THE LEGEND OF HEROES: Trails of Cold Steel IV

Picking up shortly after where the prequel left off, this conclusion to the Cold Steel series of games is structured similarly to ToCS II.

Once again you have to wander the (mostly previously visited) countryside to gather up all your scattered allies with the specter of war hanging in the background. While the repetition is less than welcome, particularly when certain quests have you revisiting an area you just revisited, the game manages to avoid the more annoying (both plot-related and mechanical) pitfalls that so plagued that second game: Instead of having boss fights you ‘lose’ despite winning, it has boss fights where your goal is to reduce the enemies’ HP (which is thankfully not bloated here) by a certain amount.

Marketing-wise it’s a bit misleading however, as you don’t actually get to play as the Trails in the Sky or Crossbell characters much (and the former in particular are pretty bare-bones on Crafts). For most of the game you ‘only’ have access to the Class VII characters, both old and new, alongside a couple semi-guest characters that won’t be available for the final dungeon… though that’s still quite a selection to choose from even if Millium is unavailable for obvious reasons.

As far as storyline development goes, I’d guess this stands out more for wrapping up some long-running Trails in the Sky character arcs than concluding Rean’s storyline. If anything, Rean’s situation is kind of open-ended. A particularly weird thing considering how prominent the series’ relationship aspects are… although I suppose they didn’t really have a choice considering that there’s apparently at least one more Legend of Heroes story arc on the way and they couldn’t very well reference every possible romantic coupling in future games.

To be honest I’m kind of burned out on the series at this point and will probably end up skipping the Reverie epilogue much like I had to end up skipping Trails in the Sky 3.


Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments