I wrote a previous post about Trails of Cold Steel so its only fitting to give my thoughts on it's sequel. Trails of Cold Steel came out last year and I finally beat the game yesterday. The struggle was real when I say that I'm slow completing games. That and the honest truth is I take my own good time playing through games. Enjoying a game's storyline is more important to me than running through a game at the speed of light. Then going on gamer message boards boasting how you beat the game in a manner of a week. I tend to play a little bit then stop for the day and pick the game back up the next day or in the next few days. I'm not a "sit in the house in front of the television and play games all day" kind of guy. Spending the day inside playing games has happened for me before but its not a daily occurrence. The Legend of Heroes games can take a really long time to play through for a various of reasons. I'm not sure what I mentioned in my post about the first game but nothing major changed in two except for a few new features.
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2 takes place right after the ending of the first game. No time has passed since you last played in the land of Erebonia and in reality since the both game were released relatively close to each other. Everything will still feel familiar to the player and the plot still unfolds the same. It seems like the creators could let go of the calendar system that shows the days pass by. This feels more relevant in a school setting but outside of school life, it didn't fit for me. Same with the task system and grade reports. Most of this game takes place away from Thors academy so I don't understand why it was like home school was in session. A lot of players complained that the storyline was super slow in the beginning of the first game and this game. I can't disagree with these comments. All legend of Heroes games have slow progression in the beginning. Not only that but there's always a load of dialogue with each cut scene making certain scenes in this series go by really slow. Book lovers will like the way this game is presented and I like reading too. Character interactions are so funny that its epic. Sometimes, I just wanted to get on with the program though. The plot does get up and running after you find all your classmates again. With this new plot comes a brand new batch of villains. They make their appearances along with familiar faces we saw at the end of the first game. I found a lot of the villains to be very intriguing because of the unique personalities that were placed on each character. Mcburn freaked me out the most. Just looking at him, you could tell he was going to be a hard boss to beat. Man, did he live up to his name........ Our main band of characters are pretty much the same(besides the obvious costume changes. No school, no uniform.) but you get to control more characters that you didn't get to control in the first game. I felt more of a connection with everyone during this game because the plot really took time to go into the character's's pasts. Especially if the player used the free days to get to know all your party members. The story does good trying to suck you into the story with shock value as well as new mysteries that have yet to be solved. Legend of Heroes always has the best cliff hangers that an RPG can give it's audience. However, A really awful inconsistency happened during the epilogue section of the game. For people who don't know, Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel takes place in the same world as an earlier released game, Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Another game called Tales Zero also takes place in the land of Erebonia. Tales Zero characters suddenly pop up in this game and most players don't know what to do with them. Japanese fans probably loved the reunion they got to have with these characters while foreign audiences are looking super confused. It didn't help that this game kept going after I thought that I had beat it. Nope. That wasn't the final boss unfortunately even thought the name of the chapter said final. You can imagine how frustrated I was by the time I got to the true final boss. Trails in the Sky was released here for playstation portable(PSP) but the second game was never released as a physical copy outside of Japan. Tales Zero was never released here either so we foreign audiences are missing a crossover story that could help us better enjoy Trails of Cold Steel's storyline. I hope that the remastered versions of these games make it stateside in the future. I had the chance to play Trails in the Sky part one back in the day. Still have yet to play part 2 though.
The gameplay offers players more of a variety of ways to travel around Erebonia and a little adjustments to the battle system. Travel was limited to trains mostly during the first game. Hence the name Trails of COLD STEEL. Now, Rean has Gundam reject Vailmar and later in the game, a flying ship. You can also choose to ride a horse or a motorcycle when traveling on foot later in the game. The world becomes much more open to you here, wherein it felt more restricted in Cold Steel one. The battle system adds a feature called overdrive that allows two characters to make the battlefield go into a warped time zone where only those two characters can attack instantly for a set number of turns. In order to use overdrive, two characters have to be linked together and the overdrive meter must be filled up by damaging enemies. Different characters can link with each other but not all of them can use overdrive so you have to find the trail chests to unlock overdrive for all characters. This game uses Vailmar more often too. Soildat battles are something you have to get used to. Once you find what strategy works for you, The battles are not that hard. Legend of Heroes is all about having a good strategy in battle. Plan your moves and be ready for anything. Your actions could me life or death for your party.
Things that got on my nerves the most was the recycling of areas and bosses. I go so tired of seeing the same bosses that I fought in the first installment. Recycled bosses mostly appeared during the side quests. It was such a frequent occurrence that I could guess what boss I had to fight again in certain areas. Were the creators too lazy to draw some new boss designs?? Players do get to see new areas but there's more recycling of old areas than the creation of new ones. The task system wasn't fun at times either. It felt like just what it was, TASKS! You do feel rewarded after you report your completed tasks in.
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2 was a good follow up to the it's first counterpart. The game doesn't lack good characters, story, or, gameplay. Some of the mechanics used to execute the game just suffered because of the lack of equal effort in making all aspects of the game fresh and new.
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