My detailed review for Cold Steel 3 (no story spoilers)

[BeastSlayer]

Right now I have spent more than 100hr in the game, and I'm more than half way towards the end. Since I will be busy IRL for a while, so I will slow down progressing the game, but I will probably update this review when I finish it.



Graphic:

I think Falcom used a new engine for CS3. There are actually some pretty big improvement over the previous games thanks to the new engine and higher budget.

Lighting is much better. There are bloom and sun ray effect makes the game looks pretty nice in day time.

The game has updated most of the character models, most of the character looks much nicer, notably Rean's hair, so no more terrible looking hairs. It seems there are proper physics for the coats and other stuff. For the most part the character models are a big improvement over the last games. Unfortunately Falcom does mess up some male character's face, for example Neithardt's handsome face. They have recycled some generic NPC models, and some monster's models, mostly society's drones, but they do look a bit nicer in the new engine because the lighting improvement.

The environment is very uneven. There are some great looking environment, the new cities looks especially awesome, they looks at least as good as other big anime JRPGs like Tales serie. However the highway map mostly looks pretty bad because of the ugly low res textures. That water texture up-close is just fugly, looks worse than CS1 and CS2 in some cases.

The combat looks pretty nice. They have used new camera angles to make the battle looks more dynamic. They have overhaul all the crafts for the old characters and magic effects, most of them looks very impressive.

The animation is still a bit stiff, the male walking animation is kinda unnatural. But it is still a notable improvement over the previous games.

There is also a problem for PS4 graphics, there are some ugly aliasing, the game is not doing a good job of covering them up (unlike Persona 5). The PS4 also has some framerate dips in large cities and combat that has a lot of enemies. If Durante is porting the game to PC, these problem will be fixed or improved. If that is the case, I will definately buy the games on steam again.


Sound, music and voice:

The sound and music is at least on par with the quality of the previous games. The title music is very different from the more depressing ones of the previous title music, it sounds very optimistic I like it much better than the previous ones. They also paid homage to the older trails games in a few of the soundtrack, I am not going to spoil it, but it's awesome.

CS3 has the largest cast of voice actor in the series, they have voice for every students in Thors brance II, all the major charactrers that was missing Japanese voices. There are a lot of famous Japanese voice actors in CS3, it is very impressive if you just look at the list of names. They have different actors for all the different characters, and original voice actor from the older games. The dialogs are not fully voiced, but there are a lot more voices comparing to the previous games, especially the Japanese version which does not have the extra English dialogs of the steam version.

However, one thing that keeps bothering me is Rean's voice in CS3. He speaks a lot more in CS3, but for some reason, the voice actor decided to lower his voice to make it sounds like he is imitate Geralts' English voice in Witcher 1. Maybe he just try to make older Rean sounds more calm and mature, but it just sounds wrong and very annoying to me.(which is a shame because I like Rean's character better than in CS2)

[BeastSlayer]

Gameplay:

This is not only the best looking Trails game, but also the best Trails game so far. There are more meaningful collectibles (like the black records), better side activities/ mini games. There is a collectible card game that will take quite a bit of your time if you want to get max AP. The fishing mini game does not require button mashing now, but instead require some timing in order to get the largest fish.

The new characters are fun to play with, and my favourite is Juna, who uses a baton gun, and can change two different stances, and also has one of the most useful brave order which I will talk about next. (I don't like the character at all, I think she is one of the most annoying character in the trails game)

The combat system is also extended with two important features: brave order and breaking system, both of them makes the combat more strategic than CS1, 2.

Brave order is basically to use your BP to buff your whole party for a certain amount of turns, the orders are charcter specific, if the characters are not in your party then you cannot use them. The buff are incredibly powerful, so you pretty much never want to waste your BP to do Rush or Burst attack.

Breaking system is sort of like staggering in Final Fantasy 13. Every enemy has a blue breaking bar under the HP bar now, and every of your normal/ crafts/ arts attack has a breaking value. If you break the enemy, you will get Guaranteed Drop(very important if you want to farm U-mats), the enemy will get Guaranteed delayed, and every attack towards a breaking enemy is a Guaranteed link attack. You see how powerful it is? The only catch is that the next turn the enemy will restore their full breaking bar, and some of the boss will get buffed/ go berzerk/ restore some HP, etc.

