The Legend of Heroes - Trails of Cold Steel (2013)

I'm going to be honest. This game bored me to tears. It's unbelievably poor and it's only made worse by the fact I had people telling me for years that this is the best JRPG in over a decade.

I have no idea what those people are talking about. This game is a meandering mess that's barely able to pull itself above mediocre at best. It seems totally unwilling to venture outside of well-worn tropes and cliches. Playing Trails of Cold Steel was an exercise in how much recycled slop I could stomach.

Now all of that sounds very harsh (because it is) but let's start from the beginning.

I played this game after it was re-released on PS4. I had heard many good things about it from a lot of different people. The last time I heard people talk this way about a JRPG, it was Persona 4 so it must be amazing!

I sat down to play it and was almost immediately disappointed in the premise. You're a high school student who is attending a special school and you're in a special class. It's a cliched premise in a setting I'm not particularly fond of. In my opinion, one of the least interesting places a story in a fantasy world can take place in is a school. It means you're hamstrung by usual high school tropes and it usually indicates that it'll take shortcuts with the exposition by just having teachers dump walls of text at you about how the world works. Often times, this is the case.

But still, let's keep going. You're a member of Class VII. A special class set up just that year with a bold new idea. What if nobles and commoners were placed in the same class together? You see, the school they're at is segregated by class and that kind of... isn't really all the important to the story aside from a few brief moments which I will touch on later. You do your assignments, you have social links, there's side quests, it's all very standard stuff really.

Also I just have to note, the game does the exceptionally cliched thing, in the first hour, of having the protagonist fall into a girl's boobs and she gets angry at him for it and plays it completely straight. It's stuff like that that makes me question the judgement of people who told me the writing in this game is great.

But onto the protagonist himself. You play as Rean Schwarzer, a... character, I guess? It's hard to say because he displays no real personality traits and doesn't seem to have anything worth saying. I was concerned that he was going to be a self-insert character, a wholly blank slate in which you can project onto. Often times this is fine but here in this RPG touted as having a story grand in scale and epic in scope, I think it would benefit to have a protagonist with a little more personality. But you know, maybe this is just what you're supposed to think. Maybe down the line the narrative reveals that he is actually just reserved and calm and he's hiding a more complex character that will slowly come out over the course of the story.

No.

Rean is the most forgettable JRPG protagonist I have ever seen. He is nice, he is agreeable, he works hard, he's cool headed. His likes include 'good things'. His dislikes include 'bad things'. He might be the blandest character ever created. The worst part is that there's no opportunity to play him differently. Normally when the main character is a blank slate, it's to facilitate choices that the player can make, dialogue options or actions. Persona 4 is a good example. The main character is a blank slate but you can choose dialogue options that range from sweet and caring big brother and great friend to a barely interested teenage boy who makes dirty jokes and cheats on his girlfriend. It's all in service of roleplaying, you know, that thing that this genre places a huge emphasis on.

Rean isn't meant to be roleplayed though, you don't really get to make any choices. You get to watch as Rean makes all the decisions and all the decisions he makes are to sit on the fence, not make waves and make everyone be friends. It's honestly such a naive way of viewing the world, it's almost cute. One scene in particular stands out when Rean and some of his friends are picked on by other members of the school during a practical exam. The nobles of Class I have decided to challenge them to a fight.

You win and at this point, I was ready to rub my victory in their faces. These guys insulted you and your friends, called the commoner members of their class "filth" and makes you fight with only male party members because the girls obviously aren't up to it. After that I was ready to slap this guy and tell him that I kicked his ass and until he can beat me in a fight, he can keep his mouth shut.

Too bad.

You aren't given a choice on how to proceed or how to respond to this, Rean just tries to be friendly and compliment their fighting skills despite all they did and said. When given the choice of standing up for his friends and oppose bigotry, Rean decides to sit on the fence and try to appease these people. And what repercussions do these Class I pricks face? The teacher's combat training lesson is going to be to point out everything they did wrong in their fight. Epic. Owned. How will they ever recover?

This was where the tedium reached its limit for me. This isn't a role playing game, this is watching someone else just decide what to do. This is a role playing game in the same way a D&D game where your DM keeps railroading you into what he wants you to do is. I'm not asking for an entirely different route based on what I say or do, I'm just asking that if this character is going to be such a blank slate, I should be allowed to define some of his personality going forward. It wouldn't be a problem if the narrative did anything with this. Maybe being nice and naive to a fault gets him in trouble? No.

