#24
YoY: NEW! My Rating: 9.2/10
To say Trails of Cold Steel IV had quite a lot of expectations to live up to would be putting it lightly. It was the culmination of a story that had at that point spanned eight earlier games (though only six had been released in the west at that point), it needed to tie together plot threads from three separate sub-series within the franchise, and do so in a way that not only made sense, but would also serve as a satisfying conclusion to said plot threads. As far as I'm concerned, it did that about as well as I could have ever hoped.
Trails of Cold Steel IV is also a very long game, precisely because it has to wrap up so many different stories, but it all feels earned. To me, it never felt like the game was overstaying its welcome, as these were characters and stories I was fully invested in, and I wanted to see this final chapter be given the time to properly tell its story without rushing through anything. And that's what they did, as this game took me over 130 hours to complete, and I never got tired of playing it.