These two systems form the core of CS3's combat system. While they are a lot of fun to play with, they are very easy to abuse. CS3's biggest issues IMO, is it's difficulty.

You think CS1 and CS2 is easy? lol. If you play it right in CS3, the boss probably won't even have a chance to touch you. The most game breaking think is Juna's and Kurt's order. Juna's order increase your breaking values to 300%, so I usually build her quartz and turn her into a breaking monster, and the order only cost 1 BP so it can be easily recharged. Kurt's decrease your delay after each action to 0.4, and only cost 2BP. So in order to break the game, you just have to: 1. break the boss with break buff 2. uses delay reduce buff and hit the boss with delay attacks. In CS1 and CS2 you cannot delay some of the bosses, but in CS3, since breaking has a Guaranteed delay, it is much easier. Oh did I mention that you can use two master quartz now? There are some "unwinnable" boss battles so easy that you can reduce the boss HP to 0 and have to wait for their turns to end the battle sequence LMAO.

In shorts, CS3's difficult is a joke. If you are looking for a challenge you will be dissappointed, the best thing you can do is start the game with nightmare, and handicap yourself by not using any orders in battle. If you can look past the combat difficulty, it is still the best Trails game in terms of gameplay.

[BeastSlayer]

Story:

Without spoiling anything, I would say, so far I enjoyed CS3's story more than CS1 and CS2. The game follow a similar structure to CS1, you do 'bracer stuff'/quest in school town, go out to explore the cities and do more quest/stuff, finish the chapter and then come back. Sounds familliar right? However, each chapters in CS3 is significantly longer than CS1, and there are less chapters. And the game does a good job break up the pacing once in a while, making the structure not too formulaic unlike in CS1. The pacing is definately a step up from CS1 and CS2.

From the first chapter, you will get a sense that the main plot is finally moving forwards, the stake of the crisis is higher than before. It feels like you have spend hundreds of hours in the prequel games, and now you finally get to the main series. Yes the civil war is just a small setup for much bigger events, knowing that CS3 will ends on a cliffhanger, CS4's stake will be the highest ever.

There are a handful of new students, most of them are more interesting than the original students. The characters from CS1,2 also gets some development, and more background stories. Rean is a notably better character than in CS2, his role of instructer also make things fresh.



Controls:

The game and interface is optimized for Dualshock4. It uses all the buttons on it, and feels intuitive and comfortable. For example using the touch pad to open note is pretty neat. I actually like it better than K+M in CS1,2.



Bugs and glitch:

I have got stuck on top of a stair once, but I still managed to get out. Other than that, none so far.


Conclusion:

Despite all the issues the game has, Cold Steel 3 is without a doubt the best trails game so far. I would definately like to get it on steam, but there will be a long wait ahead. However CS4 is just months away, I will definately get it day one on my PS4.

[BeastSlayer]

I also wanna say that PS4's performance does levitate the graphic and story, now the game can show more combatants and grander cities, makes it feel a lot more epic.

No more are the 'large scale battles' in CS2 civil war which involved less than 10 tanks/ mechs on each side.

The game also explicitly mentioned number of combatants involved in the wars, which has not been done in the previous games.

[Chester]

Thanks for the review BeastSlayer. Happy to hear about some of the improvements (and very disappointed to hear about the difficulty. Why make 4 difficulty settings if they're all easy?).

Can you say what importing a save from CS2 to CS3 does? Or if you can import saves at all?

[BeastSlayer]

Originally posted by chester.longdon:

Thanks for the review BeastSlayer. Happy to hear about some of the improvements (and very disappointed to hear about the difficulty. Why make 4 difficulty settings if they're all easy?).

Can you say what importing a save from CS2 to CS3 does? Or if you can import saves at all?

Nightmare is still mildly challenging for 1st run. Since I have not finished the game yet, I can only hope the bosses in last two chapter will be harder. It is not new that Falcom dumb down the difficulty for new players. The good news is the last game in the arc is usually harder, so CS4 should be more difficulty and at least as hard as CS1,CS2.


As for importing save from CS2 to CS3-- unfortunately, you cannot do that. CS1 and CS2 were not released on PS4 by the time of CS3, so Falcom did not plan any save import for CS3. However, you can do the opposite, if you have CS3 save, you can import to CS1 and CS2 kai to get some bonus. CS1 and CS2 kai are the PS4 port of the previous games and they were released after CS3 (just a few weeks ago this year)