Easily my most disliked Trails game, it feels like a retread of the first CS with its awful pacing, but somehow even worse.
You start with a pointless flashforward, there's another Tartarus wannabe but with none of the story purpose it had in the first game (it's just a training facility with an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ supervising it, it sucks), the school setting is back but even duller despite that you play as a teacher (don't expect any real differences, you even have to sit through tests still), the first 4 chapters feel like they're ripped off straight from Sky SC in villains simply wasting your time with experiments that are hardly ever brought back afterwards (but worse since those chapters in Sky were about introducing new villains, here you know almost everyone you meet if you've played CS1 and 2 outside of maybe 1 or 2 faces) so it feels very uneventful, mecha fights are boring, the ending is very padded out (again) and you end up in a cliffhanger (again), so it's very much a setup game that'll heavily depend on its successor to see if its plot was worth anything in the first place as otherwise not an awful lot happens here (if you've seen my review of it you know I don't feel it was worth it). All so familiar, all very underwhelmingly pulled off.
Oh and don't you worry, if you felt Rean was on the annoying side in the previous games on how easily beloved he was, it's cranked up to 11 here, truly Aidios gift that keeps on giving to the world of Zemuria.
A repeat of my other review of a CS game but the new class 7 honestly blows. Juna might be the worst core playable character in the franchise, Kurt and Altina are at best insipid, and Muse doesn't really get to be much of anything in this game besides someone that's obviously hiding something, but above else is really horny for her teacher. Ash is probably the most salvageable but his backstory is [spoiler] oh snap, there's another survivor from Hamel! After playing so many of these games I truly believe the writers don't have any more ideas in them and just repeat what was already done before, lowering their existing impact in the process. [/spoiler] Vanilla class VII are more or less relegated to glorified cameos of what they're up to after graduating, they really don't have much to do here nor do they do a good job explaining things like why Jusis suddenly gets along really well with Millium despite being virtual opposites in the previous games. Don't even get me started on the twists and turns regarding familiar faces like C, Angela and pretty much all "older" members of the cast, they're all dumb.
This is the game that brought up the idea of making characters have some Bubsy tier levels of stupid dialogues and complete inability to shut up during gameplay to the franchise as if it was a good idea, so yeah, bad.
The command systems introduced is neat, the combat system is still fine, the game looks miles better than CS1 or 2 (still pretty unimpressive by its year of release and system standards however) and I guess the fact that you go to some the locales mentioned in the first CS but your group did not get to travel to is sort of neat from a world building perspective? but that's not enough to make up for how dull and boring the game is most of the time. I really feel they should have reworked things to Coldsteel were just 2 games, it wouldn't have been great but it wouldn't be as insufferable as the final product ended up being at the least, which hardly brought us any closer to a conclusion I'm sure will suck after well over 20 years of sequels. The worst part is it really feels they learned no lessons whatsoever from this from what I've read of Reverie and the Daybreak games after the first one.
I'll repeat what I already said for CS4, if for whatever reason you only play these games for the gameplay (odd choice given how much text these have), maybe you'll find a lot more to appreciate than I did, as is this to me marked the moment where I started to just stop caring for this franchise, as neither Daybreak nor the remake of Sky did much to remediate things.
