Did something happen this past year to make public opinion of the Trails/Kiseki series worse?

[Deleted member 17627]

Been with the series ever since Sky in 2011, and man, it feels like this past year folks went from considering this series to have "some of the best world-building and characters in all of gaming," to "nothing in these games has any payoff and I'm tired of playing."

This isn't a thread against either side of these groups, it is out of genuine curiosity to better understand the shift in mentality.

Do agree on pacing and payoff issues, even from Sky SC it felt like it took forever for the plot to go anywhere, with each chapter being a lot of catch up/set up for what will happen riiight at the end of it. And in the grand scheme of things, it kind of feels like this trend continued throughout the resf of the series too. With many of the overall narratives being super slow and then just taking things to mach speed right near the climax.

But I do feel amidst all this padding there is some great character development and interactions. Honestly, it feels more and more with these recent games that they've become much more character oriented, and are more focused on the journey than the destination, especially with how many characters the Cold Steel saga and onwards have; I wonder if this is what's caused the shift in opinion.

There's other criticisms being brought up like boring dungeons and the combat system being the same for a decade and a half/people not being happy with the combat changes in Kuro, but I'll leave that to y'all to discuss since I kind of am not as bothered by these issues since it feels like so many other RPGs have them lol.

 

[Onlywantsapples]

I feel like really it's been the past 3ish years, if you pay any resemblance of attention to western fans who are on the JP release schedule, and just play the games as they come out in Japan, but the long short of it, is Cold Steel IV happened, and well........it not being great has really put the issues of Falcom a sa developer under a Microscope.

I played Cold Steel 3, spoiled myself on Cold Steel 4 and Hajimari, and I frankly am not interested in touching this series until Falcom can prove they're capable of making a good game again. Falcom has an overproduction problem, where they are driven by quantity over quality, and in the pursuit of that quantity the writing of these games has fallen off a cliff, and I see very little reason to be optimistic in that changing.

They need to either re-examine the scope of their games, and scale down accordingly to their size, or they need to stop releasing games yearly. Something has to give there eventually, and until then, I'll just wait and see what people think about Kuro and maybe consider catching up, when Kuro is localized in 2026. Cold Steel has just been a massive mess, and it's put a very bad taste in my mouth with this series.

What Sky effectively managed to do with 2 games, it took Cold Steel 4, and the writing wasn't anywhere near as good as the titles that came before it in my mind.

 

[EntelechyFuff]

As a completely passive observer, isn't the "thing that happened" just that Cold Steel 4 came out in the west and had a disappointing conclusion?

 

[Liam Allen-Miller]

I guess people tried playing them. 🤷‍♂️

 

[Blade24070]

Cold Steel IV and then Reverie being another fucking Rean retread (well, but that's still too much) made me seriously question my desire to continue this series. And then the NISA announcement that Reverie won't be until 2023, which will set the West back another three games or so was just another downer.

 

[NZerker12]

If it's any consolation from what I've heard Reverie is considered to be one of the best games in the series. So seems more like CS4 is the outlier.

 

[Stairmaster_]

I don't think I've seen anything against the series as a whole, I just thought it was because Cold Steel is regarded with mixed feelings and that arc had the job of concluding a lot of the plot threads that have been building since Sky. Cold Steel 4 was a solid RPG gameplay wise, but a disappointing conclusion.

I've heard Cold Steel as a whole was pretty messy on the development side of things, but since Ys VIII came out later (and was what got me into playing Falcom games), I still think they're still a capable studio, so I'm excited for Reverie (which was apparently very well received) and Kuro.

 

[Desma]

Cold Steel IV came out (In English)

 

[5taquitos]

People keep bringing it up as a substitute for the void that Suikoden has left in a lot of people's lives, but every time I look into it, it just looks like school setting anime BS with hours and hours of padding and painful dialog.

 

[Deleted member 17627]

I'd say my biggest Trails criticism right now is:

I kind of want to play Kuro now rather than in 2024.

I know Azure and Zero have good stories since I watched playthroughs of them, but from a gameplay perspective, I want Kuro soooo much more.

