The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV

This is game nine in a continuous story viewed from multiple angles, spanning almost two decades of releases. Cold Steel IV is the conclusion of the third story arc, and brings the previous two to a final close as well. I felt fine right up until the final credits rolled and I turned off my Switch. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. What’s next? There is another game on the horizon, Hajimari No Kiseki, currently released in Japan. I’ve avoided any major spoilers of it so far, and it’s supposed to be a fourth, and final arc to the current line of games. I have that to look forward to, but I have no idea what could possibly be in it, as the previous three arcs wrapped up quite nicely with this conclusion. Anyways, let’s get onto the actual review, shall we?

I can’t go into much story-wise because there is so much backstory I wouldn’t want to spoil anything. However, we start Cold Steel IV directly after the events of Cold Steel III. Once again we begin another adventure in the Erebonian Empire trying to deal with the aftermath of our cliffhanger ending from Cold Steel III. Our main hero Rean is nowhere to be found, and it’s up to new Class VII to put the pieces together and not only find him, but steel themselves against the current political landscape of pre-war sentiment that the empire is swept up in.

Mechanically this game is almost identical to Cold Steel III, which is not a bad thing. They’ve polished the battle system and orbment (like the materia system from Final Fantasy VII) system to be extremely fun and balanced. Well balanced until you start reaching the end of the game and you can create a small army of over-powered super-human monsters. With your, believe it or not, ever increasing cast of characters you can try out all sorts of builds. In the final battle you had nearly 40 characters you could build three teams of 8 from. It was freaking amazing. Surprisingly I could still count probably 20 characters from the previous games that were missing from that cast, because they were off in other parts of the world. 

A few mini-games here. There was a fun card game that was akin to Magic: The Gathering/Pokemon TCG where you spend points to summon cards and use their skills. A game called PomPom Party based on Falcoms early game they made that plays like PuyoPuyo. Also some fishing. Spending the time to master all of these will net you some pretty great rewards.

The gameplay loops happens on an actual calendar system, akin to Persona games. Each day has a set of events that must happen, as well as a bunch of optional side-quests, and some hidden stuff to find for those completionists out there. I didn’t use a guide except for a couple things (will explain later). You’ll spend most of your time in this game literally going around and talking to NPCs. If you talk to them every day you can you’ll see even they have their own life to learn about. One of the characters I remember was a little girl living with her grandmother, upset that her parents were caught up in the fervor of the pre-war that was going around. She hated it. On the final in game day if you go and check in on that, you’ll see her parents have finally come to get her, but she refuses to go because she’s now afraid of who they’ve become. Infatuated with war. Her grandmother insists the little girl stays with her. There are 100s of NPCs in this game all with their own little story like this.

While I do miss the music of the first 5 games in this series, the music in Cold Steel IV seemed to finally resonate with me and had a lot more diversity in its OST compared to the previous Cold Steel games. One track I particularly enjoyed was titled Synchronicity #23. It was used in a couple dungeons and it’s a freaking banger.

Part of what makes the current running Legend of Heroes games great is its world building. We got to play with a ton of heroes from our previous story arcs and seeing them grown up compared to then was awesome. I really got a sense of the time that has gone by in the world during brief flashbacks with still image artwork of the characters as they were in the past. You can see how much care the character designers put into creating that feeling. The first game Trails in the Sky FC starts in the year 1202 of the Septian calendar and ends in 1206. Our protagonists Estelle , Joshua, Agate and Tita from Trails in the Sky FC have aged 4 years and traversed from 2D to 3D. The designers did a great job portraying that growth.

There is a true ending you need to unlock, but if you are like me and scour out all the things you can, you’ll do the needful to do it. Otherwise you may want to look up how to unlock it. Some people may not like this. The normal ending was really unfulfilling, but the true ending was a perfect way to put these stories to rest.

As for the not so good… Well the characters in Cold Steel IV are over the top nice all the time. Everyone is always friends, even with the bad guys. Only a couple characters, like Ash, call everyone else out for always being sunshines and rainbows. You get used to it, but it would be nice to have more actual bad blood interactions. The Nintendo Switch port had a couple issues as well. Frame-rate would chug once in a while, but I mostly played in “fast forward” mode because I knew it was going to be an even longer game without it. The “trial chests”, which help power up special moves of the characters, all had a text bug where you couldn’t see which characters needed to be present. So I had to use a guide for this. Another text bug, was that one boss’s skills were still in Japanese. Not the end of the world. There was also one graphical bug towards the end where some characters were on screen sitting, but all that was behind them was sky, and no furniture or semblance of a room. That’s it, just a couple bugs. I had no crashes. Overall a very enjoyable experience on the Switch. Love me some portable JRPG action.

In conclusion, you’ll want to go back and play the previous entries for this game to have it’s full effect on you. It wasn’t the best in the series (in my opinion that would be Trails of Azure), but the emotional pull this one has from everything it was building up to makes it worth every minute of the 120 hours I spent playing it. If you take my advice, this game will have one of the best endings to a game you’ll ever experience. As a standalone title though, it does leave a little to be desired, and can be overwhelming because of the sheer size of the cast that gets thrown at you.