#23
Change YoY: +1 My Rating: 9.3 / 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, conclude its own internal storylines in a suitable manner, and do so in a way that not only made sense, but would also serve as a satisfying conclusion to said plot threads that had in some cases been built up over several hundred hours. If you ask me, it did that about as well as I could have ever hoped.
As you might know, or guess by what I just wrote above, Trails of Cold Steel IV is also a very long game, precisely because it has to wrap up so many different stories from across so many different games, but unlike what often happens with long games, 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 unnecessarily. And that's what they did, as this game took me over 130 hours to complete, and I thoroughly enjoyed every last moment I spent with this game, and the Cold Steel series in general. Of course, this is still not the end of the whole story, just the conclusion of a part of it.
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