The problem with cliffhangers. (You eventually have to resolve them.)

 So, I recently replayed one of my favorite video games.  Trails of Cold Steel IV.  Why yes, I do have a good two dozen other games piled up in my backlog.  And yes, I have played this 120 hour long game already.  What's your point?

Anyway, it resolved the cliffhanger from Trails of Cold Steel III so well that got me thinking about how the resolution to cliffhangers are handled in all forms of media.  Off the top of my head, I came up with two extremely high profile examples of it being done very badly,  So let's compare them so I can point out why Trails of Cold Steel IV worked, while the others did not.

The Empire Strikes Back had a GREAT cliffhanger.  Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and taken by Boba Fett to Jabba the Hutt.  Luke has had his entire world shaken to the core by Darth Vader's revelation.  And earlier in the movie the Rebel Alliance suffered a stunning defeat that left their forces scattered.  Great cliffhanger that had people eagerly awaiting the next movie 3 years later.  But the problem with that great cliffhanger was that it had to then be resolved.  Han needed to be rescued, and Luke needed confirmation of the truth and to confront Obi-Wan for lying to him.  Return of the Jedi spends nearly 45 minutes of its runtime resolving this cliffhanger, almost 50 in the special edition because of that gawdawful Jedi Rocks musical number. *shudder*.  

 

On paper, this is fine.  This SHOULD be exciting.  But in actuality it is very boring.  Luke does the majority of his character development into the confident Jedi Knight between films, and so, goes through very little in this first part of the movie.  Everyone else pretty much stays the same.  The rescue goes on, and on, and on, and on, and we see no new sides of characters.  We see no growth from them, other than Harrison Ford's hair being considerable longer than it was when he got frozen in the previous movie.  Even the action scenes are kind of boring.  It's just like 45 mins of nothing just sitting there taking up space at the beginning of the movie.  

 

It's boring.  It goes on forever.  And when the movie FINALLY moves on to its main plot little of value has been achieved for all of the time spent.  Then the whole rest of the movie has to play catch up to cram the plot of an entire movie into a much shorter amount of time because it first had to spend so much time on resolving that cliffhanger before it could even begin its own story.  A lot of it feels rushed.  It feels like things are missing.  There is very little time left for characters to deal with new revelations, like the Luke Leia thing.  The whole movie feels kind of like a gigantic mess, because they spent so much time on that rescue that there wasn't enough time for anything else.

Okay, next let's move on to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  So, Halfblood Prince ended with what some people would call a good cliffhanger, but what I called, at the time, really stupid and pointless.  Harry and Dumbledore go for the locket horcrux, Dumbledore is weakened by the experience, and dies because of it.  And then the locket turns out to be fake with a taunting note to Voldemort from a guy named R.A.B.  Yeah, there was a lot of speculation and hype between book releases over who R.A.B. was, but, I mean.  Come on.  Anyone who was paying attention in book 5 already knew exactly who it was, and exactly where the locket was.  I don't consider this to be a very good cliffhanger, because I was paying attention, so there was no mystery for me.  But the hype train chugged along anyway.

So, book 7 comes out, and we spend over an entire third of the book resolving that cliffhanger.  This time is absolutely wasted in the story.  Very little of value happens in this time.  Our characters spend ages figuring out the mystery, ages tracking down the locket, ages planning how to get it back, and ages actually getting it back.  It goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and at the end we're left with very little of value.  Hell, the Deathly Hallows themselves are NOT EVEN MENTIONED UNTIL WELL PAST THE HALFWAY POINT IN THE BOOK.  Sure, there is the wedding, and a few other things of import in this beginning third of the book, but the majority of it is tracking down that damn locket  It's boring and it goes on forever, and the escape from the Ministry, which is clearly supposed to be exciting, falls completely flat because we're already bored out of our freaking minds by the absolutely nothing that has been happening so far to resolve that stupid cliffhanger.

 

Come with me, if you will, on a journey into an alternate world.  Say that Halfblood Prince didn't end with a fake locket, and instead, the cliffhanger was that Harry has the real locket, but he has no idea how to destroy it.  Now, the beginning of Deathly Hallows is more about the locket corrupting our heroes as they desperately try to find a way to kill it.  It's darker.  It's more entertaining.  It doesn't rely heavily on a mystery that isn't much of a mystery to anyone that was paying attention, and it is something they actually had to do later in the book anyway, which would give more time to more important things so the ending of the book doesn't feel so rushed, and the Deathly Hallows, can actually be a more integral part of the story from a much earlier point in the book.

 

Anyway, the cliffhanger sucked, and the resolution took way too long to meander its way through to its endpoint.

 

So, how did Trails of Cold Steel IV  succeed where the others failed?  Well, Cold Steel III is all about a new group of students following in the footsteps of the previous class, and learning about the world, and all of the political tensions in it, while also facing some pretty crazy combat situations.  It is made very clear in this game how naive and young these kids are, and how far they have to go before they're adults, and how hard they'll have to work to live up the the class that came before them.  The cliffhanger was very strong.  The villain defeats our heroes with overwhelming might and power.  An important character dies, sacrificed by the villain in an evil ritual.  Darkness is spreading all across the land, causing chaos and fighting everywhere.  Rean, our hero, after watching his friend be murdered, loses control of his power, goes berserk, and kills the holy beast he was meant to protect, thereby starting the apocalypse he was there to prevent himself.  The students can only flee before the might of the villain as Rean is taken prisoner.

