As everyone around the Baltic Sea must have already heard me sequaling in unapologetic delight, allow me to spread the news here:
JRPG
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III is coming to the west this year, you guys!
I cannot say it any other way, but I love the first two
Trails of Cold Steel to pieces - warts and all.
Let me explain that a bit:
Trails of Cold Steel and its sequel are JRPGs concerned with the formation and first adventure of Class VII from the Thors Military Academy of the Erebonian Empire, a quasi-steampunk-quasi-fantasy hybrid setting. It is not a groundbreaking entry in the JRPG genre, but rather a "perfection of the form"-kind of entry. If you have played enough JRPGs you have seen the archetypes and formulas before, but rather than relying on that familiarity
ToCS and
ToCS2 tied it all together by smart narrative decisions and clever world-building; something that made playing through the story a delight from a design perspective. Each story also cumulated in a rugpulling and heartwrenching finale, which despite all the melodrama send chills down my spine and gave me serious heartache-by-proxy.
Saying more would give away too much, but if you have any interest in JRPGs please check the series out. (ps. don't worry about the continuity with the previous
Trails in the Sky and "Trails into Azure" (fantitle) entries in the wider continuity;
ToCS 1&2 stand perfectly on their own storywise)
My anticipation of part 3 (and by extension part 4) also comes from another source, as the story is already hinted in the Epilogues of
ToCS2 to take a turn I always really like: Taking the characters from a completed heroic story and putting them up against the circumstances their actions helped to create. I really want to see what emerges here as commentary on heroic narratives themselves.
Now there are some rumbling surrounding the publisher shift from XSEED to NIS America - including questions on the quality of the localisation and what happens with save game continuity (in Japan, PS4 remasters of the first two games came out prior to
Trails of Cold Steel III to ensure players could have continious savegames
- and of course a make quick profit).