 

[AllEchse]

The thing with long running series is that the potential of where it could go plays a huge role in how people view it.

I didn't get that far into them but didn't it already start with Cold Steel that things got much more harem-anime-like and then later people were pretty disappointed in how Cold Steel 3 and IV turned out?
How you follow up plot threads from earlier games can retroactively sour them for people if not done correctly.

 

[kurahador]

Cold Steel happened and it's the only series that's available on modern consoles.

 

[Vic20]

People started to play the games instead of listening to a bunch of people on forums praising the games.

 

[Onlywantsapples]

People keep bringing it up as a substitute for the void that Suikoden has left in a lot of people's lives, but every time I look into it, it just looks like school setting anime BS with hours and hours of padding and painful dialog.

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Cold Steel has given the series a very bad wrap, in the context of people who don't like school settings, but honestly, Sky and the Crossbell games are some of the finest JRPGs I've ever played, especially Crossbell.

ignore the overarching narrative, and you can honestly play Sky, and Crossbell and just call it quits after Azure. These arcs are very capable of standing on their own, and you can just drop in and out as you see fit.

Don't play Cold Steel if you don't want to, but Sky and Crossbell are absolutely worth your time. As for Suikoden.......I'm really excited for Eiyuden Chronicles.

 

[Skulldead]

People started to play the games instead of listening to a bunch of people on forums praising the games.

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Probably this, i really like both first trail game, but cold steel was not my taste at all, school setting and all, nop

 

[PlanetSmasher]

 

[Yuntu]

I honestly only see that negative air here on Era regarding Trails from a personal viewpoint.

 

[RetroRunner]

I was really hoping this topic would be about how people got tired of sexist designs, oh well maybe some year.

 

[Deleted member 4090]

The "payoff" of CS4 came, and disappointed, like all payoffs fail to do. People should play games they enjoy rather than viewing them as homework for some later gratification that will likely never come.

I was really hoping this topic would be about how people got tired of sexist designs, oh well maybe some year.

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Oh, yes, some day in the distant future will be the first time a user on Resetera dot com totally goes off about the long history of sexist bullshit in Falcon games.

 

[hydrophilic attack]

the weebs raved about these games for so long and so insistently that eventually some non-weebs got around to playing them

 

[PlanetSmasher]

People keep bringing it up as a substitute for the void that Suikoden has left in a lot of people's lives, but every time I look into it, it just looks like school setting anime BS with hours and hours of padding and painful dialog.

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Seriously. Like if I'm desperate for a Suikoden follow-up, you know what I DON'T WANT? Fucking anime high school.

There was more to Suikoden than just "a lot of worldbuilding".

 

[Korigama]

Other than a divisive conclusion to everything built up so far from the beginning of the series through Cold Steel IV, there's also the possibility of more people being aware now that the bulk of certain sensibilities that they didn't like began in Azure and not Cold Steel, along with the fact that the turnaround for localizations has gotten even worse than it already was (2022 and 2023 for official releases of Zero and Azure respectively even with using Geofront's work as a base, 2023 for Hajimari/Reverie as well, and who knows when Kuro will happen in the West).

 

[Chaosblade]

I think development issues when Falcom moved to full 3D really hampered Cold Steel's storytelling. Was just talking about this in the series OT.

The older games, pre-Cold Steel, were already relatively laid back adventures for much of each game. Azure is the biggest outlier in that regard. Cold Steel's development issues caused those games to be even more padded out on top of the already laid back pace the series typically offers.

Cold Steel 1 and 2 were clearly intended to be a single game to build up the larger Erebonian conflict that occurs in Cold Steel 3 and 4. Not unlike Sky FC being a relatively smaller conflict that builds up to Sky SC, or Zero building up to Azure. But when that "smaller conflict" is expanded out into two 70+ hour games, that naturally creates some issues with storytelling and characters. For example, nearly all the important character development for Class VII occurs during CS1, leaving CS2 with minimal progress for the cast. In such a character-driven series, that's a damning flaw.

