BEFORE STARTING THE REVIEW:
Please for the love of god play Trails in the Sky FC, Trails in the Sky SC, Trails in the Sky the 3rd, Trails from Zero, and Trails to Azure before even playing ANY of the Cold Steel games. It will make you much more invested and immersed in the overall world and playing Cold Steel games before them would be doing yourself a HUGE disservice. Trust me, every game is worth every second spent in them and the overall story in the past eight games (including this one as the eighth) has been truly amazing and a well worth experience.
Wow, there is so many things I have to say about Trails of Cold Steel 3. There is so many amazing things about this games that make me love the trails series even more. The first thing that comes to mind is the story for Cold Steel 3. The story was ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR. It continues on roughly a year after the events of Trails of Cold Steel 2 in a whole new environment. You get to explore areas of Erebonia that you couldn't explore before. These areas primarily consisted of the field exercises of the opposite group you were put into from Trails of Cold Steel. The story keeps a nice pace throughout it, letting you explore areas as it starts to ramp up. Speaking of ramping up, THIS STORY RAMPS UP REAL HARD. I am FLOORED at how many twists and genuinely unexpected things that happened in this game. I was left speechless multiple times throughout the game, which primarily related to characters. The story also made me tear up and cry almost as much as the Sky games did.
Speaking of characters, most of the newer characters are genuinely great. I didn't particularly like Ash or Major Micheals that much at all, but outside of those two I enjoyed every new character that was introduced in this game. They also expand upon the character stories from Class VII in more detail, letting you understand their histories even better. They also expand upon characters which have been either mysterious for multiple games (Lechter) or for characters that have not been expanded upon in the previous Cold Steel games. Also in regards to the character bonding, it was pretty satisfying in this game overall. I enjoyed spending time with Towa and gushing over how cute she is. The only complaint I would have about the bonding system would be that there are only three characters which you can romance in this game. Those characters are Laura, Emma, and Alisa. However, this is amended in the next game Trails of Cold Steel IV, allowing you to romance other characters like Towa.
In regards to the music, it is like previous Trails games where it's constant banger after banger after banger, and Cold Steel 3 is definitely no exception. The whole OST is extremely well made and uses some of the tracks you're familiar with from previous Cold Steel games along with introducing new songs as well. I could jam out for hours on end just listening to every song in this game, especially the final dungeon theme and the boss themes. The music ends up being perfectly timed to the current scene going on and generally enhances the mood, either making you cry/tear up to feeling excited for whatever battle you are getting into.
For the general gameplay, I definitely have to say it's the most satisfying out of Trails of Cold Steel 1-3. The order system that gets introduced into the game adds a new layer of strategy that you can use to either deal significantly more damage than you could before, or reduce incoming damage in prep for massive attacks that you may be unable to avoid (I recommend using Impede 3 plus another Impede orbment, it's funny hitting bosses and general enemies while they're trying to cast arts and then just saying haha no.). You're also introduced an interesting sub-mater quartz system where you can use some of the skills/stats from another character's Master Quartz and use it on another character (albeit limited to one sub-Master Quartz use per Master Quartz). The Link system also feels a lot more fluid than before and the designs they did between the characters you're linking, making it a lot more clean and less confusing.
In terms of art, this game's art SLAPS. The new character portrait art they've done for every single character's S-Craft is so good. The new art style is really satisfying and adds even more character to each S-Craft. This usage also doesn't apply to only the characters you control, even enemy characters will have their own S-Craft art too, and man some characters look AMAZING in their S-Craft art. The same art from the S-Crafts are also used when doing combos with your links or when doing an all out attack on the enemies. In regards to the 3D models, they're just as amazing as well. The new models compared to the older 3D models are just night and day. Everything about them and the other UI/Art in the game scales up wonderfully to higher resolutions like 4K. Even the environments are more captivating than ever before, especially when looking out onto places like an ocean or in other pretty areas. They made sure to go all out with the new 3D models and environment with this game
Overall, I love this game and everything it brings to the table. It doesn't matter what the game does, it just does it EXTREMELY well and truly adds more wonderful things to the Trails series. It definitely gave me a lot more game time as well, which is more than welcome with any Trails game in my book. Another small note, the voice acting for this game has expanded a lot, leading to more voiced scenes (I use the Japanese dubbing) compared to previous entries in the Cold Steel series. I would 100% recommend this if you are continuing off of Trails of Cold Steel 2 and have completed the previous games in the whole Trails series. Definitely recommend it at both full price and discounted.
Another Side Note:
I love Towa, she's so cute and amazing. This is now my 3rd game going down the Towa bond route and I plan on continuing to romance/bond with her in the 4th game of the Cold Steel/Erebonia arc. Towa best.