 

So, how does Cold Steel IV resolve this?    Beautifully.  The entire world starts gearing up for war as an ancient curse spreads through the land, unleashed by the death of the holy beast.  The students who fled are outlawed, and in hiding.  They want to get Rean back, but it will take a lot of work to uncover where he's being held and then to actually get him out when they do.  The beginning of this game is all about these naive children from the previous game having to step up and use what they've learned.  It's about them transitioning from children to adults.  Taking responsibility.  Growing beyond who they were into who they need to be to get the job done and save their instructor.  It's crazy how much real, impactful character development is packed into the beginning of this game as our characters get closer and closer to finding Rean, and then, eventually launching an all out attack on where he's being held.  But he's been consumed by the curse, and is still running berserk and mindless.  They have to defeat him in battle, and then bring his mind back by forcing him to remember who he is, who they are, and what they all mean to each other.  It's a really touching scene. 

So, we've got our characters basically being forced to grow up into adults with no one to guide them anymore.  They grow quite a bit as characters.  And then they prove their worth through succeeding in finding Rean, and by overpowering him and forcing him to remember.  It's a story about students who were pretty clueless before meeting him, surpassing him, and taking their places beside him as equals for the coming darkness and world wide war rather than beneath him as children and students.  Great character development, great actiony climax, with a very emotional reunion.  This is a GREAT resolution to the cliffhanger.  Yes, it takes up a huge chunk of the beginning of the game, about 25 hours of gameplay.  That's 25 hours of gameplay not devoted to fighting the villain and his overwhelming superiority.  But it's 25 hours of characters becoming who they need to be to stand up to him, challenge him, and eventually defeat him.  Which is priceless.  

 

This is what Return of the Jedi, and Harry Potter lacked.  Cold Steel IV filled this cliffhanger resolution with deep emotional weight, and solid character development.  It used this time very well to push characters into bettering themselves for the coming battles.  The other two treated their cliffhanger resolutions like this annoying thing that needed to be dealt with, and couldn't be bothered to make it interesting in any way.

Anyway, those were just my thoughts about cliffhangers and the crappy way most writers resolve them in the next installment.  It's pretty rare that you get writers who can actually pull off a great resolution, and Trails of Cold Steel IV did really well at it.

What a gawd-awful year in Streaming "entertainment"

I'll bet nothing this year could possibly be worse than Wheel of Time.

 

Boba Fett said, "I'll take that bet."

 

Halo said, "I'll raise you Master Chief's constantly bare booty, free swinging dong, and inability to wear his signature helmet."

 

Cowboy Bebop said, "I've got a live action version of Radical Edward, and don't understand what made our source material any good."

 

Foundation said, "Source material?  What's that?  I literally do not understand the term." 

 

Hawkeye said, "I'm not even about Hawkeye."

 

Master's of the Universe: Revelation said, "You call that sucking? Let me show you how to REALLY suck."

 

Obi-Wan Kenobi said, "Hold my beer."

 

Then She Hulk said, "hold my box wine."

 

Then Rings of power said, "hold MY mead."

 

Then Willow said, "y'all are amateurs, all y'all can step back and hold MY mysterious potion that sent the evil queen Bavmorda to the realm of eternal darkness."

 

And then Witcher: Blood Origin came out and is legitimately worse than every one of them.

 

And that's not even counting the ones I didn't bother to watch because I had no interest in them like Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel.

 

If this is the quality of streaming shows these days, I see no reason to pay for ANY of the streaming services out there. I'll keep my money. I'm done spending it on this trash.

 

This has been one of the absolute worst years in entertainment of all forms in my entire 43 years of life. It may actually be THE worst year. There has been nothing but garbage. Even the stuff that was kind of okay, was only kind of okay by comparison to the rest, rather than actually being good in itself. I think the only legitimately good pieces of media that came out of Hollywood this year were Top Gun, and maybe Bullet Train and Violent Night. The entertainment industry as a whole needs a severe wake up call. 

 

Japanese and Korean stuff was great though. And a few Indie video games.

Jennifer Lawrence being absolutely stupid made me think...

 So, recently, Jennifer Lawrence claimed that she was the first woman ever to lead an action movie.  Uhuh.  Right.  Let's see.  Just off the top of my head you've got Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton, Mila Jovovich, Gina Davis, Uma Thurman, Michelle Rodriguez, Pamela Anderson, Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Hallie Berry, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Cynthia Rothrock, What's her name from Red Sonja.  Like, dozens of women who led dozens of action movies, and many of them before Jennifer Lawrence was even born, much less acted in Hunger Games.

But this isn't the stupidity I wanted to talk about.  In the video, she said something that really, really rubbed me the wrong way.  Something so utterly and completely stupid and wrong that I just had to scream out into the void on the internet about it.  She said something like "girls can identify with both male and female heroes, but boys can only identify with male heroes."  This one line right here is even more stupid than her claim to be the first female action star ever.

Allow me to give you an example from my own life to illustrate the utter stupidity of that statement.

My all time favorite video game is Final Fantasy 6.  It came out in 1994.  I was 15 in 1994.  I played the hell out of that game.  Over, and over, and over again.  And many times more over the almost 30 years since.  This is a game that is split into two parts.  Each part is led by a different protagonist.  Both of these protagonists are women.  These two characters are also my favorite characters in the game.  My two favorite video game characters from my all time favorite video game are women.  15 year old me didn't care.  15 year old me saw an outcast trying to find her place in the world and said, holy crap, it's like this character is me.  15 year old me saw a lone woman standing up to evil in order to save the world even though she thinks she's the only one left alive who can do it, and that all hope is lost, and said, holy crap, I want to be as strong and awesome as her.  I want to stand up to the darkness in my life and fight for what is right even if I know I will probably lose.  It's not about which jiggly bits a person has.  It's about what's in their character.  What's in their personality.  When they're pushed to the brink, what will they do?

