The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV [Game Review]
TL;DR
A great conclusion to the Cold Steel games and the major story arc of the franchise. Recommended for any JRPG fans. 100+ hour adventure.
I recommend playing Cold Steel III (if you aren’t trying to start all the way from the first title) before playing, as it is highly necessary to understand the story in this title.
The Legend of Heroes titles (also referred as Trails or Kiseki) are all about world-building, so you can play the Cold Steel titles before the other major titles if you prefer.
[Played on a Nintendo Switch Lite]
Anyone who has been following Kiseki for awhile that has not played this title needs to get up to speed and do so. This is everything that fans have been waiting for. This title brings all 3 of the major story arc games (Trails in the Sky trilogy, the two Crossbell [from Zero/to Azure] games, and the tetralogy Cold Steel) together and the story converges as one.
While I do think fans will be very interested in this title, it is definitely not the entry title for Kiseki or even the Cold Steel games. Fans will appreciate old, familiar faces appearing and being playable, yet the newcomer will be lost. Even for a JRPG fan like myself, I was not as immersed as I was in Cold Steel III. The problem with these titles is that there are a lot of skills/crafts/etc that are very redundant. I found that with the correct orbment (sort of like materia in FFVII) set-up that I can be even more destructive to enemies than with the “ultimate” or “best” stuff. It really makes the grind for those items really useless in a way. This title is filled with lots of useless skills, if you know what you are doing.
The minigames in this game are expanded. There is the return of Vantage Masters, and this time around the computer player is a lot more sophisticated. There are more cards available, so there is even more reason to change-up your deck. I had a lot of fun with building decks and tweaking my strategy depending on my opponent. There is the addition of other minigames, such as Pom Pom Party. It is sort of like Doctor Mario. The ability to take a break from talking, running around, hitting up missions, and just the grind in general is really nice.
This title really was enjoyable, and it has more character development and story than the other title. (especially in terms of optional content, bonding scenes, etc) That is great for myself as a fan, but I found that even with all the variety of characters to have in my party that I was not really interested in customization as much as I thought I would. The game does make starting over fun, but early on in there is not much optional content available, making it fairly linear. Once the optional content and world expansion occurs, there’s really at that point not a lot making me want to dive deeper. I felt more obligated than excited to do side content in this case.
Cold Steel IV is a great title nonetheless, but it suffers a bit from the bloated nature that most games are taking up. Content for the sake of content and without any real coherence. There is, however, a part of me that would love to replay this title along with all the other Cold Steel games because the story does have a special place in my heart.