It's also harder to nail the payoff when you're building it up that much. Liberl and Crossbell's arcs are two games, that released a year or two apart from one another (3rd is fairly different in this regard). Cold Steel is a four game arc that took years to see through, and still ended up needing a (still two years off in English) 5th epilogue game to provide better closure. Expectations are higher, but impossible to meet through all the bloat and padding. Easy to see why it feels like the payoff is less "worth it."

The series also has a growing struggle with stakes because of a conflict between showing and telling. We're TOLD stakes are high, but our experience as the player shows that is that nothing is actually at stake, death is meaningless, and life will go on cheery as ever no matter how bad things get.


Also yeah, some of the character designs are trash, much more so than in the earlier games. 3D models of women are terrible because they all wear skin tight spandex and defy gravity, and that doesn't appear to be changing in Kuro. And sexual assault being played for laughs is never acceptable. Falcom needs to be held more accountable for their """"tropes."""" I have little hope the series is going to back off the trashy pandering though, I haven't decided if I'm going to continue with Reverie and beyond yet.

 

[Dust]

Coldsteel was really bad series even by generic anime tropes standards. CS IV killing ALL story set ups made the game pretty shit by default.

 

[z1ggy]

Writting and the otaku pandering got way worse with each game.

 

[Abdiel]

My friends that play the games all finished cold steel 4 and were really happy with it. It wasn't perfect, and there's definitely things they need to improve on as a dev (the sexist comments above, absolutely) but in terms of the story and bringing so many threads forward across so many games, I was happy with it, and I'm just sad I am not fluent in Japanese to pick up reverie and Kuro immediately.

 

[nsilvias]

It's a victim of its own hype.
It's kinda like when ff type 0 finally got localized after years of people being told it was a lost gem and then it came out and sucked

 

[PlanetSmasher]

Writting and the otaku pandering got way worse with each game.

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Let's be real, Cold Steel 1 opened with dumb anime pandering. That was the series' first impression - dumb, annoying dialogue and 'LOL THE MAIN CHARACTER FELL ON GIRL'S BOOBS, NOW THERE WILL BE COMEDY DRAMA FOR SIX HOURS".

 

[EggmaniMN]

People here are always excessively negative about everything. The vast majority of communities I've been in that have played them still love every game in the series. People just fall all over themselves to shit on stuff, call it overrated and explain to you that you actually like trash, especially if it has any sort of anime styling.

 

[Deleted member 4090]

Other answer: a larger chunk of the fanbase is now "caught up" with official releases so are more mired in the generally negative discourse of the games, rather than being in a position where there are still official games to play while being detached from online discussions. The discourse for nearly any widely played modern RPG series is generally a pit of negativity and I'm not convinced that Trails exists outside of that norm.

 

[Bongodaddy]

The franchise took a nosedive with the Cold Steel series. I quit part way through the second one and I don't know if I'll ever get back to the franchise.

 

[Belthazar90]

Cold Steel happened. It still has some of the best world building in the industry,but it just goes for too long without anything happening in the plot... Dragon Quest has this on some entries, but the little vignettes make up for it, the ones in Cold Steel are absolutely abysmal.

I still liked the 4 games, but it was an absolute slog to get to the good parts.

I always say this, had Cold Steel been two ~50 hours long games (with maybe a third extra entry to tie lose ends), like Sky, it would've been a lot better. They just stretched what they had too thin

 

[Ashes of Dreams]

Let's be real, Cold Steel 1 opened with dumb anime pandering. That was the series' first impression - dumb, annoying dialogue and 'LOL THE MAIN CHARACTER FELL ON GIRL'S BOOBS, NOW THERE WILL BE COMEDY DRAMA FOR SIX HOURS".

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Pretty much. Cold Steel was my introduction, turned it off after an hour or two. I have a high tolerance for anime nonsense but that was just the dumbest cliche bullshit I'd seen in awhile. It doesn't help that the only positives people ever say about this series are things like "the world-building is really good if you go back and talk to every NPC after every story event" and that doesn't sound enjoyable to me at all. I don't think talking to every NPC multiple times is a good way to tell a story.