Here's another example.  My all time second favorite videogame(s) are the Xenosaga Trilogy.  This trilogy is also led by a female protagonist in Shion.  Over the course of the story she is beaten down again, and again, and again by the horrors of her past, and the reality of the not too distant extinction of the human race being HER fault.  Yet, she still finds the strength to stand back up again.  To continue on.  To fight, even though she knows she will probably die.  To turn her back on the peace that she so desperately wants just so that she can do the right thing, and save what's left to save of humanity.  She falls countless times along the way.  She even joins the villains at one point in the story because she is so desperate for just one person to love and accept her for who she is.  But with the help of her friends she is able to realize why she should continue fighting, and why she should lay down her life if need be, because the needs of the many outweigh her own selfish desires.  That is a hugely complex and extremely relatable character that is probably my single favorite video game protagonist of all time.  Does it matter to me that she's a woman instead of a man?  Are you freaking kidding me?  What does that even have to do with anything.  She is an amazing character that if I could find even a shred of her strength of character in myself, I would count myself lucky.

So, yeah.  I just thought that was both extremely stupid, and, frankly, pretty insulting of her to say.  Again.  It is not which jiggly bits a person has that makes them an interesting, relatable character to aspire toward.  It's who they are inside.  What they do when the world pushes them down.  How they react when they are the only thing standing between evil, and everyone else.  If they will step toward death to save those they care about from it.

I am just sick to death of this narrative of sexism and misogyny that American media keeps beating me over the head with.  I'm sick of being told I'm the scum of the earth because man bad for not liking female character.  It's not that they're female that makes me dislike them.  It's that they're shit characters that make me dislike them.  Show me a character even half as strong and relatable as Shion in Xenosaga and we'll talk.  Until then, take your idiotic narrative and shove it up your ass, Jennifer.  

The Mass Effect 3 ending choice isn't really a choice when you think about it.

 Okay, so, for Mass Effect 3 you've got 4 choices for the ending.  Destroy.  Control.  Synthesis.  Reject.

The Rejection Ending is stupid, because all civilization will be wiped out, and all advanced sentient life destroyed.  What have you been fighting for through three games if not to stop that from happening.  One VERY IMPORTANT thing to note when choosing this ending, however, is that when you choose to reject all of the Star Child's options, HE SPEAKS WITH HARBINGER'S VOICE.

Which leads me to the Synthesis Ending.  This is the ending that the Star Child pushes the hardest.  This is the ending that HE wants you to choose.  HE, as in the kid WHO SPEAKS WITH HARBINGER'S VOICE.  This is the choice that HARBINGER wants you to choose.  Whatever Harbinger wants, I pretty much want the opposite.  This is a bad choice, because it is the choice that your bitterest enemy wants you to choose, which brings up questions over whether it will really be what he says it is, or if it will just be another way of indoctrinating and enslaving all life in the galaxy.

So we've got two choices left.  But Control isn't looking all that great either.  Rewind five minutes and see how that went for the Illusive Man.  You're going to control the Reapers by taking the place of the Star Child, are you?  And there's no way that you're not going to be indoctrinated and start the cycles all over again once you've been overwritten like you've seen so many others throughout the trilogy?  Yeah, no thanks.  Didn't work out too well for the Illusive Man, and there's no guarantee that you're not going to end up a Reaper puppet just the same.

Destroy is really the only choice here.  It's the only choice that removes the threat forever.  It's the only choice where you can be sure that you have actually won, and the Reapers will never return to enslave and destroy ever again.  Yes, the cost is high, but can you afford NOT to pay it?  Peace with the Reapers is not possible.  They are pure evil that cannot ever be reasoned with.  They must be removed from the equation completely, so Destroy is the only path that makes sense.  This is probably why the Happy Ending Mod defaults to this ending, because the guy who made it understood everything I just said.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails series

 

So, once upon a time, when the Sony PSP was still a thing, I heard about this game called The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.  It was said to be an amazing JRPG experience, unlike nothing you had ever played before.  So, I bought it for myself for my birthday back in 2011.  Which was 7 years AFTER it originally released in Japan.  Something that would become a running theme with this series, stretching on even to now in present day.

Anyway, I played a few hours of it, and got bored fast.  The game is extremely long winded, placing far more emphasis on telling a very involved, character driven story through dialog than on gameplay, and I was more looking for a game that was a bit more action-y and a little less talk-y at the time.  So, I set it aside, and promptly forgot about it.

Then somewhere around 2017, I’d been hearing about this Trails of Cold Steel series that was supposed to be really good, and I figured, eh, why not, I’ll give it a try.  I played a few hours.  Got bored for the exact same reasons I did with Trails in the Sky, and promptly forgot about it.

I’m not sure why I decided to give the game a second chance a year or so later, but I did.  I went into it knowing what kind of game it was.  That it has a lot of story to tell, and it prioritizes that above all else, including gameplay.  That its story is almost entirely told through dialog scenes, which can stretch out to be pretty hefty in length.  And that when the game finally does let you play it, the gameplay sections are often further broken up by more dialog scenes.  I decided that I was going to just sit down and play it, and try not to expect the game to be anything more than it is.

