Board 8 > Trails from MZero

(+) Yeah! (+)

Azure, Zero, Sky 2, and Sky 3 all have better OSTs than any Cold Steel game.
---

Cold steel makes up for it by actually having voice acting, so it's okay.

I'm running around the school preparing for the festival now, dumbfounded how they are going to make this the final chapter. I guess the terrorists are going to attack Trista or something? That's my guess.

The game is not quite caught up to Azure yet with all the crazy happenings in Crossbell after the trade conference. I feel like it has to be coming pretty soon though. How much downtime was there in Azure after everything went down? I really hope the plot actually advances in CS2. I know it's supposed to be an entry point into the series so it's naturally going to play more like Sky1 in terms of pacing, but I wish they would drip feed something for the old timers. I feel like I haven't gotten anything except Erebonian world building and character introduction since minute 1

---

Lloyd was in prison for like a month, I think.

---

Oh nice, vice principal heimlich is a Rixia superfan. Somehow that makes...perfect sense

---

_stingers_ posted...

Fair enough. I don't get why you'd play on Nightmare if you don't feel like trying to tackle that challenge though, but that's just me. All or nothing!

Hey, you played on Hard so you must have wanted some challenge, but you didn't go all the way to Nightmare. I wanted some challenge so I played on Nightmare, but I'm not going all the way to beating superbosses on Nightmare!

---

Lol yeah true. You got me there. Trails 1 on nightmare was just the worst thing I've ever done to myself...I couldn't bear to repeat it

---

Also, Crossbell declared independence! Beautiful...it finally begins...

Also, disappointed with how much they talked up the girls costumes and what they actually looked like. Penguin suits wasnt my first thought for sexy dancer costume

---

Wow I didn't realize Wazy is only 17. I thought he was around the same age as Randy

---

This week, in JRPG Quarterly...legends foretold a hero older than 18 was set to appear, but they were killed by God for daring to grow old. How will his edgy younger brother save the day?

---

_stingers_ posted...

This week, in JRPG Quarterly...legends foretold a hero older than 18 was set to appear, but they were killed by God for daring to grow old. How will his edgy younger brother save the day?

Kuro's main character is 24!

---

I wonder how many times he'll be called an old man in the first few hours of the game

---

R.I.P Pater-Mater :(

---

I got the feeling Ian was a crook based on the chat with Kilika and Lecter on the train, but hadn't considered it up until that point. A lot of heel turns in this game. KeA is now a tree.

Water master arts too good. Demon Wald OHKO'd me with his S-Craft but with Elie using the master arts, Wazy healing, and Lloyd and Randy going ham I rolled him. Not to mention Elie's ATS is pretty high so she was doing pretty good damage when her turn came up

Wazy put him to sleep with a pretty sweet shoryuken

---

demon wald is like the easiest story boss fight in the second half of the game

get an evade tank and give them one shield and you can't lose

---

NFUN posted...

ao no kiseki is evade tank: The Game

---

NFUN posted...

demon wald is like the easiest story boss fight in the second half of the game

Shirley was even easier!

---

TreeA

---

_stingers_ posted...

TreeA

wow

Don't hate the player hate the game

---

_stingers_ posted...

TreeA

A+ post

---

Hopefully I will get back to cold steel this weekend. I've been playing Pokemon unite with all my free time since it launched

---

_stingers_ posted...

Hopefully I will get back to cold steel this weekend. I've been playing Pokemon unite with all my free time since it launched

jungle or feed tbh

---

Yes I try to force Gengar jungle every game. I'm probably at a 70% winrate so far with it

---

_stingers_ posted...

Yes I try to force Gengar jungle every game. I'm probably at a 70% winrate so far with it

I haven't played enough to get Gengar yet but I quite like Cinderace

---

Sigmund took forever to beat because I couldn't do much damage to him, or even his goons for that matter, but I was never in any real danger of losing. Water master arts all day baby

---

that Arios fight was bogus. Now I know how enemies feel when I delay lock them. He and his minion got like 30 turns in a row it was bonkers. Idk how that happened because when I beat him it never got that bad

Adios Arios

---

nothing like spending 45 minutes fighting a boss just to get one-shot lmao

---

oh cool he can vanish my whole party too

this final boss sucks noodles

---

oh yeah I would've warned you about that if I knew you were near

just spread your party out and give one mute immunity and have them cast to cheese the boss. after the vanish bullshit it's not worth doing for real

---

The final boss felt like a worthy final boss at least. Too many games phone it in

---

Vanish is stupid

---

_stingers_ posted...

The final boss felt like a worthy final boss at least. Too many games phone it in

it's not a good fight. better than the joke 0's was, at least

the last good trails final boss was 3rd's

---

I thought it was a good fight. It only took me two tries though I guess if you have to redo it a million times you might end up hating it

---

a fight that has an almost unavoidable 1-HKO move (and that can soft-lock the game if you avoid it too well) that doesn't imply before-hand that it can't be shielded is inherently a bad fight. add in getting characters vanished for doing too much damage to get a fight that's more about saying "fuck you" than having a fun level of difficulty. It's also absurdly trivially easy and obvious to cheese, not by the game mechanics being broken but just by it being a poorly-designed fight

---

I mean that's what I liked about it. It was like a puzzle to figure out and then when you do you should be able to win. There's not a lot of ways to make JRPG fights truly "challenging" since it's all about math and decision making, them adjusting the decisions you have to make in the final fight was a nice final challenge. That's how I see it at least

---

_stingers_ posted...

I thought it was a good fight. It only took me two tries though I guess if you have to redo it a million times you might end up hating it

I only had to play it once to know I hated it. It's more of a gimmick than a challenge, and I hate when RPGs have a gimmicky last boss to make it a "challenge"

---

_stingers_ posted...

