This game or Trails of the Cold Steel 1-4?

[Coralie]

So, right now P5R and TotCS are both on sale, though the bundle of Cold Steel costs less than the Persona. If you played both, which one would you suggest to buy? Gameplay is important, but the story itself and characters are the things which interest me the most of all.

[Jackfrost]

I would say that decision heavily depends on wether you have played the previous Trails games or not.
If yes then I would seriously consider giving ToCS a go. While P5R is a long game you will naturally get more content out of 4 games.
If no then I would not even bother...

P5R is a better game in pretty much every regard imo and you can easily get into it without having played the previous Persona games.

[DLON]

Persona, without a doubt.

I used to be a big fan of the Trails series. I played through the entire Cold Steel series multiple times, and, in my opinion, it's one of the most boring, artificially prolonged, cheesily-written, waste of a time series I've played, maybe ever.

I liked it the first time, but each new time I tried to replay it, I started noticing more and more things I disliked. I despise the main character, who's your typical goody two shoes to the point of absurdity. It pissed me off how meek he was, almost all the time, willing to forgive pretty much everyone. Every single character is some kind of anime stereotype. Every single one. They tease some sort of "romance system" in the first game, which ultimately doesn't go anywhere. Not really, apart form a couple of scenes here and there. They also tease dialogue choices, which, again, don't change anything and eventually even disappear. They released Cold Steel 3 an 4 on new platforms at release, so they retconned your romance decision from the first 2 games, so you had to start from scratch. And despite letting you """romance""" a girl of your choice, they strongly push one as a canon LI.

Furthermore, these games waste your time on everything - character interactions, scene transitions etc. Each time, the camera SLOWLY pans around the scene and characters. It's incredibly annoying. You'll be watching a train pull into the station, with doors slowly opening as your characters walk out, for like 45 seconds. Even the devs knew how annoying this was, so they gave you a 'Turbo' button that lets you fast forward such scenes. The leveling is slow, and you'll be "turboing" through a lot of the fighting, too. The lore of the world is detailed and rich, but they almost never utilize it to its full potential. The maps are linear like corridors (Think of Final Fantasy XIII), the NPCs rarely have anything interesting to say, increasing your bonds with teammates doesn't affect the story in any way, it's filled with a myriad of stupid fetch quests or kill X amount of monsters etc.

The Persona games are not perfect either, but I had a much better time with them. I fully recommend P5R.

[当回忆老去的痕迹斑斑]

P5R

[Lametta]

Originally posted by DLON:

Persona, without a doubt.

I used to be a big fan of the Trails series. I played through the entire Cold Steel series multiple times, and, in my opinion, it's one of the most boring, artificially prolonged, cheesily-written, waste of a time series I've played, maybe ever.

I liked it the first time, but each new time I tried to replay it, I started noticing more and more things I disliked. I despise the main character, who's your typical goody two shoes to the point of absurdity. It pissed me off how meek he was, almost all the time, willing to forgive pretty much everyone. Every single character is some kind of anime stereotype. Every single one. They tease some sort of "romance system" in the first game, which ultimately doesn't go anywhere. Not really, apart form a couple of scenes here and there. They also tease dialogue choices, which, again, don't change anything and eventually even disappear. They released Cold Steel 3 an 4 on new platforms at release, so they retconned your romance decision from the first 2 games, so you had to start from scratch. And despite letting you """romance""" a girl of your choice, they strongly push one as a canon LI.

Furthermore, these games waste your time on everything - character interactions, scene transitions etc. Each time, the camera SLOWLY pans around the scene and characters. It's incredibly annoying. You'll be watching a train pull into the station, with doors slowly opening as your characters walk out, for like 45 seconds. Even the devs knew how annoying this was, so they gave you a 'Turbo' button that lets you fast forward such scenes. The leveling is slow, and you'll be "turboing" through a lot of the fighting, too. The lore of the world is detailed and rich, but they almost never utilize it to its full potential. The maps are linear like corridors (Think of Final Fantasy XIII), the NPCs rarely have anything interesting to say, increasing your bonds with teammates doesn't affect the story in any way, it's filled with a myriad of stupid fetch quests or kill X amount of monsters etc.