And this time I fell into a very well told story about a pretty well developed and entertaining cast of characters in a world that is extremely well built, with believable history and interesting mythology, which both play deeply into the story.  It’s a story about a bunch of school kids traveling around an empire that’s on the brink of civil war, and basically seeing for themselves all of the tensions that have risen up between different factions of nobility and common people.  It’s really well played out.  They never actually say, hey, look, we’re about to fall into civil war.  The writers just show you all of the things that are creating tension, while your naïve school kid characters are pretty well clueless to the ramifications, so when the civil war they’ve been seeing signs of throughout the whole game actually does break out at the end, they’re taken completely by surprise.  And it doesn’t come off as them being stupid, it feels more like they’re just young and naïve, and never thought something like that could possibly happen in their peaceful empire. 

And near the end, I realized, hey, wait, is this a sequel to Trails in the Sky, that game I never finished from way back when?  So, I looked it up, and yes.  Yes, it is.  This sent me spiraling down a rabbit hole from which there was no return, into a video game series that is unlike any other that I have ever played.  So, hey.  Let me tell you all about it, and try to sell it to you, because it really is a great series.  If you can get past the way it tells its story.

The first game ends on a pretty hefty cliffhanger, so, obviously I immediately started the second game.  The third game had come out sometime during my playthrough of the first one, so I grabbed that one as soon as I finished the second.  And then I had to wait until 2020 for the fourth and final game in the Trails of Cold Steel series.

Once I finished those four games, I realized that I was missing a whole lot.  There are a lot of things that get referenced, a lot of characters from previous games that show up and I had no idea who they were, and a bunch of lore that they expect you to remember from previous games.  Upon a little research I found that there were three Trails in the Sky games, followed by two more taking place in another part of the world called Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure.  That’s five games of content I’d missed that give a pretty hefty backbone to the Trails of Cold Steel series.  So, I decided to head back and play through each and every one of them.

My PSP does not work anymore.  So.  I discovered that the Trails in the Sky trilogy were all released on Steam, and I went and picked them all up.  They were all pretty cheap, like $20 each.  This is pretty much the only place you can realistically play these games in present day.  The first two games were released on PSP and PS Vita, but Those are pretty old handhelds and were never really all that popular to begin with.

Then I ran into a bit of a roadblock.  Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure have yet to be officially released in English.  Zero comes out in September of this year (2022) and Azure has an unspecified 2023 release date.  BUT, I found that there are fan translation patches that you can get.  So I bought the Japanese PC versions from a site that the fan translators linked me to, and installed their English patches onto them and was able to play them as well. Unfortunately, as soon as an official English version of these two games was announced the fan translators took down their translation patches to encourage people to buy the official English releases when they come out (which I will definitely be doing to support the series and tell the developers that there is interest in these games over here on this side of the world).  So, you will either have to wait for these games, or *ahem* sail the high seas, if you know what I mean.

There are also three more games that take place after Trails of Cold Steel called Trails into Reverie and Trails into Darkness 1&2.  Reverie has an unspecified 2023 English release, and the Darkness games have no English releases as of yet.

Anyway, what are these games all about?  There are four main story arcs in this series at present.  The Sky arc, the Crossbell arc, the Cold Steel/Reverie arc, and the Darkness arc.  All of these arcs take place in the same world.  The events of each of them impact games later in the overall series, and characters from previous arcs often show up in later ones.  It’s one huge interconnected world and story and it is unlike any other game series I’ve ever seen.  Its like one huge 12 game long story.  And as of this writing, the developers say that they’re only 60% of the way through the full story they intend to tell, so this will be going on for years and possibly decades to come. Just the enormity of this connected world and story with all these dozens of characters that show up in all of the different parts of the narrative is kind of mind boggling.  You see stuff like this in big epic fantasy book series, but you really don’t see it in video games, which makes this series pretty unique.

So, lets start at the beginning.  It’s a pretty good place to start.  The Sky arc consists of three games.  Trails in the Sky, Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, and Trails in the Sky the Third.  The first game is available for PSP in English.  The first two are available as digital only downloads for PS vita in English.  And all three are available on Steam in English, and that is the only place where you can get the Englsih version of the third game.  The first two games are basically one game that was split into two because it became prohibitively huge for a PSP game.  And the third is kind of like an epilogue that focuses on another character, but all the characters from the first game do show up, it’s just not narratively focused on them.  It basically sets the way things are going to go throughout the arcs.  Same world, same characters, same events, just experienced by different characters, with old favorites showing up to help now and again.

Trails in the Sky – This game follows Estelle and Joshua Bright as they travel the Kingdom of Liberl, learning about the history of the nation and world, while meeting new friends, working their way up in the Bracer Guild, which is basically a guild for adventurers seeking to help people out, and unravel the mystery of the disappearance of their father.  At first, this game feels like a very generic JRPG, but as you play further, you begin to see hints of things much deeper than what you’re seeing on the surface, and as the characters and world gain depth, it becomes clear that this is far more than the generic game it looks to be on the surface.  Unfortunately, a lot of people never get past this game because it does come off as so generic.  Even I lost interest in it and set it aside for quite a few years before picking it back up and finishing it.

Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter –This is the second half of the story from the first game.  An evil, shadowy society is behind the disappearance of Estelle and Joshua’s father, and they’re seeking an ancient relic that caused the collapse of civilization 1200 years prior.  Estelle and Joshua team up with all their allies to stop them, and avert a war that their nation is sure to lose.

