As I've said many times before I want to be optimistic. The community really believes in this game, and they're... usually right.
They'll need to announce it before the end of the year to meet this kind of a release window, I doubt it but I also doubted this ever getting a Western localization so ..
Likewise want to be optimistic. Even discounting all the work Geofront did already on Zero and Azure, NISA still managed to bring over 4 Falcom games in a year. On the flip side, Kuro doesn't look as short as Reverie.
Man, this series has always interested me but I've never dove in.
What's the best way to play? Trails in the sky series followed by Cold Steel?
My tolerance for anime fluctuates. Sometimes it drives me batty. Sometimes I love it. What is the anime-ness of this series? Or does the post above about the stepbrother and stepsister in the hot spring sum up the anime-ness of the games?
Opinion is split. As someone who's played all 9 English-release games (over 1000 hours, btw, from a guy who does everything), I generally recommend Trails of Cold Steel I & II --> looping back to Trails in the Sky 1-3 --> Trails from Zero & to Azure --> returning back to Trails of Cold Steel III & IV. The primary reason is that the original Trails in the Sky, for however immediately snappy and fun the dialgoue is, is just not a fun video game to play. Even within the Sky series, the games get better to play as they go along but the original starts you off with too few options and abilities are too stringent in their demands. Worse, the game doesn't really coalesce until nearly a
third of the way into its runtime, and the major plotlines up to that point are punctuated by some dumb shit. I like Sky 1 allot after that, maybe even more moment-to-moment than the fan favorite Sky 2, but that doesn't change that I still bounced off the game twice before I played Cold Steel, returned, and powered through what I considered the bad stuff.
Cold Steel on the other hand is allot easier to recommend. The clearly Persona-inspired format the game borrows from is probably familiar to allot of people looking at this game but is still distinct and sets itself apart. This game has a ramp-up time too, but it actually being fun to play makes it easier to recommend as a jump-in point. A common criticism of the first Cold Steel game is that the whole thing is too slow but I don't agree. It's a
slow burn, but the framing of the game, a school adventure where a bunch of kids travel to a bunch of different places learning about the world and themselves, is higlighted by so many moments of learning about the various factions around the country. The adventure is fun in its own right because of how well-packaged it is and because of how interesting it is to piece together the political landscape.
You asked about animeness. Anime is baked into the series' DNA. That said, the stepbrother/sister hotspring is not indicative of the series as a whole. For Trails in the Sky in particular, as initially weird as that kind of attraction being played straight is, the uncynical approach to just about everything else lets me give it a pass. My impression is that the writers had a story they wanted to tell and that particular dynamic served their end best.
The later games get worse about it. The first hour of Cold Steel 1 includes accidentally grabbing a tsundere's boobs and her being mad at you for the next couple chapters of the game which is just... really bad? There are more power of friendship speeches and anime-tropey archetypal characters. It
permeates the experience but generally does not dominate it. Through it all, you know there are machinations under the surface and the reveals are (usually) satisfying.
opencritic.com
