Flammie reviews: Trails of Cold Steel II

Trails of Cold Steel II is a JRPG with traditional turn-based battle system. It has large futuristic fantasy world, in a steam punk style. The best part of the game is definitely the story and characters, the legend of heroes is overall a huge series with interconnected lore, but you can well play this after the cold steel 1 without rest of the series. On top of main story-arc that tells a story of a war, the game contains persona style character interaction parts where you can develop relationships between the protagonist team, who are military academy students, in other words it’s also a teen drama coming of life kind of stuff. While Cold Steel 1 was rather linear travel through the school trips, Cold Steel 2 is quite a bit more open world, allowing you to travel around the world in each chapter and sub-chapter parts, within limits (the characters will refuse to go too far at any given time). This doesn’t mean that all parts of the game still aren’t about systematically talking to every single npc at any point of game, then doing all the quests leaving the story quests / events last, every single time. The battle system is quite traditional turn-based JRPG, a lot of people seem to like it and its somewhat unique feature of moving and placing your characters on the battle field but I didn’t really care for that. On normal difficulty the battles on the field are way too easy to need any tactics, and the boss battles are impossibly difficult unless you equip everyone with exactly the stuff to counter bosses’ special attacks and status changes and still cheese the boss battles with some boring combos, I really do not like the battle system that much. The equipment and crafting is unbalanced as well, the weapons are just to grind and buy best for everyone (there’s ever only one at a time) and there’s like 10 times too much crap you can craft for me to care otherwise, but if you really like crafting and tweaking it’s probably good for you. The pacing of story and battles I think was better in cold steel 1 even though it was more predictable. All in all the story is captivating enough to keep me playing 100+ hours even when the battle system is getting so boring towards the end.

★★★★★★★★☆☆ (8 out of 10)

(A version of this review was submitted to metacritic)