I mean that's what I liked about it. It was like a puzzle to figure out and then when you do you should be able to win. There's not a lot of ways to make JRPG fights truly "challenging" since it's all about math and decision making, them adjusting the decisions you have to make in the final fight was a nice final challenge. That's how I see it at least

it didn't though. It's still faster to win by eating the vanishes; it's not a real threat, it's just punishing you for how the game is designed. You go through the whole game by managing buffs to get the most damage from attacks, and then in this one fight, for no reason, the game says "uh-uh-uh, you shouldn't do that", without actually designing the fight around having you not do that.

Making you repeat the entire fight because at one point, with no indication, it requires you to do as much damage as possible isn't a puzzle either. It's nothing more than a "fuck you" from the game and terrible design.

Suddenly adding in new mechanics with little apparent forethought isn't an inherently effective way to make a fight more challenging, and decidedly failed in this case. There are a million ways to spice up the fight without it feeling like the game is disrespecting you (a timer isn't a good way either, though at least it's funny). And the series had some fun, well-balanced, non-gimmicky boss fights, so they clearly should know how to make a final boss that is challenging because it's challenging, not because it has sucker-punches and annoying mechanics... although, judging by the abuse of s-cradts in the super bosses of this game turning the fights into a worse Zero Field spam game than 3rd, maybe they lost that skill in Ao

---

and for the record, it's not like the fight is particularly good even ignoring the nonsense it has

---

MZero, the final credits have, arguably, spoilers up through CS3 or 4. You may want to skip them

---

That ending was... pretty underwhelming. The Guy and KeA stuff was pretty good (my guy Lloyd TAKING ACTION and running into god knows where to save KeA) but after that it was kind of abruptly over. Mariabelle just casually drops that she joined Ourboros in an anti-climatic way (granted I spoiled it a long time ago, but still), and it doesn't go into detail about what happened to Arios, Ian, the Red Constellation, etc. Did they just let them all off the hook? Idk I felt like Zero's ending was more satisfying even though it was clearly leading into a sequel.

Mariabelle sucks, Shirley sucks, Ourboros sucks, sunscreen scene sucks, final boss sucks

Lloyd is cool, Lloyd's friends are cool, Master Quartz are cool, battle system and music are cool as usual

The story was a little more convoluted than it needed to be but was alright overall

Lloyd > Randy > Wazy > Elie > Rixia > Tio > Noel > Dudley (but I like them all)

Zero > CS > Azure/3rd > SC > FC

I'm going back and forth on whether I preferred 3rd or not

NFUN posted...

MZero, the final credits have, arguably, spoilers up through CS3 or 4. You may want to skip them

too late, but this was the way it was meant to be played so it can't be that big of a deal (hopefully)

---

MZero posted...

too late, but this was the way it was meant to be played so it can't be that big of a deal (hopefully)

you say that, but you're dealing with Falcom here, and you'll note that Ao spoiled a great deal of the major plot points of CS1 and CS2 pretty explicitly

azure's ending really soured me on the whole game. I was already getting "off" impressions through much of the finale chapter, and the ending just blegh. Pretty symptomatic of the downfall of Trails, with the forced horniness and harem bullshit, beginning of the games being noticeably rushed, and weirdly unsatisfying plot beats

---

I don't think it was that big of a deal the way Azure did it, and you'll be spoiled on the events of one or the other regardless of how you do it. I played Zero and Azure last, and I still really enjoyed the experience. They still managed to surprise me from time to time, too.

---

Leonhart4 posted...

I don't think it was that big of a deal the way Azure did it, and you'll be spoiled on the events of one or the other regardless of how you do it. I played Zero and Azure last, and I still really enjoyed the experience. They still managed to surprise me from time to time, too.

saying that there's a civil war, specifying the factions, saying Osborne got shot, saying Osborne survived, saying how long the war lasts and that Crossbell gets conquered for how long are all fairly significant end-game plot points that are casually dropped, the last few of which are just explicitly told to you in the end credits for zero reason at all except as a half-assed way to tease Cold Steel and to try to rescue the rushed, anticlimactic ending of the game in a pathetically low-budget attempt not even Unisuga could rescue

---

I mean, it's not great, but it also didn't ruin the experience for me having Cold Steel spoil most of the major Crossbell plot points. Cold Steel put together the skeleton, but I still wanted to see how Zero and Azure put the meat on the bones.

---

I was astonished how bad the end credits of Azure were, and I played the game before playing any of the Cold Steels. They were felt rushed and silly enough even without CS existing, but they hurt CS itself, too, in many worse ways. They wouldn't have the same painful effect if you played all the CS games first, of course. I would agree that the game would be better if that part simply didn't exist, and it's a shame they didn't delete it in the Kai version.
---

NFUN posted...

azure's ending really soured me on the whole game. I was already getting "off" impressions through much of the finale chapter, and the ending just blegh.

Pretty much how I felt, yeah. I still like the game overall but it dropped from possibly being the best in the series to competing for 3rd with... well, 3rd.

---

im surprised everyone disliked it so much, i felt like it stuck the landing. i wish it didnt "spoil" cold steel but as I'm playing it my thoughts are just how it will build towards those events so I wouldn't say it bothers me that much

---

I definitely thought the ending portion felt like a botched rush job but in the end it's a minor problem in the big picture

---

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this, but the part where everyone died and KeA reversed history to save them felt so unnecessary and kinda dumb. I don't like time travel though so I have some inherent bias there

---

that was the biggest plot twist and gave meaning to the prologue of zero! i loved that.

---