This problem extends to most of the characters. Alisia is the heiress of a big company but she doesn't get on with her mother. Elliot is shy and sensitive in contrast to his fierce father. Laura is a refined lady. Fie is quiet and distant. I won't bother with the rest. They consist almost entirely of cliches. Between the 12 character main cast, I don't think there's a single original idea between them. They're less characters and more collections of tropes bundled into the shape of a person. None of this is more apparent than in the 'social links' in which Rean proceeds to make every girl fall in love with him.

This is the extent of the choice the player gets. Which girl do you like the most? Or more accurately, which archetype do you like the most? Do you like the reserved, quiet girl? Do you like the noble girl? Do you like the modest girl? Do you like the emotionless girl? They're all here. Even the teacher who hates paperwork and loves drinking is here. It's just all so mind-numbing. I came to this game being told that it has amazing characters and I'm seeing no evidence of that. I'm seeing the same old tired cliches again.

So what of the highly praised story? The characters are a bust but hey, maybe the story can make up for it.

Well maybe it could, if I could find it.

No seriously. Nothing happens in this game. The entire thing is setup to the final act and all of that happens elsewhere, away from the actual story we witness which is Rean and a couple of his friends go to school, fuck around, do chores for people and go on a field trip at the end of the month where they do chores for different people, sometimes earning a crumb of story for later.

The majority of this story is told in cryptic conversations between two or more characters we don't know. Most often this takes place after the field trip where some characters will stand on a cliff overlooking the train Rean and his friends are on and say things like "Yes, the plans are proceeding as scheduled" or "Everything is falling into place" or exchange knowing glances to each other. Nothing ever happens. It's all just characters teasing that something, somewhere is going to happen eventually at some point in the future.

The story is just too vague to care about. I'm not intrigued by what's happening, I'm just getting frustrated. It doesn't help that this extends to the character interactions too, for the most part. So often, a character will say something to which another character has a big reaction to it and a dialogue box that just says "...". Someone asks them what's wrong and they reply "Oh... It's nothing..." which is code for "This plot point is a few more hours away so we better foreshadow it." This story feels like what happens if you try to write an entire script with the idea of 'show, don't tell' reversed.

A lot of this game is world-building and that's fine if you like that kind of thing. Personally though, I don't. World-building is good when the things you're building are relevant to the story you're telling. It's good to know what an ARCUS is or who Giliath Osborne is but often times it feels like I'm reading a TTRPG manual. There are books in the game about things like the history of the railways that are longer than the summary of what one of the main characters did in this game on the fan wiki. While I'm not overly fond of this kind of world-building for the sake of it, it usually doesn't bother me. That is unless you are spending more time focusing on world-building than making an interesting story or characters.

And both of these issues just collide for me. You have a story that is told extremely slowly in an extremely vague way and most of the information you're given is world-building that seems wholly irrelevant. It gets very old very quick and makes me just want to stop playing. I have been assured by people that it's all important and this is all setup for the future games where it becomes good and I'm sorry but if you told me that I had to pay full price for a 60 hour game with barely any story and characters I actively dislike so that I can pay full price again for the sequel to it where it gets better, I would never have bought it to begin with. Especially since there appears to be absolutely no reason you couldn't cut the first like, 50 hours of the game into a 2-3 hour prologue and have the ending and the second game be the rest of it. The pacing is so unbelievably bad.

The writing also appears to treat the player like they are a completely fucking idiot. Everyone gives their full name except for Alisia who is referred to as Alisia R. Hmmmm, I wonder if there's a reason she hides her surname? On a completely different note, have you heard of the Reinford Group? They're the biggest company in the country and they deal in weapons. They're very controversial.

Or how about the identity of the mysterious character known as "C"? Who could that be? Maybe it's Elliot or maybe it's Jusis or maybe it's, I dunno, Crow? I guess we'll have to wait and see how the plot unfolds.

And that's what I mean here. The game is either trying to be smart and failing or they think you, the player, are so stupid that you need the world's most obvious mysteries to solve or else you'll never guess what happens. Neither is good.

Ultimately I'm mostly just disappointed with this. I first saw this and assumed it to be a mid anime game, a solid 5-6/10 but then everyone told me it was incredible and so I gave it a go and even my middling estimation of it was far, far too generous. I won't be playing the sequel any time soon.

I can't really think of how to end this review so I'll just end it by telling you my reaction to the ending. You end up in a mecha fight (for the first time in the game) against one of the antagonists and defeat them when suddenly one of the others fly in to assist. You have another mecha fight against him and beat him and then...

You lose in the cutscene...
And then the mecha flies away while Rean protests...
And then the game ends...

"Are you fucking serious?"