Well that sure was a lot better than Act 2! 3-1 was probably the most consistently good chapter in the game so far, though it was also insanely looooong. Thankfully all the content was good at least! The side quests were great (this is something the game has excelled at so far - almost every side quest has been excellent, and I think the average side quest quality has probably been better than any other Trails game), and the main story parts were real good too! Actually getting some answers was nice (though the cause of the curse being lol evil divine knight is... not exciting. Finally beating Sharon and co. and getting her/Schmidt/Irina/George back on your side was all good. I still feel like them becoming evil is a storyline that shouldn't have existed though. Honestly you could delete all the Black Workshop parts from the Cold Steel games and lose nothing of value. Alberich is not an interesting villain either. Taking down Rutger was good and emotional. Liked it very much! It's silly that the third path is just "defeat Erebonia before the war starts" as if Musse couldn't possibly have come up with that idea, though.
3-2:
This was mostly good too! I liked exploring Crossbell, the confrontation with Victor was cool (gimme all the Aurier), the performance was a bit cheesy but fun with how literally everyone joined in (too bad they didn't have Osborne watching from the rafters or something), Orchis Tower music rocked (did they use this music in the prologue?). The ending was lame though. Am I really supposed to believe Rufus could take Lianne by surprise after all of 2 weeks with his Divine Knight? And all the things appearing in the sky was lame too, especially since we're obviously going to need all of two days to take down every single one of them. Narrating everything with their appearance sucked, too. Oh well.
Finally, is it just me or are the bond events better in this game better than the previous CSs? I remember 1 and 2's bond events were mostly kinda trash, but here (and maybe in 3?) they're on another level. Lots of them have interesting story beats, and even tie into the main plot in cool ways. I'm mostly sad when I can't pick one (except the crappy romance ones).
Man this is gonna be the longest Trails game by a lot (my playtime is already several hours above CS3, which was the previous longest). ---