izigame.me

Disclaimer: The thumbs down is really more mixed feelings but Steam's review system is dumb. Also the character limit prevents me from spelling out all of my thoughts. I'll do my best.
I have a love/hate relationship with Trails of Cold Steel 4. Really, I have a love/hate relationship with the entire franchise after the Liberl Arc and, most of all, with the Erebonia Arc. I don’t regret continuing the series, and despite the mounting number of flaws and their increasing severity as the saga drags on, the magic that Falcom is able to create when they do manage to nail it is simply too breathtaking to miss and somehow, they manage to continue creating those moments even around their most idiotic self-imposed limitations.
As with every game of the saga, CS4 picks up where the previous game left off. Rean has been taken prisoner and is being consumed by the curse that is apparently single handedly responsible for everything bad that has ever happened. It's impossible to make such a twist interesting. Falcom proves to be no exception.
Despite my criticism of the curse and its extremely poorly written "impact" on Erebonia (more on that later), the way all of the story threads from the previous games stretching all the way back to Sky FC continue being woven together is a gaming experience that I have yet to find on this scale elsewhere. Unfortunately, much of it in CS4 falls apart completely in critical ways. Such as Olivier's rivalry with Osborne that was built up from Sky 3rd all the way through CS3 just getting inexplicably yeeted into oblivion even though Olivier survived the crash so that a teenage girl can shoehorn extremely poorly explained intelligence god-mode hacks over everything, but only retroactively AFTER the things she "totally knew would happen exactly according to plan" actually happened. Guys, I know Musse needed more character development than "blah blah blah Rean's cock" ad nauseum, but surely you guys can do a lot better than that and also NOT sacrifice the entire damn plot of the series up to this point in order to do it?
The story relevant battles were already repetitive before this game. If you're hoping for anything new here, stop. It’s just another giant circle of the same old cliches. By the time you get to CS4, you pretty much know exactly how every story relevant battle is going to go. Example:
Campanella teleports to the heroes
Camp inserts snarky one liner here
Camp casts spells
Camp gets stabbed
Camp inserts snarky one liner there
Camp teleports away from heroes
While the lazy copy & pasting isn’t quite as egregious here as it was for the story relevant battle(s) in CS2, it has had more time to become stale, gets exacerbated greatly by Falcom’s refusal to let anyone die or face consequences for their actions or just find a way to wrap up a recurring rivalry, and nothing has been done to mitigate any of this.
The bond point/harem system rears its ugly head yet again and as with the other 3 entries in the Erebonia Arc (and to a lesser extent in the Crossbell Arc), it continues to cripple the development of the relationships between the characters so completely that Falcom mostly has to simply continue to depend on the gratuitous overuse of exposition to tell the player really really hard over and over and over again that these characters definitely love each other for good reasons and blah blah blah the power of friendship. Compared to how the bonds develop between the cast in the Liberl Arc where every character dynamic is free to receive every bit as much TLC as the world that Falcom builds around them in the absence of such crippling self-imposed limitations, one simply cannot help but notice how much more vapid and shallow all of the relationships between the characters feel throughout the Erebonia Arc by comparison. To Falcom’s credit, they do still manage to somehow create a magical moment here and there among the cast. However, they’ve become outliers and isolated instances whereas during the Liberl Arc, the magic was the whole dynamic of the relationships between the characters.
As phenomenal as some of the moments in this game are, others miss the mark badly. As Rean is taken prisoner while in a near comatose state due to the curse, Juna becomes the de facto leader of Class VII both old and new. This was handled with less care than Akira Toriyama’s alcoholic bender fueled attempt to make Gohan the new Goku during DBZ’s Buu Arc. As Old Class VII struggles immensely from not only the loss of their dear friend, but also the new “threat to the world” that has suddenly (sort of kind of actually not at all - more on that later) turned everything upside down, years of trauma therapy apparently get blown completely out of the water by a teenage girl yelling at you for 40 seconds. And now Juna is the de facto leader of both Old and New Class VII. Because reasons. Then she gets demoted to harem bait. 😴
There are a few exceptions to my criticism of how the game handles character development. Altina's emotional growth, for example, is nothing short of amazing to watch and play through. Over and over again I found myself wanting to reach through the screen for her to flatly decline my attempts to give her a hug. That’s probably a brand new sentence. The Legend of Heroes saga tends to inspire those.
Now on to the curse, the rivalries, Ishmelga, etc. The things that are supposed to represent the apocalypse in this game. What exactly are these things and why do they matter? They don’t. By the time you reach this point in the series, you’ve probably long since figured out that the closest thing to a realistic threat that Erebonia faces is the collapse of the earth’s surface under the sheer weight of the astronomically insane amounts of plot armor that keep getting slathered onto the characters that are supposed to have it at that precise moment in time. It's just another series of tired old lazily copy & pasted tropes and plot devices to slog through an unreasonable number of times during the adventure. The events in this game are described as being apocalyptic in scale, yet there's not a single moment of tension anywhere to be found. The writers certainly tell you to feel it but by this point it's so transparent that it's comical. These writers are afraid to even so much as let a dead character stay dead, they're utterly terrified of allowing people to face significant consequences even for some VERY extreme acts, they're allergic to anything that resembles pragmatism or major sacrifices to fix anything unless you’re the one character who is allowed to die, they refuse so completely to let a bad guy actually be a bad guy that they’ve given every gawd damn protagonist in the Erebonia Arc suicidal levels of battered wife syndrome and naivety to keep the revolving door going and magically it always works out in the end….and we’re supposed to pretend this apocalyptic omen is anything to fear? By this point it’s so cliche that I couldn’t even find myself feeling sorry for helpless children anymore. There's a scene where a little kid is crying because his dad got conscripted to go "die at war" and the closest I can come to feeling anything is "aww, poor kid hasn't learned how to be genre savvy yet".
If sideways thumbs were an option I'd give one instead of a thumbs down because despite the Erebonia Arc’s extreme flaws, the game still contains its share of cameos of the magic that Falcom has woven throughout the Legend of Heroes saga. That said, while I don't regret this experience by any means, I definitely believe that LoH peaked very early, and if the literary trends we saw throughout the Erebonia Arc are any indication, the days of narrative brilliance on the Liberl Arc’s level are a thing of the past.