The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Review for PlayStation 4

<Climbs out of escape hatch>

Whoa! Oh Hello! I believe it is time for my review of Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel.

Now, I suppose you guys and gals remember my previous review of Fate/EXTELLA Link, right? And I am sure you all remember me mentioning Final Fantasy, with its turn-based combat?

Well, to cut to the chase, Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel is a Japanese Role-playing Game that uses turn-based combat.

Now, you guys know the drill: before diving into the game, I dive you all into the companies that developed and/or published the games I review.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel is developed by Nihon Falcom Corporation. They are a Japanese-based company that mostly creates RPG’s, with its most noteworthy entries being Ys and The Legend of Heroes series.

An interesting note is that the publisher varies by region. If it is in Japan, Nihon Falcom is the publisher themselves. If it is in the USA, which my copy is based in, Xseed Games is the publisher. Elsewhere, NIS America and/or Marvelous Europe are the publishers.

Xseed Games is an American video game company that was founded by the former members of the USA branch of Square Enix. They eventually became a subsidiary of Marvelous.

NIS is a Japanese video game developer and publisher. They are known for two popular tactical RPGs, but I won’t get into detail.

Alright! Now that we got enough information about the developer and the publishers, we can now get started on diving into the game itself.

Now, once again, I am given a game where it is a sequel to another game, and I got to do some catching up. Am I complaining? Nope. If anything, it is a preferred idea to investigate the lore of any games’ series if you don’t start with the first.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel takes place after the events of the entire Trails in the Sky series. The setting of the game takes place in what is known as the Erebonian (Arab-own-Ian) Empire. In this story, our main protagonist is a male student named Rean Schwarzer (no, it is not supposed to be Schwarzenegger), along with his fellow classmates of “Class VII” in the renowned Thors (yes, that’s the name, no relations to Marvel) Military Academy. According to the story and the dialogue by the staff, as well as the class’s own instructor, there originally was only 5 classes in the Academy. All the classes were filled with students, based on their social class. The top two classes were of the nobles, while the other three were the commoners. It has been that way in Thors Military Academy for many years, up until the previous year before the game’s events. However, in the current year in-game, they decided to change and shake things up a bit by introducing a new sixth class composed of both nobles and commoners. The class name is, for possible sake of comedy (or an extremely subtle reference to 2+2=5), the class is named “Class VII” instead of “Class VI”. That’s all I am going to go over about the main lore of the game, as it will just clog up the entire review, similarly to how Fate/EXTELLA Link would have, if I continued.

Now then, let’s get on with the nit-grit that is the gameplay! Starting the game, I was once again met with an amazing cinematic intro, and the song was in Japanese. Funnily enough, I felt nervous that the game would mostly be in Japanese, but that thought could have also risen from the previous game. After the intro and getting past the title screen, there were the default options of “New Game”, “Load Game”, “Options” (as in the game’s settings) and a fourth option of loading data from a previous title.

When starting a new game, I was met with the options of difficulty. The game explains how it will behave based on the difficulty. There’s Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare. Easy is self-explanatory; Normal is described as for the people who are familiar with RPG’s. Hard and Nightmare are for the experts, with Nightmare being balanced for New Game+.

After starting a new game, I was immediately thrown into action, with the cutscenes showing a war going on, and a group of students, Class VII, are trying to stop a large military weapon, the Railway Guns, from firing. Throughout, the class had to fight enemy robots who stood in their way.

Before I began the gameplay, I decided to check out at the Camp Menu, by pressing the triangle button on the PS4 controller. Doing so, I was surprised by what I saw.

The Camp Menu had an awfully similar feel to how the menu system in most of the games in the Kingdom Hearts series looked like. Because of that, I thought that this was going to be another hack ‘n’ slash RPG.

When I got to my first enemy, I saw that it instead was a turn-based RPG, contrasted with my previous game. Nonetheless, I still had a lot of fun playing. Good thing is that the gameplay isn’t too difficult to learn. There were many other elements of gameplay, like the introduction of the Master Quartz and so on. However, I will leave it at that, and you guys can learn the rest. However, one thing I will mention is that there is one minor detail that is a major anti-frustration feature: you can save wherever you are. That’s right! Go into the Camp Menu, press System and press Save.

Now that I gave you guys and gals a big glimpse into The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, it’s time for my score of the game.

The game is definitely worthy of a 10/10! I can’t thing of anything else the game needs to make it better. The game is practically perfect on its own!

Check Out the The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Launch Trailer:

More information on The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II can be found at http://www.trailsofcoldsteel.com/.

Abrar Ahmad

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I'm the kind of guy who LOVES games with rich storytelling elements, but still finds enjoyment in the other games that don't have those. I am always intrigued by how new and upcoming game developers either bring something new to the table or take something existing and bring an exhilarating twist to it.

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