After playing the game for 130 hours over the course of 8 months, I finally managed to finish Cold Steel III. I was very excited to play this game not only because I love Cold Steel I & II but also because there was so much anticipation for this title. I finished Cold Steel II when III was getting ready to be released in Japan but it would take two years for the game to finally reach western shores. Two years of listening to fans that played the Japanese version proclaiming that the game was the best entry in the Cold Steel story arc if not the best Trails title in general. No game can stand up to that kind of hype so it might not be that surprising that my feelings on Cold Steel III are a bit mixed.

First off there is a lot I like about Cold Steel III. The story has some great moments and I really enjoyed how certain returning characters got more development such as Altina. There were even a few times where I got surprisingly emotional during small character moments like when you meet Towa’s family and share a meal with her and your students. On a technical level Cold Steel III is also a huge improvement over my experience playing the first two Cold Steel games on the Vita. Battles load up instantly and the graphics are far more detailed, being more in line with modern Falcom titles like Ys VIII. The part where the game starts to come apart a bit for me is how momentous and repetitive the story often feels.

The past games in the Cold Steel series are certainly very structured, often having chapters start at school followed by the students going on a trip, discovering a conflict and solving that conflict. When I played through the first chapter or so of Cold Steel III this structure felt comforting, like slipping back into an old routine. However after those initial hours the preceding chapters followed the same story beats almost exactly. I’m not trying to say that there isn’t any variety in the events that happen in each chapter. However there are definitely moments where it feels like Falcom copied and pasted certain scenes into each chapter and just filled in the blanks with different locations and characters. For example the middle of almost every chapter has you reunite with an old member of Class VII after fighting a boss with the scene playing out the same way almost every time. Monster materializes out of nowhere. The team fights it. They think they’ve won the battle but, “oh no,” the monster is still alive. Then, off screen, one of the members of Class VII says something along the lines of: “Not on my watch!” And they jump down from a high place to save the group. It gets to the point that you can literally time your watch to when certain story beats are going to happen.

Another disappointing aspect of the story is the old members of Class VII themselves. I love the new VII members, they are all pretty fun in their own way, but when I first started the game I was the most excited to see what my old classmates had been up to since Cold Steel II. The game even does a great job of hyping up the arrival of an old character, teasing who you are about to meet while you visit certain towns. The thing is that once they appear they don’t really have much to do. Sure they have a role to play in the story but they don’t have a lot going on in terms of anything else. All the old Class VII members feel like they had all their development in the first two games and now they are well established which honestly makes them less interesting to have around. Sure they have new jobs and such but their personalities feel a bit dull since most of them don’t have any more room for growth. It also doesn’t help that you pretty much never have a moment where you can just hang out with the old Class VII. You are almost always talking business whenever they are around. Even during the part of the game where all the old Class VII members meet up for a big party they just end up spending the whole scene talking about how they are going to fight the bad guys. Characters like Millium and Sara are some of the few exceptions since you learn more about their pasts and you get to hang out with them more compared to the other OG classmates (or at least it felt that way to me).

There are also a lot of story moments that feel like retreads of scenes from past games but they don’t work as well as they did in the previous titles. The prime example of this is the Summer Festival near the end of the game which plays out similarly to the School Festival at the end of Cold Steel I (or even the part where you visit Mishelam Wonderland in Ao no Kiseki) . However, the School Festival saw the characters preparing for the festival over a long period of time before the event happens and the school totally transforms when it does, creating a great feeling of setup and payoff. When you go on dates with people during the festival, the whole school is updated and every NPC is now doing something different and has something new to say, making the festival feel alive. The Summer Festival near the end of Cold Steel III works the same way but takes place in a city you haven’t spent that much time in so the characters don’t feel as involved in the event. The location itself doesn’t change that much once the festival starts either nor do the NPCs change after dates, making the event feel far less exciting.

The overall story was also a bit weak in my eyes. While I loved a lot of the story’s smaller moments, especially when they focused on Rean and his new class, the larger story about all the different villains and secret organizations was a bit underwhelming. This isn’t because there aren’t some cool twists and big moments but because a lot of that story is delivered by characters standing around and dumping a bunch of exposition on the player. The game is the longest entry in the entire Trails franchise, with one of the longest scripts as well, yet it feels like most of that is padding and the overall plot doesn’t really start to have any momentum until the very end where it just sits the player down for long storytimes. The story is front and back loaded with almost nothing happening in the middle of the game. I’ve heard that Cold Steel III and IV were originally going to be a single game but got split into two titles during development and I can really feel that in the pacing. It’s like the middle of the game is stalling for time and feeding you a bunch of filler to replace all the story that would have happened there previously. Cold Steel I and II are certainly guilty of the same crime (and even the Trails in the Sky duology) but it feels far more egregious in Cold Steel III. Also the reveal at the very end of the game retcons a bunch of events from past games in a way that takes responsibility away from the villains and makes the whole conflict feel far less interesting.

All that being said, I’m still gonna play Cold Steel IV.

After all those complaints about the game as a whole, I still really enjoyed my time with Cold Steel III on a moment to moment level. I liked how the Branch Campus in Cold Steel III is smaller compared to the school from Cold Steel I/II because it makes the group feel more like an underdog and allows you to get more connected to each student. I liked watching the new Class VII grow and how they also helped Rean grow as a character. I found Rean to be more interesting in this game in general because watching him try to adjust to his new job as an unsure 20-something was far more relatable to me personally.

The battle system is so much snapper compared to the old games and it was really cool to explore parts of Erobonia that were mentioned in past entries but you never saw in person. There was even a weirdly melancholy moment I had while going on a date with Laura where I realized that I didn’t think Rean and her should be in a relationship anymore. So I purposely didn’t have him pursue a romantic event with Laura during their final date even though I had them date each other in previous two games. It was weirdly emotional to basically watch my characters “break up” after spending so much time with them throughout the series. That is a very personal moment that doesn't really apply to anyone else but it speaks to the larger strength of the Trails series. The games do a great job of building their world and relationships throughout multiple titles both in the canonical text and in the headcanon of the players. And that brings me to my final point, I just really like this world and the people who inhabit it. Even if the larger story isn’t going in a direction I’m super happy with, I am so invested in the people involved with this story that I want to see how these events will affect them. This series is so big that the overall plot and conflict is just one of many stories going on in its huge world.

So in the end I still enjoyed this game and I still love the Trails series but I certainly think Cold Steel III falls short in a lot of ways compared to the previous two games. Depending on what you want out of a sequel you might feel the same or you might think it’s the best thing ever. However, if you are playing this game at all, which requires playing almost 7 other super long RPGs, then you are a passenger aboard the crazy train and are most likely never getting off.