Trails in the Sky: The Third – This game follows a new main protagonist named Kevin Graham, a Knight of the Gralsritter (Grail Knights) serving the church.  The ancient artifact from the previous game is recovered, but when Kevin comes to collect it for safekeeping by the church, he and basically all of the characters from the first two games are sucked into a world crafted out of Kevin’s own guilt and suffering at the horrors of his life.  They must fight their way through literal hell to reach the personification of Kevin’s worst sin and defeat it, before it all collapses around them and they are lost into nothingness forever.

And then we move into the Crossbell Arc.  This arc takes place in a small citystate sandwiched between two far larger nations, which resemble the USA and the USSR during the cold war.  Crossbell serves as a sort of buffer between the two nations, where they can trade and spy on one another while pretending that they’re not trading with or spying on one another.  The Crossbell police have decided that they are going to form a new unit to mimic the Bracer Guild called the Special Support Section, and these games are the adventures of the SSS, as they fight their way through mysteries, rebellions, terrorist attacks, and the worsening political climate between their neighboring superpowers.  Zero releases at the end of September on Steam, PS4, and Switch, and Azure releases sometime first quarter 2023 on the same systems.  Or you can sail the high seas and snag the English fan patches, and install them onto the Japanese versions of the games if you can’t wait that long.

Trails from Zero – This game follows Lloyd Bannings, a newly minted police detective as he is assigned to the new Special Support Section of the Crossbell Police.  His goal in becoming a police officer is to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, who raised him, and to solve his brother’s murder.  So, being dumped into a new unit that is trying to steal the Bracer Guild’s thunder is not an ideal situation for him, but he and his fellow SSS members make the best of it, and find that even in doing simple, every day tasks for the people of Crossbell, they can make a difference that can steer the course of their nation.  I thought I was going to hate this game, because, on paper, it sounds pretty boring, but with all of the political intrigues going on, a very well put together mystery story about an evil cult quietly trying to take control of the city in the background, and the mystery of who killed Lloyd’s brother, the story is actually really good, and I think this arc has my favorite main cast of characters.

Trails from Azure – This game is one of the best of the series.  All of the political machinations of both superpowers, and of Crossbell’s leaders collide in hugely epic ways as the corrupt president of Crossbell uses mercenaries to stage terrorist attacks all over the city so that he can seize power, and uncover another ancient artifact that contributed to the downfall of civilization 1200 years ago.  It’s up to the SSS to stop him before the full might of the neighboring superpowers can be turned against them, and Crossbell is crushed between them.

Then we come to the Cold Steel/Reverie arc.  This one is probably my favorite of the overall series, mostly because the second two games have a lot of extremely epic payoffs for people who have played through all of the games.  Parts of Reverie are also pretty good, and it ties up a lot of loose ends while also acting as a bit of a prologue for the next story arc.  It centers around Thors Military Academy, Rean Schwarzer and his class at the academy, Class VII.  The first two games are two parts of the same story, and the second two games are two parts of the same story.  So there’s two stories with these characters with a year between them.  Rean is a student in Class VII in the first arc, and the teacher of Class VII with a new batch of characters in the second arc.  1&2 are available on Steam, PS Vita, PS3, and PS4.  3&4 are available on Steam, PS4, and Switch.  I imagine that Reverie will also be available on those systems as well when it’s released in English at the end of next year.

Trails of Cold Steel – This game is basically entirely setup.  I already explained above what it’s about.  Students going all over the empire to see the tensions building between the nobility and commoners, widespread terrorist attacks by people who want to change the status quo, and the outbreak of a civil war.  This game and Cold Steel II take place at the same time as the Crossbell arc, so there’s a lot of discussion about what is happening in Crossbell throughout the game.

Trails of Cold Steel II – This game is considerably better than the first.  After the outbreak of the Civil War, Class VII were scattered all over the empire.  Rean must reunite them, and all the other students from Thors and bring an end to the war by uncovering the truth behind its beginning, and the shadowy organization pulling the strings from behind the scenes.  This game is really great right up to the ending.  It ends.  It has a great ending.  It’s really epic, and emotional.  And then the game just keeps going for like another 15 hours.  It drags on, and on, and on, and ON before it finally meanders to a close, and it really kind of drags the whole rest of the game down with it.  This is also where you might start to suffer a lack of not having played any of the previous arcs in the series.

Trails of Cold Steel III – Rean has graduated, and taken a job as a teacher at the Thors Military Academy Branch Campus, mentoring a new batch of Class VII.  This game follows the same general format as Cold Steel 1, with the class heading to places all over the Empire to see how all of the political stuff fits together and how everyday places in the Empire are run.  This game, however, learned from Cold Steel 1, and instead of being entirely set up with little in the way of action, it ends off each chapter with a huge epic climax which really helps the pacing of the story.  The shadowy organization is at it again, causing mayhem everywhere Class VII goes, culminating in a showdown in the imperial capitol where the imperial Chancellor activates an ancient curse to brainwash the entire empire into following him in a war to conquer the entire world.

Trails of Cold Steel IV – Every single character from every game leading up to this point bands together with all of their resources to make a last ditch attack on the Chancellor during the opening battle of the world war, Punching through the battle and fighting through every single enemy that you have ever faced in the entire series (that are still alive at this point) to end the curse before it forces the entire world to fight until there is nothing left.  This is my absolute favorite game in the whole series.  It is a massive, epic payoff for all of the 8 games that came before it, and the only thing in media I can really equate it to is the last half of Avengers Endgame.

