The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV

For the game on it's own: I think the overall plot is solid. The highs are really high, and at this current moment I can't really think of any lows that bothered me enough to point out or take away from my overall enjoyment of the game. My main gripe with this game is its cast: Class VII, both new and old, is too large of a cast, and this is without mentioning the casts of the other two arcs also playing a major role. With Class VII specifically, it's hard to manage all the characters, both in the story and in gameplay. When the game limits you to only having a certain amount of party members and not knowing what may happen next, characters that may be relevant to certain plot points will just be absent if you just so happen to not bring them along. There's too much miss-able dialogue that arises because of this. I thought it was a very interesting choice to have two endings, a "regular" and "true" ending. I don't have much to say on the true ending because it's a happy ending and things end as well as they can. However, I found the regular ending intriguing, and would have loved to see the consequences the world would have faced as a result of the actions taken in it. With the Cold Steel arc as a whole: I got into this franchise through Cold Steel, which I'm sure some will find sacrilegious, but I really liked it. In retrospect, these games are very formulaic: Cold Steel 1 and 3 parallel each other in story structure, as do Cold Steel 2 and 4. I liked that these games ended up being formulaic, especially considering the bigger themes that come up in Cold Steel 3 and 4, I think it was very intentional and it plays into said themes well. These games are a slow burn that reward you for committing to it. The Trails series probably has my favorite turn-based combat system out of all the JRPGs I've played, and I was always engaged in the gameplay loop, especially as they continued to evolve the core system (IE Overdrive, Orders, the Sub-Quartz system, and the Break gauge). I think the ambitiousness of these games both help and hurt it. In the beginning, you have a very grounded plot about these characters and the challenges they face as people and students, but then by the end, you're having fantastical mech fights while trying to stop the threads of fate from destroying the world, and at times it was jarring for me, even as a mecha enjoyer. Even as ambitious as these games are, I find issue with what I perceive to be as a lack of commitment to the consequences of the actions in the story, namely the important character deaths. They build up these shocking, emotional moments that tug at your heartstrings, only for them to come back alive at the end of the day, and everyone lives happily ever after. At that point, why even kill characters off if you just have them come back to life anyway? Millium's death in Cold Steel 3 REALLY hit me hard and was what elevated the game as a whole to me, but knowing she gets a happy ending with little to no consequence makes the fact that they even killed her pointless. As a fan of all these characters, I'm more than happy that they all get a happy ending, but from a storytelling perspective, it really irks me. Crow especially bothers me, I already wasn't really a fan of him coming back to life, but then in Cold Steel 4, they build him up as him only being alive for a short amount of time, but then in the true ending, he gets to fully come back to life. Again, why bother killing him to begin with? All in all though, I really liked the Cold Steel series and would heavily recommend as both a story and a fun turn-based JRPG.