The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III Review (Sciembe)
It's an improvement over the previous two Cold Steel games, but its still pretty rough overall.
The smaller core cast works well and gives the new characters a much better chance to shine than those in CS1 and 2, but keeping so many other legacy characters involved in the story made it feel much more bloated than necessary. The plot suffers a fair bit from the need to simultaneously flesh out its new characters and remind you that all the other characters still exist and are doing important things, bloating the story with way more than was really needed.
At least the team building side of the gameplay was handled well since the old and new characters were kept separate most of the time, letting you both put a lot of effort into building an effective team for the new cast (since you'll have them for the whole game) while still offering variety thanks to the occasional involvement of characters from previous games.
As for the actual combat, I like the theory behind the new mechanics but they're horribly unbalanced in their current state. Bosses take a huge amount of damage before their defenses break and, unless you're using Juna's order to boost break damage then they'll heal whatever damage they took before long anyway. The only strategy I could put together that consistently worked was to stack orbs and orders to increase break damage, unleash a bunch of S-Crafts right off the bat, and hope to god that you can finish them off before they recover from the break. Anything else just failed to work, leaving the boring and exploitative strategy as the only real option.
Cold Steel 3 isn't bad. I like it better than the previous Cold Steel games. But its still far from the peak of the earlier titles in Sky and Zero/Azure.