Trails into Reverie – This game has not yet released in English, and wont until the end of 2023.  I bought the Japanese version off of steam and installed this English patch: https://mega.nz/folder/FVQglRyZ#Ko2ORdPVz6MEXx_hx3aKFQ.  The entire story is translated, as well as most of the side content.  There are a few minigames and non story related NPC dialog that are still in Japanese, but it’s enough to get the story and the bulk of the side content finished.  This game follows Rean, Lloyd, and another character named Rufus, and all of their allies as they try to unravel a mystery who kidnapped the prince of the Empire, and fight back against a terrorist takeover of Crossbell.  It acts as kind of an epilogue to everything that came before, and a prologue to what’s coming next.  What really drags this game down is the Reverie Corridor.  It’s where all of the side content is in this game, and it really serves no narrative purpose in the game, except providing a place to level up.  Some of the side stories here are pretty good, but, on the whole, it felt like a waste of time to me, and it just bogged down an otherwise excellent story with a bunch of unnecessary fluff.

After that is the Trails into Darkness arc.  Or, at least, I would translate Kuro no Kiseki to Trails into Darkness, but who knows, they translated Hajimari no Kiseki to Trails into Reverie, where I would have translated it to Trails Toward a New Beginning.  Neither of the two current games have English release dates, and probably wont for some time to come.  The first game, Kuro no Kiseki has an English patch in progress that can be installed onto the Japanese version of the game off of Steam, and you can find it here: https://mega.nz/folder/AYthzT6C#CzegMJ8nUEDi3HhsqYd2Aw.  Personally, I’m giving it a few months for them to translate more of the side content before I play through this one, but I did already buy the Japanese version from Steam since it was on sale.  I’m excited to get into it, I just want the fan patch to be as complete as it’s going to be before I do.

 

And that’s the Legend of Heroes: Trails series in a freakishly large nutshell.  As each of these games can run from 50-120 hours in length, I think I did pretty well condensing them.  Also, something to note, is that these games are notorious for having very slow animations in both cutscenes and in gameplay.  Thankfully, the Steam versions of the sky arc, and all modern console versions of the rest of the games have a speed boost option that speeds the animations up to something more like a bit faster than normal speed for other games.

 

Here's my rankings for the series, with the games I haven’t played yet marked as 0s.  There are no bad games in this series, this is just my personal preferences on which games I liked more than others, but I liked all of them.

 

 

1.)     1.) Trails of Cold Steel IV

2.)     2.) Trails To Azure

3.)     3.) Trails of Cold Steel III

4.)     4.) Trails in the Sky the Third

5.)     5.) Trails in the Sky Second Chapter

6.)     6.) Trails of Cold Steel II

7.)     7.) Trails From Zero

8.)     8.) Trails Into Reverie

9.)     9.) Trails in the Sky

10 10.) Trails of Cold Steel

0.)   0.) Trails Into Darkness

0.)    0.) Trails Into Darkness II: Crimson Sin

 

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

So, probably my favorite current JRPG series is a tossup between The Legend of Heroes: Trails series, and the Xenoblade series.  And the 4th Xenoblade game just came out at the end of last month, conveniently titled Xenoblade Chronicles 3, just to make sure no one is confused.

Anyway, I've been following the Xeno series since its first entry, Xenogears, back in the late '90s, which went on to Xenosaga in the early 2000s, and then Xenoblade in the 2010s.  The gameplay and graphics haven't always been great, but the stories and the characters have been.  The series takes very complex philosophical and religious arguments, and applies then to everyday people, then lets you watch them suffer, grow, and eventually overcome.  It's always been a series that's not afraid to go very, very dark, and treat its players as adults, which is one of the things I absolutely love about it.  There are, of course, light hearted, comedic, and child friendly parts tossed in for levity, but the core stories and struggles of the characters has always been very dark, complex, and oftentimes hopeless, which makes moments of triumph hit a bit harder.

Anyway, my top videogames of all time list fluctuates pretty regularly as I play new games, or revisit old favorites, but nearly all of the Xeno games, especially the Xenoblade games, are usually near the top of that list, with the previous game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, holding the top spot since I first played it 5-6 years ago.  I absolutely LOVED that game, and nothing has come along since to knock it off the hill for me.  So, I was pretty excited for this new entry in the series.

Unfortunately, it had a very, very, very, very tough act to follow, and it really suffered from the comparison for me.  Xenoblade 3 is, by no means, a bad game.  It's actually an extremely good one, with a decent story, mostly great characters, a mind-blowingly HUGE world to explore, and great gameplay.  It's just not Xenoblade 2 good, and I found myself mildly disappointed by it.  Don't get me wrong.  It is a great game.  It's just not as good as the previous game in the series, and that had me constantly thinking, "the last one was better" throughout the entire game.

Okay, so, what it did better than previous games.  The character models are much, much better in this game.  Xenoblade 1 had blurry, pixelly characters.  Xenoblade 2, they didn't have a character designer on staff, so they went with the lowest bidder, who happened to be a porn artist, so all of the characters are scantily clad women with enormous boobs.  But here, the characters look great.  They have a sort of subdued, anime style that's more on the realistic, rather than stylized end of the spectrum of anime characters.  The world is bigger than that of Xenoblade 1, 2, and X combined.  The combat is the best the series has ever seen, including Saga and Gears.  The class system was a lot of fun to mix and match with.  Most of the characters are great, with really well fleshed out back stories, deep trauma from a life of neverending war, and hope for a better future.  The English voice acting is great.  And it is genuinely fun to play and explore.

