The overarching story is just terrible and makes no sense, but the absolute worst are definitely the villains. You constantly get blue balled, every time you win the fights, but then lose in cutscenes, so you end up pretty much going nowhere.
Cold Steel constantly resets most progression at the start of each game, so you end up just spinning wheels for hours on end, building a relationship with characters that shouldn’t matter, until there’s a tiny bit of story (that contributes to the overarching plot) at the end of the game.
The exception in the series for me were Zero and Azure, which I genuinely liked, because of the much smaller setting and since it has nothing to do with the rest of the series, until the end of Azure, where some connection to the rest of the games is shoehorned in.
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Wtf, Azure was the worst of those issues. Crossbell gets attacked by about a dozen villains, and your police squadron never gets to actually “defeat” any of them until the very last chapter.
Poopfeast420@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Imma be honest, I played those games all back-to-back in 2020, Sky SC to CS3, 500 hours of Trails in two months, so I don’t remember a lot about all of these.
It definitely does have some of these terrible moments, which is why I didn’t like it as much as Zero, but I still liked the smaller region more than the other games, along with the rest of the characters.
Thaurin@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Yeah, but telling people to pretend Trails does not exist and to ignore them goes a little far. I personally liked them better than Zero and Azure.
Poopfeast420@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
It doesn’t go far enough, I think. These games should be laughed at and used as examples of what not to do.
You are objectively wrong (although after thinking about it some more yesterday, Azure is now also on my Trails-shitlist).
Nobody should play Sky FC and think “that wasn’t very good, and the final act was garbage, but there are like a dozen more of these games, they have to get good eventually. Maybe the great world building I’ve heard so much about kicks in at some point.” NO! You can still turn back!
Nobody should get hope after playing Zero that the series might finally be on the up and up, and not hot trash. You will be disappointed!
Nobody should be like me, be literally held at gunpoint to eventually play the rest of the games, because of the hundreds of hours, that I’ve already wasted on this abomination of a video game series.