Is this a school based slice of life type young adult game?

[Mookies]

I played the very first game, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the sky. I actually got into the story and at the time the second game had not been released so I forgot about the game. Didn't come back around to the series till Cold Steel was out and to be honest it looked like it had a cringey young adult storyline.

Could a veteran of the series confirm/deny this for me, I was thinking of getting back into it but I'm not a fan of the young adult anime trope stuff.

[SirBiff]

Easiest way to answer your question is Yes and No. There is school stuff but there's also a larger storyline starting in CS1.

[BondEternal]

The Cold Steel series has a lot of anime tropes. It never really got in the way of the storytelling though.

I wouldn't say the game is a slice-of-life type. Sure some sidequests have you helping out townspeople, but the focus of the game is the narrative. And you don't spend the whole game in the school. Each chapter has you going out of the school and "learning".

[siln]

CS1 has school life segments, at least in between its more traditional adventure chapters. CS3 definitely tries to recapture some of that, though slightly less so because the primary POV character is a teacher by that point .

CS2 and CS4 still feature a lot of people originally from the school setting -- hope you enjoy stories where everyone who grows up to be important went your high school -- but the stories have little or nothing to do with school/campus life, beyond it being a shared experience of your main party's past.

I prefer the Trails in the Sky setup too, honestly, but to be fair it's pretty tropey too; it just leads with a lot of 90s fantasy anime/JRPG standard fare, and grows the story from there. Cold Steel does the same, it's just leads by drawing on the more recent popularity of super-power high school anime/games instead.

[Kai]

The game series is about a continent or universe entirely, not isolated stories like Final Fantasy.

[Dragon]

Originally posted by Mookies:

it looked like it had a cringey young adult storyline.

That's 100% accurate. The Cold Steel game are filled with endless speeches to the effect of:

as long as we stick together, through the power of friendship and belief in ourselves, we can reach our goals and accomplish anything!!!

Rean probably gives some variation of that speech literally hundreds - or maybe thousands - of different times in the Cold Steel games.

If you are expecting the CS games not to be full of cringey content like that, then you will be disappointed, because they certainly are chock-full of it, and there's no way to avoid it whilst playing through the games, because a lot of that happens within mandatory dialogue scenes.

There are even dialogues in the game where the characters in the world make fun of how lame Rean's speeches are, although they use words like "cheesy" instead of cringey.

[Durabele]

Like the others said, it takes the typical anime high school setting as a base and builds on that. CS2 and CS4 do deviate from it a bit. And yes, the series is riddled with cheesy dialogue and the "power of friendship", which can get VERY tiring at times and its frustating how they refuse to explore darker themes like death, war etc. (I'd be fine if it was sidequest-only, but nope) In the end, for me, the series is carried by the world building and the attachment you build with the characters, who are plenty interesting themselves but not very deep by any means