There are a few things that I didn't really like about the game too.  First is the music.  The music in Xeno games has always been S tier amazing.  I own every single soundtrack from every previous game going all the way back to Gears.  The music in this game is really bland, mostly forgettable, and just kind of generic sounding.  There's one or two good tracks, but most of it just sort of blends into the background, rather than standing out.  Some of the characters are somewhat less well developed than others.  It's clear that the writers had their favorites.  Each character has their own side story that focuses just on them dealing with something from their past.  But, for one of your main party members, her side story isn't even about here.  She's just there as a background character in her own freaking story that's supposed to develop her character more fully.  The game has this enormous open world to explore THAT IT KEEPS BLOCKING YOU FROM FREELY EXPLORING.  I can't tell you how annoyed I was to constantly have my characters running into invisible walls out in the world with text boxes saying "Oh, we shouldn't go that way yet".  That was NEVER a thing in previous games.  The only thing that kept you from exploring was the level of the monsters in areas beyond where the story wants you to go.  It was annoying.  Frustrating.  And really made this huge world begging to be explored feel smaller and more cramped.  The boat controls leave much to be desired.  That stupid boat is so frustrating to try and steer.  The difficulty of this game is very low.  I rarely play games on hard mode, because I'm there to relax, not stress out more.  But this game is so easy that I actually cranked up the difficulty to hard because normal was so easy.  Heck, even hard was too easy near the end of the game once I'd hit the level cap (which is extremely easy to do well before hitting the end of the game) and loading out the best classes with the best abilities.  I praised the character models earlier, but I do have to take issue with the villain character models.  They were red and white armor with elaborate, often silly looking helmets, and they just look so out of place in the game.

One last thing that kind of held the game down for me was the villain.  Nowhere in this 100+ hour story is his motivation EVER given.  In fact, by the end, you still don't even know what it is he's even doing, how it helps him achieve his goals, or what those goals even are.  Like, how could you forget to put in what the villain is doing and why?  That's like basic level writing right there.  Because of this, a lot of aspects of the story and the worldbuilding just kind of flat out make no sense at the end.  You're never really told WHY any of this is all happening, and toward what end.  It's all just happening because reasons.  I did a lot of the side content in this game, and it's not even explained there, or if it is, it was in some obscure sidequest I never bothered to pick up and complete.  The end of the game is clearly meant to be an emotional gutpunch, but all I could think of was how confused I was by the villain's lack of motive, and it kind of ruined the impact for me.  In the end, there's just way too much mystery for the sake of being mysterious, and not enough resolution to go around.  Sure, some of this may be cleared up in the story expansion set to be released next summer, but that's a long time after the end of the game to wait to find out what the villain is even doing and why.

So, at the end of the day, it was a good game, but it wasn't a great one.  I liked it.  I had fun playing it.  I'll probably play through a new game + sometime in the vague future.  But there are other games in the series that are much better than this one.  In a series of god tier amazing games, a game that is just merely good kind of stands out in all the wrong ways.

My rankings for the Xenoblade series is:

1.) Xenoblade Chronicles 2

2.) Xenoblade Chronicles 1

3.) Xenoblade Chronicles 3

4.) Xenoblade Chronicles X

For the Xeno series as a whole:

1.) Xenoblade Chronicles 2

2.) Xenosaga 3

3.) Xenoblade Chronicles 1

4.) Xenosaga 2

5.) Xenogears

6.) Xenoblade Chronicles 3

7.) Xenosaga 1

8.) Xenoblade Chronicles X (sorry X, you're kind of the black sheep here)

Cleaning out the backlog.

So, I have built up a sizable video game backlog.  I pretty much made my way through most of it during the pandemic, but it built back up again.  So I figured I'd go through the games I've checked off the list this year with some mini reviews.

 

Tales of Arise.

This game is absolutely beautiful.  They knocked it out of the park on visuals.  The music is pretty bland and generic.  There are some very good characters, and a few that are pretty meh.  The story was decent, but I felt that it really started to drag in the last third of the game or so.  The combat is pretty badly balanced.  It's not difficult, but enemies have such a ridiculous pile of HP that it just takes forever, even on normal difficulty.   And, well, the combat is not exactly what I'd call engaging, so pounding away at weak stuff that should go down pretty easily for way, way longer than you should have to gets old fast.  I ended up setting it to the lowest difficulty level because I was sick of the ridiculous amount of time this game expects you to spend on 700 hit combos just to get through a single battle against the weakest of trash mobs.  And after so many times, the flashy combat animations really start to get old and feel like they're wasting your time.  Previous entries in the Tales series did not have this problem.  They were all pretty well balanced combat-wise.  If you like Tales games, or enjoy decently made action JRPGs, you'll probably enjoy this one.  I'd say it's probably my fourth favorite in the Tales series behind Berseria, Symphonia, and Xillia.  Maybe fifth, I think Vesperia may have also been a bit better, though it's been a long time since I played it.

