Trails of Cold Steel is the beefiest JRPG on the Vita since Persona 4: Golden. It has a huge script, a massive runtime and a giant list of minutia to pour over should you choose to do so. It’s also a lot like Persona in tone and structure, although anyone familiar with a previous Legend of Heroes game should still feel firmly planted in familiar territory. What this game is, ultimately, is a new take on the school and dungeon-crawling time management formula that is much more laid-back and accessible than some of its peers.

Trails of Cold Steel is a part of the same world as XSEED and Falcom’s earlier Trails in the Sky series, the main story of which recently concluded late last year. While the Sky games told a story about the somewhat whimsical kingdom of Liberl and the scout-like Bracer organization, Cold Steel is set in the far more rigid and structured Erebonian empire, and follows a group of military academy students. Those familiar with the Sky games will undoubtedly be fascinated by this new perspective, and the deeper plunge into the rabbit hole that is the ambitious world-building in these games.

The key theme in Trails of Cold Steel is class, and the interactions between people of different social standing. The story covers a lot of ground and sides of that discussion, giving the player a lot of different perspectives on ideas of morality, tradition and tolerance. The game does this by plunging the main cast into a brand new sect of the academy, one that comprises students of common and noble lineage together. This is unheard of in Erebonian tradition, and seeing how the kids react to this situation and grow as it plays out is the most valuable part of an otherwise fairly by the numbers plot.

Tying this into the good ol’ dungeon crawling is the Combat Link gimmick. As characters interact, spend time together and have their obligatory character arc blow-offs, their “social links” level up. As those levels go up, they can perform automatic team functions in combat that can often make a huge difference in how smoothly an encounter goes. The Combat Link stuff grows from an occasional bonus attack, to larger combos, healing and more.

The problem there is that while some strategy is involved (weapon effectiveness, more or less), Combat Link abilities popping off is largely random. The game often emphasizes how much you should be utilizing Combat Links, then you’re at the mercy of number rolling. Sometimes you get a ton of combos and do really well, other times you spend a whole battle bonking monsters one turn at a time like any other JRPG. Balance is a factor, but without any true control over the system, Cold Steel doesn’t feel as distinct from its peers as it should.

Aside from that, Cold Steel has refined the “Quartz” systems quite a bit from the Sky series. Quartz is basically a more limited version of Final Fantasy VII’s Materia. Each character has a bunch of slots that can be filled with different abilities. In the Sky games, stat boosts were tied in with abilities. Fire would boost attack and lower defense, for example, and come with the relevant fire magic. Now it’s all separate. A character can have boosted attack, wind magic and other unique abilities all independently of one-another. This also eliminates the stat lowering, so while there is less real estate for more options, there are less immediate drawbacks therefore more freedom.

Since the cast is quite large, Cold Steel attempts to balance party swapping by un-equipping certain Quartz gems and equipment whenever the active party shifts. This can be kind of annoying if you have your builds for each character locked in, since you have to keep re-equipping things. You inventory only grows as time goes on, so doing this over and over gets old.

Despite that minor annoyance, Cold Steel does do a good job of developing each character and guiding the player to playing as everyone more than once. You’ll end up with your favorites, but each “field study” assigns a specific team for the story being told. Other opportunities to dive into a multi-floor dungeon with whoever you want are part of the story too, so it isn’t entirely gated.

Trails of Cold Steel is also really good looking! It pushes the Vita to its limits, which sometimes does make the poor thing chug a little during certain scenes. The field of view is huge though, and everything is bright and colorful. Tons of NPCs roam around and react to the game’s events (A Trails staple) and everything just feels meticulously planned out for the sake of further building such an enormous world. And for collectors, the special Lionheart Edition comes with a very fancy silver colored box, thick color artbook, and Erebonian Empire pin. It will definitely stand out on your video game shelf. 

My main complaint about Cold Steel is it suffers a bit from superhero movie syndrome. The cast is too big for everyone to really get enough time in the oven, and the characters come off as less dynamic as a result. This is in comparison to Josh and Estelle in Sky, who were compelling all the way through. That said, on its own, Trails of Cold Steel is a thoroughly well-written and thought-out story not just about a few plucky JRPG kids, but also an enormous world full of nuance and life.

Hint: Money is tight. Make sure to experiment with recipes and selling different meals to make the biggest bang for your buck outside of selling septium crystals.

by Lucas White