Welcome to our review of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, the famous RPG franchise is finally coming to Nintendo Switch and we played the third game.
The year is 1204 of the Septian calendar. A young man named Rean Schwarzer heads to his first day at Thors Military Academy—the most prestigious academy in the Erebonian Empire. Together with his new classmates in Class VII, he’ll forge unbreakable bonds, face overwhelming odds, and find his place in the world.
This game originally released in Japan in 2017 with translated versions coming to the west 2 years later and now in mid-2020, the Nintendo Switch gets their version. Developed by Nihon Falcom, which in itself is usually a label for quality and in this case, published by NIS, Nippon Ichi Software.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III is a classic role-playing game with all the usual like mana, encounters with enemies, and a big story. Well, a very big story really. In the first two hours of playing, you will even get tired of the amount of reading you are doing, this game is incredibly heavy on dialogue and less focused towards fighting.
A delight for some but a curse for others, right? Personally I was at first impressed that the story really went deep and by the end of my second hour, I often got annoyed that I was unable to save often so I could put down the switch or even play another game. Yes, you can skip the conversations and you will be using that plus button after every fight but take my advice, do not skip the story. While heavy, it is good!
Mechanically, this is a Nihon Falcom game after all, you will not be disappointed. There are many ways to fight. Whether you link up with others, activate a special attack, or just make the characters randomly attack, animations are nice and the game does look quite nice on the small Switch screen. We captured some footage of this in handheld mode and you can find this on our Youtube channel like always!
Surprisingly, the game does begin with what appears to be the final fight and at that time, you are unaware of how to really fight. This will become more clear as you progress down the game. It just felt weird as a design choice to me and you have been warned to expect to be thrown in there without any idea what to do. That is unless you played previous games, but hey, this is the first time this franchise is coming to Switch…
Trails also looks great, I just loved the cutscenes and the port looks amazing! I tip my hat to the porting company Engine Software for their great work and I hope we will get the older titles ported as well. The fourth game, I saw a 2021 release date for Switch which I hope holds up.
In conclusion, while everything has been said and done about this game already, this keeps being a very decent RPG. Despite its heavy load of reading and character development, you will not miss a pure RPG feeling. The heavy load of reading does come at a price as it did not allow me to just save the game. At times this mechanic did annoy me, sure, I can put away the Switch whenever and just put it in sleep mode, but switching games was not that easy… The game itself is very solid and I had fun exploring the lore of the game.
