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The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
PlayStation 3
The Attack of the 80-Hour Prologue
2.5/5 stars
“Trails of Cold Steel” (“ToCS”) is the latest in the ongoing ‘Legend of Heroes’ franchise by Falcom, the developer better known for the ‘Ys’ series. The ‘Legend of Heroes’ games have been among the most-praised new-gen RPGs, despite debuting on the PlayStation Portable with the multi-part “Trails in the Sky,” which has since been ported to PC via Steam. I have been anxiously awaiting the two episodes of “Trails in the Sky” to hit the magic $5 price-point during a Steam sale, but decided to buy the collector’s edition of “ToCS” for PlayStation 3 completely blind based on franchise reputation alone… And as I should have learned from past mistakes, judging whether or not an RPG is ‘good’ is becoming just as much of a lost art as judging whether or not a game is an RPG.
Presentation
“ToCS” is a rather unimpressive-looking anime-styled game. Instead of going with sharp 2D anime visuals, Falcom went with a bland, stiff polygon engine that doesn’t look much more impressive than a PlayStation 2 game from a decade ago. There are lots of jaggies and lots of blurry textures on environments. There is also a rather noteworthy inclusion of strange text on the game’s many book covers that lead to many WTF moments. I’m not sure why school textbooks would ever have titles like ‘Woo Baby’ and ‘Christ, Whose Gonna Die First,’ but they’re in the game regardless. Character designs are bland, uninspired, generic anime stereotypes, monster designs are the same (with numerous pallet swaps and very few distinct designs), while environmental designs are merely passable.
Falcom obviously wanted to save money on cutscenes, as they use the in-game engine, but include severely limited character animations, employing awkward visual cuts whenever a character needs to do something like stand up or sit down in a chair. These cutscenes are completely hobbled with ‘tell, don’t show’ issues, and are incredibly slow and wordy. When a cutscene does bother to ‘show’ something, it usually involves a painfully drawn-out camera pan across an environment that doesn’t really amount to anything.
The audio is also fairly bland and unimpressive. The game is mostly voiced, and the cast is the typical mix of anime dubbers one would expect a localization company like XSeed to employ. They do an alright job, but I was never once truly impressed. The music is adequate with a few pleasantly catchy tracks, but isn’t the type of thing one might find themselves humming while away from the game. Perhaps “ToCS’” biggest crime against presentation is the heavy amount of build-up leading to a stage performance near the very end of the game. The characters obsess over this performance for the entire final chapter (amounting to several hours of real time), yet when the time finally comes, the payout is completely half-assed, with cut vocals, no amazing original song, and more game-engine visuals. I was expecting something like the concert scene in “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya,” but the game completely failed to deliver.
Technically, “ToCS” is pretty solid. It is a console game, after all, and only Bethesda games should crash on consoles… but “ToCS” did freeze up on me once. It was only once, but I had to fast-forward (not skip, because the cutscenes aren’t skippable) through 20+ minutes of cutscene, which was unpleasant.
Story
All of the ‘Legend of Heroes’ games are supposed to take place in the same fictional universe. This being my first ‘Legend of heroes’ game, I didn’t have any fore-knowledge or preconceptions of what the world, setting, or characters would be like. Thus when I popped the game into my PS3 for the first time and was greeted by a splash screen covered with generic anime teenagers in school uniforms, I was tragically disappointed.
Yes, “ToCS” takes place in a fracking high school: Thors Military Academy. Thors is a 2-year school where both nobles and commoners can prepare themselves for either a life in the Imperial military, a non-government job as a private military contractor (either a Bracer or a Jaeger), or a non-military job in one of the private industries that have sprung up as a result of the game world’s semi-magical industrial revolution.
The story revolves around a group of incoming freshmen at Thors who have been chosen to participate in an experimental new curriculum. Class VII is the first class of student in over 200 years to consist of cross-class students, mingling nobles and commoners. The inspiration behind Class VII is revealed throughout the game’s 70+ hours of narrative, in which the player guides the actions of Class VII member, Rean Schwarzer, as he attempts to navigate the perils of student life, deal with angsty classmates, handle the workload dumped upon him by his lazy/drunk/super-sexy female instructor, and travel the world on monthly weekend field-studies with his class.
I am indescribably disgusted with the recent trend of setting EVERY piece of Japanese pop-media in a damned high school. Only a handful of decent high school-themed anime exist, and I have yet to see a high school-themed RPG that doesn’t completely fail from a plot perspective. “ToCS” is no exception. Light comedies can work with this setting, but anything with any sense of gravitas comes off as ridiculous instead of serious when placing responsibility on the shoulders of a bunch of annoying kids.
Not only does the school setting fail fundamentally, but even the way it is executed in “ToCS” is exceedingly sub-par. Huge swaths of time are simply glazed over because presumably someone on the dev team was smart enough to figure out that watching students study, do homework, and take tests is BORING (of course, some of that nonsense is still present in the narrative). The game is also horrifically linear, as the students don’t have a whole lot of autonomy to travel wherever they want, whenever they want, thus backtracking to pick-up missed sidequests, etc. is impossible.
As if to make up for the lack of backtracking, the game includes very, VERY specific timing to activate certain side activities, requiring a completionist to either use a walkthrough (so as to not miss anything) or talk to every single generic NPC after every single minor story cutscene… multiple times. When every NPC has at least two dialogues consisting of two paragraphs each, the result is a lot of reading… that DOESN’T ADD ANYTHING RELEVENT TO THE PLOT! I have seen ‘Legend of Heroes’ fans gushing about how the ‘little stories’ and the ‘lore’ behind generic NPCs are the best part of the game… and I simply cannot wrap my head around it.