 

[Yasumi]

It seemed like "these prior games are building to what might be a really cool conclusion," then Cold Steel 4 came out, was a pretty poor conclusion to the Sky, Zero, Steel, and all the other plotlines, didn't have the payoff people were hoping for, and retroactively made the previous games less worth the time investment.

 

[Deleted member 57758]

Tbh, I've only seen it get a whole lot of shit on here, granted, I'm pretty divorced from the fandom on Twitter and the like, it's mostly just been something I talk with friends about

Sky the 3rd's still the peak tho

 

[rickyson33]

as someone who loves the series i'm currently super duper burned out on Cold Steel to the point where I keep finding myself doing things like playing other games to avoid going back into 4

not only do I have a lower opinion of Cold Steel than the other arcs but 4 games of it is just too much

i'm still hopeful for Hajimari because if nothing else I like what i've heard about the structure of it, and Kuro is of course a new arc so who knows with that

 

[SolVanderlyn]

The Zero and Azure games came out during a relative drought of JRPGs. This was in the early 2010s. They also played on old school JPRG sensibilites people were craving at the time. Couple that with them being a forbidden fruit only Japan got to have and they were hyped up to heaven and back.

To be fair, the Sky games and the Crossbell games are pretty good, albeit slow as hell. The Cold Steel games have a lot more tropes that are harder to get past, even if those basic storytelling elements are still there.

I think they were hyped up as more than they are by the diehard fans, especially by those who can speak Japanese. Also, Era has a subset of users with a hatred for anime tropes and anything that can be seen as asinine (anything that can appeal to younger audiences seems to pull in the holier than thou attitudes a lot), so the dislike is probably disproportionate on this forum.

I still like them, but they're not my favorite games by any means. Cold Steel in particular irks me with its school setting and generic anime tropes, but what really gets me is how dragged out those games are. The major story beats are pretty cool but they take forever and last four fucking games! It could have been two if they cut them down, which they easily could have.

 

[SilentiousBeing]

Completed Cold Steel 1 and fell off halfway through 2. The aesthetic of the falcom engine just turns me off.

 

[z1ggy]

Let's be real, Cold Steel 1 opened with dumb anime pandering. That was the series' first impression - dumb, annoying dialogue and 'LOL THE MAIN CHARACTER FELL ON GIRL'S BOOBS, NOW THERE WILL BE COMEDY DRAMA FOR SIX HOURS".

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Yep, coming from Trails to Cold Steel was rough.

While we are at it, i *really* dislike Rean as a MC.

 

[Kalor]

Cold Steel happened, and 4 in particular which just came out in the West last year. The series starts real strong with the Sky games then the next localized games were Cold Steel 1 and 2 which were a big step down, but still had some of the stuff people loved. But then it got weaker as the arc continues with 3 and especially 4.

 

[5taquitos]

Seriously. Like if I'm desperate for a Suikoden follow-up, you know what I DON'T WANT? Fucking anime high school.

There was more to Suikoden than just "a lot of worldbuilding".

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Exactly. And in terms of world building, what I think a lot of people get mixed up is that Suikoden is not loved for its complex world building. Because the world building is not complex, it's just tightly woven into what you're doing and seeing. Suikoden doesn't spend dialog box after dialog box talking about wars and dropping countless names. It shows rather than tells. Hell, most characters' backstories are like one paragraph of text total, but that one paragraph gives the player a glimpse into the larger, unseen world.

 

[Belthazar90]

And after playing the 4 Cold Steel games available they reminded me a lot of the Sailor Moon anime, where you could basically watch the beginning and end of each season and still not lose anything relevant.

 

[Holundrian]

Cold Steel 4 happened and they still needed 1 more extra game to wrap up.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

Exactly. And in terms of world building, what I think a lot of people get mixed up is that Suikoden is not loved for its complex world building. Because the world building is not complex, it's just tightly-woven into what you're doing and seeing. Suikoden doesn't spend dialog box after dialog box talking about wars and dropping countless names. It shows rather than tells. Hell, most characters' backstories are like one paragraph of text total, but that one paragraph gives the player a glimpse into the larger, unseen world.

