LogFAQs > #897279741

Figured it might be worth making a topic, since people seem to like discussing this series here.

First, I liked this a lot more than the previous five Trails games. I dunno what it was about it, but it felt like everything just worked better here? The battle system is very similar throughout all of the Trails games I've played, but there are always some minor improvements, and this one has the best of the lot. Being able to get triple advantages makes the lead-ups to battles interesting, and it makes random battles a breeze. Turbo mode and skippable attacks make them even better. Battles are over in seconds rather than taking a couple minutes, and there's no more waiting when characters/enemies move around the battlefield. Links are a great little upgrade as well, though I never fully figured out all the symbols <_< (the game was easy enough that it didn't really matter). It felt like every single character had useful Crafts, especially since so many of them could inflict different status ailments. The orbment system is greatly simplified, but I felt like that was okay, especially for the physical-based characters. So yeah, the changes to the gameplay made random battles less tedious and major battles less braindead. I never had a huge problem with the battle system in previous entries, but I definitely didn't care for random battles in general, so this was pretty nice.

The setting is the best fit for the series so far. Not Erebonia, but the combination of the academy as a main base of operations and visiting various towns on Field Studies. The Crossbell games switched to featuring a central location, which was good because the Trails series is so focused on conversations with NPCs and their development over the course of the game, but it lost the sense of adventure that the Sky games had. Cold Steel lets us have a ton of important NPCs that you'll see over the course of the whole game, but also fun adventurous trips to all the different areas. Every single Field Study was great. Always looked forward to doing these. They did a great job of working a personal connection into each one of them, so they always led to good character development and interesting plot developments as well. It was a bit unfortunate that they seemed to sometimes forget that Thors is a military academy, but eh.
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