Quartz in Cold Steel vs. Quartz in Trails in the Sky

[MindfulOcean]

I've played both FC and SC and I'm working on Cold Steel now. I love both series dearly, but I'm seriously enjoying some of the benefits of playing a more recent game (thank the goddess for fast travel). But I'm kind of conflicted on which battle system I like more.

In-universe, I don't think the way quartz works in Cold Steel makes sense. At the end of Trails SC, Professor Russell upgrades everyone’s orbments so that they can use the quartz they find in the device towers and the ark. The civilization that built the Liber Ark was obviously much more advanced than any existing civilization by a large margin, so why do we see quartz with the spells already embedded in them, where elemental combinations make no difference? It is very different from anything seen in Trails in the Sky, even in the ancient ruins. Only two years pass between the start of Cold Steel, which doesn’t seem like enough time to develop a new kind of quartz. And as of Chapter 3 in the first Cold Steel game, it hasn’t been commented on by anyone.

Just in terms of the battle system, I prefer the way arts and quartz worked in Trails in the Sky. Some of the spells required weird, hard-to-get element combinations to work, but I enjoyed the flexibility afforded in the old system. Just having an art assigned to a quartz cuts down on the complexity, but you also waste a whole slot on a caster giving them that art. I’m aware there are quartz with multiple arts on them, but a slot is a slot and it feels restrictive. Master quartz are kind of cool, but they still don’t add enough flexibility.

I do think that battles flow more smoothly in Cold Steel, and that the more solidly-defined roles for each character in battle work well. The roles that each character leans towards makes sense in terms of what you learn about the characters. In Trails in the Sky, the only characters whose playstyle in battle completely meshed with their character for me were Agate, Zane, and Kloe. Everything just feels more cohesive.

What do you guys think? If at all possible, please avoid discussing story details from Cold Steel (even if you use spoiler tags) as I’m still playing it.

[DDR]

I also prefer Trails in the Sky's system where you can mix and match the attribute values to form Arts. :>

As for the lore part, in Zemuria, developments in quartz and orbment technology are depicted to be very rapid, so much so that an entirely new type of quartz rolling out isn't that unnatural.

The tactical orbments used in Trails in the Sky are 4th generation Epstein-made standard model tactical orbments, but even within this era there was a big change that caused all quartz to be changed, between FC->SC.

Then for the 5th generation tactical orbments, there are ENIGMA (made by Epstein, used in the Crossbell games) and ARCUS (made by Epstein and Reinford together, used in the Cold Steel games). Every model and every generation of tactical orbments are so different from one another that nothing at all is compatible. So it just happens that the developers of ARCUS designed the orbal system and quartz to use the new system, i.e. master quartz and quartz with embedded Arts.

[Harag]

I prefer Sky's system as well except the lack of Master Quartz. That was a nice touch.

By the way the difference between the twi versions was in fact called out and nearly everyone agreed, that the ARCUS units are in fact a regression compared to the previous versions. It's just that these conversations happened elsewhere... eg.: reddit

[tej]

I started replaying Trails in the Sky after finishing the Cold Steel games and I am finding that I prefer most everything about Trails in the Sky. Cold Steel battles were smooth and had good improvements but I also found it easy to abuse the system. In Cold Steel II, only one of the long string of bosses in the Infernal Castle even got to take a turn before my party had dropped them. I didn't bother to look up how to max stats or anything like that, it just sort of worked out.

Master quartz is okay, but they don't do much until the end of the game and by that point I had gotten used to the benefits of each character's master quartz and figured out how I thought each was best used. So, at the end of the game I think I only had one character who had a different quartz than what they started with. All that to say, those stat growths could have been simply built into the character's normal level progression and it wouldn't have made any difference to the game. For me at least.

I never thought much about quartz in context of the Trails world, I just saw it as a simplified version of what Trails in the Sky had and moved on. However, the Trails in the Sky games do say repeatedly that quartz are just circuits made from septium and an orbment is a mechanical system to draw out the energy. So it isn't unreasonable to think that a different research institute in a different country developed a totally different architecture.