The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III is the third game in the Cold Steel subseries of The Legend of Heroes series. It was first released for the PS4 and later ported to PC and Switch, for those who prefer power or portability.
The game picks up one and a half years after the second game, despite the short amount of time, everyone’s appearances have matured quite a bit. While it is beginning a new story arc, it is highly recommended to have played at least the first two Cold Steel games. Due to several returning characters from previous games in The Legend of Heroes series, as well as heavy references to those events, you’ll gain more enjoyment if you have played the Trails in the Sky trilogy and the Crossbell Duology. However, they aren’t a necessity as you’ll be able to gather mostly what’s happening since the characters summarize the events. If you haven’t played the first two Cold Steel games, and you have the patience and time to read through huge chunks of text, then the game provides detailed summaries of those events. It isn’t a perfect (or even a good) replacement but it will do in a pinch.
The game’s opening chapter is typical of the series. It starts with a climactic event, before jumping back several months to show the events leading up to it. Rean, having graduated from Thors Academy and having become famous for his part in several high profile events, has been reallocated to become an instructor at the Thors Academy Branch Campus. There, it is no coincidence that he becomes the instructor of Class VII. The first hour is almost completely cutscenes, and a huge amount of characters, both old and new alike, are rapidly introduced. You better get used to this though because the cutscenes can be a bit too long, severely skewing the story to gameplay ratio and can be quite exhausting at times when it is cutscene after cutscene after cutscene. There is tons of text but not everything is voiced.
Trails of Cold Steel III has a complex battle system. Take the battle system from the second game, and then tack on several new mechanics. It is turn-based and instead of the rotating circle menu, all actions are now mapped to the d-pad and face buttons in order to speed up gameplay. Furthermore, you can speed up the animations as well as completely skipping them to streamline the battles even more.
Each character has three different types of attacks: normal physical, Crafts which are special physical moves, and Arts which are magical moves. The latter two have additional effects. Hitting and being hit will give you CP used for crafts and also allow each character to use their ultimate moves known as S-Crafts.
There is a bar on the left hand side to show the turn order. Each action by your character will delay their next turn by a variable amount, so you need to be careful not to spam your strongest moves in quick succession as that’ll probably give enemies multiple turns before your next. Characters can move and position themselves on the battle field, use items and swap party members at any time. Physical attacks have one of four different attributes. Enemies may be weak or resistant against particular ones. Use something that they are weak against and you’re more likely to “unbalance” them which can lead to additional assist attacks from linked party members.
The new additions to the combat system include a guard bar, which depletes when you attack. If you manage to fully empty the guard bar, the enemy breaks and is susceptible to critical hits as well as losing a turn. Then there are Brave Orders, which uses BP. These don’t use up a turn and bestow helpful buffs. With the addition of Brave Orders, you are expected to use them and enemies will seem buffed up as a result.
The minigames are also revamped as well. The new card game is a lot more involved and requires way more strategy than in previous games. There are elements from Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh in its design. Fishing is less button mashy but still very simple.
Despite the new location and mechanics, the gameplay loop is very familiar and similar to the past games. While Rean is an instructor, he still splits his time between teaching (basically the other side of being a student) and free days. There are plenty of optional side events which while are mostly comprised of fetch quests, they are made much more interesting due to the characters. The story doesn’t progress day by day. You only see events for a few days at a time before skipping forward several weeks. However, the characters pack in so much within a day that it’s hard to believe all that could have happened in such a short amount of time.
Like previous games, the story is a slow burn. This is a massive game, even ten hours in and you would have barely made a dent into the first chapter. The story gathers pace at around the midpoint where it threatens to reverse a major event that happened in the second game. This is much like how the second game reversed something in the first. You’d think that it wouldn’t dare to do this since it made such a big deal out of it and this development threatens to demean everything.
The story basically has Rean teaching what he has learnt to the new Class VII. As part of Thors Academy, each chapter focuses on the field exercises that the classes take a part of. These allow the characters to travel all over Erebonia, in places both old and new. The secretive society, Ouroboros, does something fishy at each location and Rean learns slightly more after each encounter. The story can be a lot more political than previous games. A large focus is Crossbell’s annexation into the Erebonia, which brought with it a lot of issues integrating it into the Empire as well as causing tension with neighboring countries.
The graphics, having been built specifically for the PS4 this time, are polished and runs at 60 FPS. So if you have been playing the previous games on the Vita where it would chug, it is much smoother here. Playing on a PS4 Pro will also allow it to render at a native 4K resolution. While it looks good, the graphics won’t wow you when compared to other AAA heavy hitters. The story has flashbacks to events of previous games though and that’s when it is obvious at how much the graphics have improved on the character models themselves, even if it might not have struck you at first.
