worse taste when it retroactively hurts a lot of the setup from even earlier games. Cold Steel 4 indulges in all the worst parts of the previous 3 Cold Steel games and brings them to their zenith (so far at least).