The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (TCS for short) is the 6th entry in the Trails franchise by Nihon Falcom. Similar to the long running Final Fantasy series, TCS can be enjoyed without playing its’ previous entries. TCS falls in that special realm of game between a AAA title and an indie game. There is a noticeable gap in graphical fidelity and production values in TCS compared to a AAA game but there is enough content there to not be relegated into indie territory. For what TCS lacks in sheer development power and budget, the game more than makes up for it with a well developed cast of characters and an intriguing plot.

The game starts out with an action packed prologue. The player is immediately thrown in what appears to be an all out war between humans and robots. The plot thickens when the hero and his comrades realize that robots have commandeered two cannons capable of levelling a city. However right before the cannons fire, the game pulls a fast one on you and tells how our hero and friends got to this point via a flashback.

It is at this point TCS does its’ world building; and it is impressive. The game introduces you to our protagonist Rean Schwarzer and his 8 other classmates attending Thors Military Academy. The game also introduces the teachers, side characters and tells you about the history of the school and the world of Erebonia. This massive information dump in the first two hours of the game is understandably overwhelming at first but fortunately the game provides an information section where you can catch up on the story and all the encountered characters at your own pace.

TCS has a staggering amount of text. If you enjoy reading in games, this is the game for you. You can speak to every single NPC in the game. Not only is the dialog from the NPCs interesting, they also have multiple lines of text and appear in different areas as the story progresses. NPCs are treated as characters who have their own lives and relationships. Some early examples are a boy who has a crush on a nun or a couple who are in a rocky relationship. The closest game that the NPC’s in TCS reminds me of is Majora’s Mask.

The plot of TCS revolves around the politics of royalty. In the world of Erebonia, people born of royal blood are treated as first class citizens while everyone else is relegated to being a commoner. In Erebonia, the royals rule over the commoners. They dress in elegant white clothing, live in posh areas and have servants and maids do their every bidding. Eventually the game shows that things are not as black as white as they seem. There are financially successful commoners and commoners with high military backgrounds who are treated with the same respect as royals. On the other hand, there are some royals who choose to live their lives as commoners to avoid the societal pressures of ruling over a state. Some of the characters you meet including the protagonist are not who they seem to be. The game teases you just enough every chapter to make you intrigued to keep playing.

The main loop of TCS is split between school work and field studies. The school work is undeniably influenced by the Persona series, most notably Persona 3. In the morning, the protagonist listens to lectures and answers quizzes. In the afternoon, Rean gets to complete side quests and bond with his teammates. In addition, Rean and his classmates must explore an ever expanding dungeon (not unlike Tarturus in Persona 3) in the old schoolhouse. At night, Rean gets another opportunity to talk with his classmates at the dorm. Unlike the Persona series, the school work in TCS only lasts for 2-3 days before Rean and his classmates embark on a field studies trip.

The field studies trips play like a typical JRPG where Rean and his friends travel to a town/city and complete quests. The quests range from monster hunts to benign fetch quests. At the end of each chapter, Rean is graded on his performance in the quizzes as well as the field studies. Depending on how well Rean does, grants the opportunity to unlock exclusive gear and items.

This is the first problem I have with TCS. The only way to get a perfect score for each chapter is to complete every single quest including hidden side quests. These hidden side quests are activated by speaking with a specific NPC at a specific time of day. I found myself speaking to every NPC at least twice every day, once during the morning and once during the evening to ensure that I did not miss any hidden quests. Fortunately the dialog for the NPCs is so varied and interesting that the process was not as laborious. Nevertheless I would have preferred the game explicitly tell me all the quests available. Another option is to resort to a walkthrough if that’s your jam.

Battles in TCS are a mix of turn based and positional combat. Some moves affect a specific area around the character and other moves only affect a straight line. Arts serve as the magic in this game while Crafts are character specific skills. There is also a random buff element in the game where if an ally/enemy lands on specific turn, they will get a boost in hp, magic, etc. The unique element to TCS is the link system. Attacking an enemy’s weapon weakpoint triggers a link attack which ranges from a basic follow-up attack to the equivalent of an all out attack found in the latter Persona games. Overall I found the difficulty of the game to be on the easier side. Starting around the mid-late game I was able to one-hit basic enemies and defeat bosses without breaking a sweat. Stacking buffs on characters and repeatedly using delay attacks made most bosses completely trivial to beat.

The side activities in the game include fishing, cooking and reading books. These activities are fairly basic and serve more as extra busy work if you really want to get the best gear and items. Fishing is not challenging, only requiring the player to mash on a given button for a time. Cooking is all about just gathering ingredients and partnering with the right teammate to cook the dish. And reading books is completely optional and has no tangible benefit. It’s merely there as entertainment for the player to read some more things that are completely unrelated to the plot.

The presentation is TCS’s weakest point. The game was initially released in 2013 built from the ground up to run on the PS Vita. The graphics are rudimentary with basic lighting and texture mapping. Characters have a limited range of motion and are stuck in the same pose when still. Even on the PC version where anti-aliasing and shadow resolution is ramped up, TCS at its’ best looks like a game made for the PS2 or Gamecube. The music is a serviceable fantasy JRPG score. It is nothing too memorable or catchy to listen to compared to the music in the Final Fantasy or Persona series.

If there is one thing I would like to spoil, is that the game ends in a cliffhanger. It honestly felt like a slap in the face because all of the mysteries and intrigue built up throughout the story was meant to be revealed in the subsequent TCS games. I find it infuriating that I have to pay for multiple games to reach a satisfying conclusion. Other than this sticking point, I can wholeheartedly recommend TCS for any JRPG fan who loves to read… a lot.