LogFAQs > #900188988

I think both the Cold Steel games that have English releases are noticeably worse than the Sky games, though they're pretty great RPG's themselves also.

Cold Steel 3/4 looks hype as hell though, and my reading is that the portion of the fanbase that has played CS3 considers it to be one of the stronger Trails games.

Also about The 3rd, I think the right way to look at the game is as the video game equivalent of a short story collection, rather than a main entry in an adventure epic. In other words I don't really think it matters that the game doesn't have a strong overarching focus on an epic narrative, because to me that's never what the game was trying to be in the first place. And I think the individual stories (including the main one) are quite good--personally I think 3rd easily has the most "top-tier" moments of the series. (Well of the games in English anyway. I've heard quite good things about Ao, which I of course haven't played.)

Obviously that's not exactly a story structure that falls into well-established JRPG conventions, and it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but those are my thoughts anyway.
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