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Exactly. Like there are little hooks in various character backstories but really the worldbuilding is very thoughtful in Suikoden. I don't really think "every NPC has new dialogue after every cutscene" is really anywhere close to the same thing. It just kinda feels like the Trails team likes to flex how much writing is in their games rather than making the writing actually meaningful (or even good, really).

 

[Alent]

In my experience the otaku pandering became too much. I managed to get through CSI & II but i've been unable to drag myself through more than 5 hours of CSIII so far. If the pandering was more restrained i could handle the annoying story telling (the enemy is always holding back so you never truly beat them, no one is ever in any actual danger, male gaze character designs, harem shit instead of writing proper romances etc.). I hope i enjoy the Crossbell games more, though i have been informed some harem shit happens there too. At this point i just want the series to get to the Church state, i forget what it's called.

 

[Sumio Mondo]

Reading about how those who worked on the localization at XSEED lose their minds over how insanely large the script is sounds like a nightmare to have worked on.

These games need paring down/editing.
Having said that the upcoming Trails Of game caught my attention despite not liking FC that much on PSP. I will not be playing the other 20 games in the series to "catch up" either. I might check out one of the upcoming NISA releases whenever those come out, since I like old Falcom games. Fans of the series get very aggressive if you just want to try out one game out of order, even though as far as I can tell they are all arcs set in the same universe. I understand the concern since it's like reading a manga halfway through but I'd rather try the ones that appeal to me.

And from the outside looking in: Cold Steel never appealed to me due to the art style and how much the fans say the fourth game was a disappointment. Already gone through that crap in the past with other series, not exactly appealing for me to try that series out.

 

[Pundere]

I'm playing CS1 now as my first Trails and it is certainly some of the most generic anime shit ever. Fortunately most of the writing is solid and the combat is good so I'll keep going. It's good, but nothing mind blowing like it was hyped up to be.

 

[Arsene no Kiseki]

I honestly only see that negative air here on Era regarding Trails from a personal viewpoint.

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You're right, Nobody bitches about Trails more than Era. I was pretty surprised looking at popularity polls and seeing Cold Steel IV so high. But I guess thats what happens when you take era's opinion seriously on anything.

Cold Steel is widely considered the worst arc by far by most people that played Sky and/or Crossbell though and I mean a lot of the complaints are completely valid.

 

[Deleted member 17627]

The Zero and Azure games came out during a relative drought of JRPGs. This was in the early 2010s. They also played on old school JPRG sensibilites people were craving at the time. Couple that with them being a forbidden fruit only Japan got to have and they were hyped up to heaven and back.

To be fair, the Sky games and the Crossbell games are pretty good, albeit slow as hell. The Cold Steel games have a lot more tropes that are harder to get past, even if those basic storytelling elements are still there.

I think they were hyped up as more than they are by the diehard fans, especially by those who can speak Japanese. Also, Era has a subset of users with a hatred for anime tropes and anything that can be seen as asinine (anything that can appeal to younger audiences seems to pull in the holier than thou attitudes a lot), so the dislike is probably disproportionate on this forum.

I still like them, but they're not my favorite games by any means. Cold Steel in particular irks me with its school setting and generic anime tropes, but what really gets me is how dragged out those games are. The major story beats are pretty cool but they take forever and last four fucking games! It could have been two if they cut them down, which they easily could have.

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What an excellent post.
Especially regarding the RPG drought in the early 2010s, I feel like folks were really into a lot of RPGs back then that as I go back to them now, am seeing how badly they've aged (was just talking about God Eater here, used to be seen as a strong competitor against Monster Hunter, and now it's all but forgotten).

 

[hwarang]

People here are always excessively negative about everything. The vast majority of communities I've been in that have played them still love every game in the series. People just fall all over themselves to shit on stuff, call it overrated and explain to you that you actually like trash, especially if it has any sort of anime styling.

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Cold Steel saga has legitimate flaws though. It's okay to not like a game.