Currently Online 
#25
Change YoY: +1 My Rating: 9.3/10
Very few video game series have ever climbed up in my estimation as quickly as The Legend of Heroes did after I first discovered it. I played Trails in the Sky 2015, the sequel the following year, and then the first two Trails of Cold Steel games in 2017, and at that point the only series I held in higher regard than it were Final Fantasy and Dark Souls. Now, the issue here is that this is now the third time I'm talking about a Trails game, and I've still have four more to go after this, and trying to come up with new and interesting ways to say "I really like this one" is getting a bit difficult, especially since these games have a shared continuous storyline that spans the entire series, characters that play a role in much of it, and a battle system that retains it basic foundations throughout. Essentially, the reasons why one of these games is great, are quite often the exact same for why another one of them is. Even putting them in any specific order within the series itself can be very difficult, as it is in essence a single extensive narrative that runs through nearly a dozen games at this point.
I guess the one thing I can say about Trails of Cold Steel, is that it was basically the game that cemented the series' place in my mind as something truly great. As mentioned above, I had previously played the first two Trails in the Sky games and loved them, but this was the game that showed the franchise could keep the quality high beyond the confines of that one sub-series. It could introduce new characters and settings and make me care about them just as much as the ones I already knew, a trend that has continued ever since with each new installment I've played. Almost no other franchise has ever held up this well across so many different titles for such an extended period of time, for me personally at the very least.
Essay Pro