The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV - The End of Saga

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Well, we made it to the end (actually it really isn’t as Trails Into Reverie is) but here’s my review. This game is easily the worst in the series for obvious reasons. The plot never progresses as it should (for a finale it’s quite boring many times & quests drag on) but the characters have very nice arcs. The gameplay is the best in the series so far too. But man that story & progression really held this back & bored me most times.

Sadly this is the weakest entry of the ToCS series. I'm a very big fan of this series so you may take that however you want. The game is the easiest one in the franchise giving you a way to raise your characters stats infinitely within either the second or third chapter, and there is actually nothing new to this game other than a puyo puyo rip off, in a game with already too many side activities. Literally no one in this series can die. It's just a thing that if someone dies you will see them later on or in the next game, this is one of the most infuriating things, and I found myself literally staring there with "seriously" face any time they tried to be dramatic only to fall over later whenever they tried to make it a dramatic reveal that they were just fine. they spend a good 60 hours explaining the entirety of the story you've already played through like you're the idiot no lie, It was hard for me to even keep playing because of this. Whenever I played through the series I always felt number 2 was the weak link, because most of the game was devoted to just finding the characters you had from the start of the first one, and this game starts you out repeating that formula except now there's much more meaningless characters. The most exciting promise of this game was everyone being a part of it, I mean the previous two protagonists are all over the advertisements for the game, however you only get to play with the characters from the other games a total of three times for about 10 minutes each, and you can't change anything on them. The ending was very lack luster, almost acting as if the entire story was about your Speechless (90% of the time) robot instead of the actual characters you spent so much time pretending were worth a damn. It was very sad to end the story this way and I truly hope the next game will fix these issues of being the same game with an hour of new story. It's not all incredibly bad though. Whenever the story finally picks up (literally after the halfway) It's actually quite interesting and if you enjoyed playing through the first few you're going to of course love playing with the characters still. My main hang ups with this game are there's just too much everything. They never pay enough attention to the story about the characters and even at times when they do they really slop on it. The ToCs series could be squashed down into two games with a focus on the story and they would be excellent. As a closing remark I really was dissapointed with this entry which hurts all that much more knowing that the first game is one of my favorite RPGs. It's a shame they decided to end things like this, but it doesn't defer me from playing the next ones. If you're a fan of the series you owe it to yourself to see it through to the end, but if you've had trouble getting through any of the previous games maybe just go watch a YouTube video that sizes up the story.

I'm a fan of the Trails series, but holy crap was this game unnecessary. The Erebonia arc should have been wrapped up in 3 games instead of piling together this bloated nonsense. So much of this game is filler, and very little contributes to moving the story forward in any meaningful way. Also it's just so stupid how the development team felt they needed to force every character from every previous game into this game, however unnaturally it may be. So there's probably 50 or more characters that have been introduced in CS4 and previous Trails games and just about every one is put into this game for better or worse (usually worse). The development team tried to give a relevant role to each of the 50+ characters and it just turns into a sloppy mess of nonsense and supernatural contrivances. This whole game could have been trimmed down to 20 hours or less by removing all the filler and been added to the end of CS3 after trimming the filler from that game and you'd have a satisfying end to the Erebonia arc. Also it's just nauseatingly obnoxious how every single one of the girls falls instantly in love with the main character and eats up his every action despite him having such a dweeby, goody two shoes personality that would turn off most girls. Gameplay is good, music is meh, story is crap, game is bloated. 4/10

- Story in this game is like a kid's cartoon. The story treat every battle like sparing practise. - Bad guys joining you after you beat them and it happens over and over. So repetitive. - Like the past games this game feels like it's way longer than it deserves to be. - Horrible pacing. The story is watered down juice and the juice wasn't good to begin with. - Do you love it when you finish a game then don't get the full ending? - Battle system was great but hasn't changed in the 4 games much. - Not enough new locations to see. = The story is some how even worse in this game and the pacing is some how just as slow despite this been the game the story has built up to. I am done with doing dull tasks after the credits to get the right ending. This is the worst of the 4 Cold Steel games and should have been the best.