Trails of Cold Steel - Preview @ GameSpew

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GameSpew has reviewed The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel:

Review: Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Makes a Valiant Leap to PC I've always bounced off Japanese RPGs - especially when they're heavily influenced by anime.
It's hard for me to pin down exactly why that is, but it's something to do with how painfully innocent they are. I'm too resigned to the horror of the world to accept the naive worldview that anime stories sometimes rely upon. The cutesy, bright and cheerful characterisations just burn holes into my retinas with how sugary and twee they are, and from a narrative perspective JRPGs have a tendency to break the players' immersion by over explaining every single plot strand to the point of insulting your intelligence. I like to call it death by exposition. That being said, it's not that they're bad games or anything, it just boils down to what your introduction to RPGs were.

My RPG adolescence was filled with games like Fallout and Deus Ex. So when it comes to JRPG games... I just come from a different world altogether. With that in mind then - yes, I was worried about playing Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. In the opening prologue the dialogue seemed to drag on forever, the gameplay was streamlined and on rails, and the combat was insultingly simple. It seemed like it was going to represent the things I loathe about JRPGs. But after spending quite a lot of time with the game I actually think it just about manages to get away with it. But not by much.

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Trails of Cold Steel ticks a lot of boxes of what I dislike about JRPGs, but despite my issues I'm more than happy to say that I enjoyed my time with Class VII and would happily recommend it to anyone looking for a genuinely well made, if slightly limiting, JRPG. I have some serious reservations with the storytelling, and the often cringe-inducing anime tropes are enough to make you want to rub salt in your eyes, but Trails of Cold Steel still manages to be an impressively entertaining ride. This is a game with a long, arcing story that takes some awkward, colourful teens through their turbulent teenage years with a fun and vibrant world to explore, charming characters to befriend and a turn-based combat system with a surprising amount of depth once you look beneath the surface.

Score: 70%​