The setting for “ToCS” is probably the best part of the narrative, but even that’s a stretch, as it is a fairly generic anime setting with anachronistic technologies existing side-by-side. The main gimmick of the game world is that a type of magical energy, called Orbal Energy, exists within special types of quartz crystal. Orbal Energy is unique in that it is both clean and renewable, as energy expended from a quartz simply recharges over time automatically. Somehow, easy access to unlimited clean energy still has the game world developing along the lines of the real world’s industrial revolution, with railroads, firearms, and radio taking up a great deal of the world’s technological focus. Yet, at the same time, technologies that are far too advanced for the real world’s industrial revolution exist in more-or-less complete forms, yet nobody seems to know about them – things like personal wireless communications, microprocessors, and motorcycles. Then there’s the fact that sci-fi levels of technology, like levitating airships and mechs exist, yet nobody bats an eye. Of course, the mechs don’t even show up until the final chapter…
“ToCS” suffers from absolutely abysmal pacing. While it takes place over 7 chapters, everything except for the final chapter feels like a prologue to a game that might actually be interesting. Dealing with student nonsense for 6 chapters, only catching fleeting glimpses of an overarching plot, only to have more and better story material dumped on us in the last 5 hours than the first 70 is simply unacceptable. I understand that the goal of the first 6 chapters of “ToCS” is to make the player feel invested in the lives of Class VII and the wider cast of important NPCs (and there are a lot of them, even discounting the generic nobodies), but it just made me feel bored and disconnected from the entire experience.
The final insult, though, was discovering that “ToCS” ends on a cliffhanger, in anticipation of “Trails of Cold Steel II.” I shouldn’t have been surprised that this isn’t a complete game due to the fact that the collector’s edition comes with a cardboard spacer in its clamshell box that says, ‘Put part 2 here when you buy it!’ But I hoped that the two episodes would at least be self-contained. Unfortunately, as it turns out, “Trails of Cold Steel” is a multi-part, episodic game, where the episodes are stupidly long. I’m reminded of the bad experience I had with “White Knight Chronicles,” which was another 2-part RPG that failed to deliver a good story.
Gameplay
Pathetically, the gameplay is the only redeeming factor in “ToCS,” and it’s not even particularly amazing. “ToCS” is a fairly normal turn-based RPG. We don’t get many of those these days, so the fact that it doesn’t have any annoying real-time elements was a pleasant surprise.
Characters have standard Hit Points (HP), but they also have Energy Points (EP) and Craft Points (CP) for performing special moves in combat. EP are used for casting spells (Arts) and can be restored by resting or consuming items, while CP are used for performing special attacks (Crafts) and are restored by dealing and receiving damage. Each character also develops an S-Craft as the story progresses, which consumes all of their CP (minimum 100, maximum 200) but deals humongous damage.
Characters can be outfitted with gear in 5 slots: weapon, armor, shoes, and two accessories. Likewise, each character has a special piece of tech called an ARCUS unit that allows them to equip quartzes to boost stats, access Arts, and a variety of other things. The quartz system reminds me a lot of the Materia system from “Final Fantasy 7,” but a bit less generic, as each character has a different ARCUS layout, and generally rely on Crafts far more than Arts in battle.
Combat is semi-tactical, as characters/monsters move around the battlefield on their turns, and spacing comes into play for almost all area-of-effect Arts/Crafts. Out of the active party of four characters, they can form two linked pairs by linking their ARCUS units, allowing them to perform follow-up attacks outside of their turns if their linked companion scores a critical hit or ‘unbalances’ an enemy.
Unbalancing and delaying are two huge parts of the battle system that aren’t explained very well. Some characters, like our hero Rean, can naturally delay an enemy’s position in the initiative order with certain attacks and Crafts. Likewise, every enemy has a hidden weakness to Thrust, Slash, or Pierce damage, which can cause them to become unbalanced when hit with such an attack. Another fairly unique twist in “ToCS’” turn-based combat is that random turns get special qualities, such as a guaranteed critical or a special Zero-Arts condition that removes the EP cost and casting time from any Art. Strategically exploiting turn bonuses (by delaying enemies out of their bonus in order to claim it for a party member, etc.) can lead to fairly interesting battles at times.
Unfortunately, the battle system’s balance is a bit questionable. If fought head-on, most random encounters can mess-up the party fairly quickly, with enemies able to gang-up on a character and kill them in 3-4 hits for most of the game. The player, however, can completely negate the enemies’ strength by exploiting field advantage attacks (i.e., pre-emptive strikes), which can give the player up to two whole rounds of bonus moves before the enemy can do anything, and status ailments, which work surprisingly often and can completely shut-down enemies for 3+ turns. Good RPG design states that random battles should either be common and pathetically easy or rare and strategic. “ToCS” mixes common and strategic, resulting in random battles that drag-on far longer than they need to. The boss battle are, for the most part, well done, though I was extremely disappointed in the final battle, which abruptly changes all of the rules and expects the player to adapt instantly.
Overall
“Trails of Cold Steel” (Part 1!) is a long, tedious, boring slog through an uninspired anime world with a group of anime stereotype schoolchildren doing formulaic, uninteresting things. Some of the supporting cast are interesting, and I would have much preferred to play a game starring the teachers, but alas, Japan’s high school obsession is still going strong. The plodding, incomplete plot can’t be saved by the bland presentation and questionably-balanced combat. If this is the ‘best’ that the ‘Legend of Heroes’ franchise can offer, the rest of the games can stay in Japan, for all I care.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
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