Other nice quality-of-life improvements including the snappy load times. It’s great considering how many areas you have to go to frequently. Complementing this is the immediately availability of the quick travel menu. There is a high speed mode which allows you to play any part of the game at a faster speed (roughly 1.5x) as well as being able to fast forward or completely skip events. Plus, there’s the usual excellent soundtrack to go along with everything.
The game is not too hard overall. Several bosses may give you a bit of a challenge. Some bosses do have annoying traits and these are the unfair ones. These bosses have the ability to constantly heal and buff themselves in one turn. It is ridiculous when they heal three times in a row and stack buffs at the same time. Giving bosses the ability to heal is the cheapest and laziest way a developer can make them more “challenging”, and this is the worst part of the game. While it is rare, when it’s there, it’s frustrating as all hell.
Other bosses are cheap in that they have party wide attacks that no matter how many buffs that you have, it will put all your characters’ HP into the red. This attack is then followed up by the other boss immediately having their turn and does a party wide attack to kill them all in one hit. High evasion rates mean nothing because these bosses have insane accuracy. It’s just frustratingly unbalanced when you’re doing so well and then one attack is all they need to completely decimate your party. It’s just a terrible design choice that ruins a lot of the game’s pivotal story moments.
The game really forces you to play a specific way, which mainly involves maxmixing your break damage to disable the boss. Then you spam delay moves to give your characters tons of turns before the boss recovers.
If only there was a faster way to retry a battle instead of waiting for everyone to die. There are times where you know it is too much of an annoyance to try and get your advantage back and just wish to restart the battle. It happens mostly when a boss spams a party wide attack that causes multiple status ailments and it’s the second boss in a boss rush so you don’t want to reload, mess around with your setup and then face the earlier boss again.
The prevalent of guest characters makes it feel like you never spend enough time playing as the new Class VII, even though that might not be the case. Forcing you to use those characters can be annoying as you haven’t spent too much time with them in this game to be familiar with their strengths. When all the characters get together, you can be sure that there will be plenty of corny and cheese lines, although these are a staple of the Cold Steel series. Rean is also super popular with the ladies, and… it can be a bit too much this time around.
It takes a long time but after around 40-50 hours, it will finally reveal some of the answers to the mysteries that it had been building up for so long. It explores the past of several major characters of the previous games and how they are connected to Chancellor Osborne. After about 70 hours, we get to the good stuff. As typical of the series though, it doesn’t reveal everything or even all that much, but it is enough to give a tantalizing taste of what is to come (in the next game). The story has gotten a lot more intricate with its ties to past events in the Sky trilogy and the Crossbell duology as it constantly references those events.
The game has a samey feel to it if you have played previous games. The boss rush at the final dungeon here you’re facing pretty much all the characters, are predictable but no less epic. When we finally get to learn about the crazy plan of the antagonists, it portrays it in such a way that they have a weak justification for their actions. Unfortunately, the game ends on a massive cliffhanger, it literally ends right in the middle of a scene. The ending doesn’t have the same emotional impact as the previous two games’ endings but it was still pretty crazy in terms of what happens and how many things that several of the characters were hiding. There are heaps of questions left unanswered but it sheds light to several long running arcs that started from as far back as Trails in the Sky. It basically threw a bunch of stuff at you out of nowhere for the final scenes to leave you in shock or surprise. What happens is completely unexpected but is poorly explained, and it is hard to say whether they will reverse some of those events in the next game.
Reloading your cleared save data for a second playthrough will allow you to carry over pretty much everything, including your levels. This is the ideal way to play through the Nightmare difficulty, which significantly buffs up the enemies, with the bosses still giving you a decent challenge without being too difficult. The only annoying thing with the second playthrough is that it doesn’t keep your equipment in their slots. You’ll be spending a while fiddling around with all the characters’ slots to get to back where you left off.
Overall, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III is a great game but not quite as good as the first two. This is because the game is more towards setting up the scene for the fourth and final game instead. While it is a massive game, taking at least 70 to 80 hours, even with a guide and playing on high speed mode for the cutscenes, the bulk of it don’t involve massive or crazy questions. Rather, the game is used to build up a mountain of questions. The gameplay loop is structured too similarly to previous games so that might cause some fatigue to players and the abrupt ending to serve as a big cliffhanger to the next game can only be described as brutal, in the sense that it felt like the developers had to find a point to end, and so ended it right in the middle something big happening.
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The Early Enrollment Edition, which was the only edition at launch, comes with a mini artbook and a soundtrack CD. The CD has a selection of five tracks, three of which are battle themes and the remaining two are music that plays when you’re in the town. They’re all great tracks, and the titles of the five are:
- Brave Steel
- Start Line
- Pancake of the Way Home From School
- Sword of Biting Gale
- Proud Grudge
The artbook has 23 pages (including the front cover) and has the cut-ins and menu portraits of Rean, Class VII and several other playable characters. Then it finishes it of with key visuals, some concept art and location art. These are cool as extras but nothing worthwhile to pay additional for. A sample of some of the pages are below.