The Persona games are not perfect either, but I had a much better time with them. I fully recommend P5R.

"Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad, Morty."

jokes aside yeah id definatley say persona 5 royal.

[DLON]

Originally posted by Lametta:

"Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad, Morty."

jokes aside yeah id definatley say persona 5 royal.

Bah, I kept finding typos, because I was rushing. And I also kept remembering new things to say. Whatever, that's how I feel about CS.

[Lametta]

Originally posted by DLON:

Originally posted by Lametta:

"Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad, Morty."

jokes aside yeah id definatley say persona 5 royal.

Bah, I kept finding typos, because I was rushing. And I also kept remembering new things to say. Whatever, that's how I feel about CS.

as i said was just messing around 😀

[DLON]

Originally posted by Lametta:

Originally posted by DLON:

Bah, I kept finding typos, because I was rushing. And I also kept remembering new things to say. Whatever, that's how I feel about CS.

as i said was just messing around 😀

I know, I know. Hence the "Bah". It's all good.

[jclosed]

It's simple - I like both. They are not comparable, because they have a very different background.

The Trails series are games that have small arcs spanning one game, medium-long arcs that span several games, and a overall arc that spans the whole series. It has a world building that spans several countries and is, in my humble opinion, better that the persona games. Also - I think the NPC's are far more fleshed out, and their little stories can span several games.

The Persona games are more confined to single games, but that make them more personal and intimate. I think connecting emotionally to the playable characters is more easy than in the Trails series.

At the end I think both type of games have their nice and not-so-nice sides. I honestly had a equal amount of fun playing both. If I really are forced to make a choice, I would probably choose the Trails series, simply because it's an ongoing story that does not ends when you finish playing one game, but continues in the next games (and will going on for the foreseeable future).

Oh - And I also like the Atelier series and Blue Reflection series from GUST too, so now I have given you a reason to shoot me down completely... ;-).

[Coralie]

Thank you all for your replies :)

[Tiasmoon]

Story and characters are more interesting in Trails (even Cold Steel) and there's just a lot more there. Gameplay is also a lot more expansive, which makes sense since you are comparing 1 game to 4.

[Leigh]

I started the Legend of Heroes Series with Cold Steel 1, played the Sky Trilogy and Crossbell titles once I had finished CS3. It works, the games are so well written with fantastic world building that you can start with an arc (Sky, Crossbell, Cold Steel) and you can pick up the background with minimal wiki searches.

Just because they are both based on school kids does not mean that they are similar games, not in the slightest. I really quite dislike that thought process. If you wanted a Persona like game that isn't Persona Tokyo Xanadu is much closer to the mark.

LoH as a whole is much more politics and "war footing" leaning, with a supernatural and ancient secret slowly unravelling as the series continues. Again, unless you start with the Sky Trilogy and be very thorough visiting every NPC and area after each and every story update (which in itself can easily add 30-40 hours to a playthrough, over the span of a game) you will need to look up stuff on wikis. That is just how the series is.

As a game I would say the LoH series is far better overall; combat gameplay, free exploration to talk to NPCs and generally explore, epic multi-angle story which is just serenely written, great lovable characters, but P4G was good fun (also fantastic characters) and I am sure P5R is too (I am just starting it for myself, also).

So what do you want? School kids in a modern, realistic world being super heroes, or a Tolkien-esque deep dive into a whole new world with deep lore and tangled fates?

[Crux]

Sorry for reviving kind of a dead topic and probably nobody cares what I have to say and so on but I wanted to speak out on this. I'd say that overall I liked CS more. P5 definitely has better presentation and the main story is great. On the other hand the secondary dialogues leave a lot to be desired. After reading another variation of "I have to be strong for Shiho" for one hundred and first time I felt like I'm out of ♥♥♥♥♥ to give. I literally didn't care about Shiho who I saw for 10 seconds in the beginning of the game and it felt like that subplot wasn't going anywhere. After finishing the game I can say that I had to endure half of social-linking and other socializing stuff just to get to the fun part. The CS series felt like it was a much smoother sailing and definitely not as exhausting to play.

[Exarch_Alpha]

Cold Steel (Hell all Legend of Heroes) games are excellent, and a must have for people who value other things than graphics.