Shin Megami Tensei V

Okay, Whichever asshole said, "Hey, why don't we make this next game in the series open world" is suffering from a severe deficiency of my boot in his ass.  This game has the exact same problem that the majority of open world games have.  It's a big open world WITH NO FREAKING PLOT.  Which is extremely disappointing as the Shin Megami Tensei series and it's spinoff series Persona have always been deeply story and character driven games.  To come into this, expecting more of the same, only to get this big open world that is basically completely empty with nothing at all to do in it but explore, and maybe have a quick story cutscene to string the bare bones of a plot they shoved into it along was just not cool.  I like that there are other difficulty levels than "why god, why" and "hard as balls" but when there's literally nothing but repetitive exploration in an completely empty world, it's kind of wasted.  I didn't bother finishing it.  I got bored and moved on to something else.

Unfortunately, that something else happened to be:

Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

So, yes.  I understand that there are many, many, many people out there that just absolutely love this game.  I can see WHY people would.  I get it.  But this game really just was not for me.  It throws an enormous cast of characters at you right off with very little in the way of introduction.  Then it just keeps piling more and more complicated systems of gameplay on top of them, and I was like come on, game, give me a few minutes to catch my breath here.  At the end of the day, the game just dumped way too much complicated crap on top of me at the very beginning, and the story and characters were not engaging enough for me to stick it out and learn how to play the game.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

This is the one that everyone hates, apparently.   I've only played 2 Call of Duty games, this one and WWII, and only for the campaign, so I don't really have much to compare it to in the series.  I had a lot of fun with the campaign.  I really do not care for online multiplayer BS, so I skipped it entirely.  I thought the campaign was a pretty decent sci-fi story.  It had some interesting mission design, especially the ones that involved zero-G, or staying out of the sunlight on an asteroid close to the sun.  I'm not a huge fan of shooters, but the gameplay wasn't too complicated, and was easy to grasp for a scrub like me.

Octopath Traveler.

Okay, I really liked this one.  It's a cool throwback to older turn-based JRPGs.  It's got 8 characters.  Each of them has their own storyline.  I enjoyed all 8 storylines and played all of them through to completion.  In addition it has an excellent soundtrack, a great battle system that has a surprising amount of depth, and was just a fun, nostalgic little game.

Atelier Ryza

I've attempted to get into the Atelier series a couple times, but the games I've tried have generally just bored me, and I don't like arbitrary time limits.  This game is pretty different from the others I've tried.  It actually has a plot, for one, and there's no time limit BS, plus the combat was a pretty huge upgrade to the other games I've played in the series.  It's a pretty laid back game with a kind of cute story about a teenage girl and her two childhood friends basically having a last little bout of being children before it's time to grow up and be adults.

Doki Doki Literature Club

WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL!?!?!?  Starts out as a bland high school harem visual novel and turns into an insane psychological horror story.  I was pretty bored with it at first, but holy crap, I'm glad i stuck it out to the end.

Scarlet Nexus

This game has a cool visual style, and good combat.  The story seems interesting to me on the surface, but I just kept losing interest in it for some reason.  It just didn't hold me.  And the prospect of having to play the game twice, once with each character, to get the whole story annoyed me, so I gave up on it about 10 hours into my first character's playthrough.

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

I was really hyped for this one, because Shadowbringers, the previous expansion, was the best that Final Fantasy has been in DECADES, and had the absolute best villain in any Final Fantasy game ever.  Period.  I was a little disappointed.  It had some serious pacing issues throughout the story, it felt really long for the sake of being long.  Though it had a few very hard emotional gut punches, it felt like a cobbled together mess.  Shadowbringers was a very tight character driven story.  Endwalker could have used a few more drafts to get everything focused, and remove some of the needless fluff.  It really suffered from the comparison.  Had this one come out directly after Stormblood, which I absolutely hated, I probably would have loved it, but coming right after Shadowbringers, it felt kind of mediocre.  Plus they removed literally every shred of complexity from my favorite class, Summoner.

Halo Infinite

Whichever asshole said, "Hey, why don't we make this next game in the series open world" is suffering from a severe deficiency of my boot in his ass.  Yes.  I know I said the exact same thing about Shin Megami Tensei V.  It applies to this one too.  You know why previous Halo games have just cutscened us to the next mission instead of making you walk cross country to it?  BECAUSE IT'S FREAKING BORING AND NO ONE WANTS TO DO IT!!!!!  The story was garbage.  The open world idea was absolute garbage.  And, it seems, that you are REQUIRED to read several novels that take place between Halo 5 and Infinite to know what's happening.   5 stars to that hookshot though.  0 stars to the rest of the game.  But that hookshot was cool and fun to play around with.  I got bored with the game and gave up before finishing.  Who the hell actually enjoys a completely empty open world with nothing to do in it, and zero plot in a series that, until now, has been very story driven, and has not been open world until now?  STOP DOING THIS, game developers!  No one freaking wants it!

Titanfall 2

I actually really liked the campaign of this game.  It was on sale for $3.99, and I thought to myself, I feel like shooting things for a few hours.  I got exactly that, and I can't argue with the price.  The combat was surprisingly deep, there were a lot of cool mechanics, and I really enjoyed the story.  Never bothered with multiplayer, because I don't care.

The Outer Worlds

The best way I can describe this game would be if Mass Effect was a comedy.  I thought it was a lot of fun.  It didn't have a whole lot in the way of memorable characters, but it was pretty entertaining for what it was.

Outriders

The best way I can describe this game would be if Mass Effect was boring with terrible characters.  It's fun to play, but the story and characters are utter garbage.  I can't even remember if I finished it or not, that's how impactful the story is.

So yeah, there's a lot of games there I gave up on because they just weren't all that engaging to me.  The ones that I did finish I generally liked, though some of them did have some issues.  I think I'm going to give Triangle Strategy a try next.