Trails of Cold Steel III’s Switch port holds up, nine years on

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III released in 2017, nine years ago, as the eighth game in Nihon Falcom’s Trails series. It is a direct sequel to Trails of Cold Steel II, and it arrives assuming you know the cast, the war and the politics. That is a real barrier. In this paper’s assessment, it is also one of the more rewarding turn-based role-playing games of its era.

Rean Schwarzer returns, no longer a student but an instructor at Thors Military Academy’s Branch Campus. Two years have passed since Trails of Cold Steel II, and several months since the Northern War between the Imperial Army of Erebonia and the Northern Jaegers of North Ambria ended with North Ambria annexed into Erebonia. Rean now runs the homeroom of the new Class VII.

Trailer, via NIS America.

Juna Crawford, Kurt Vander and the New Class VII

The new Class VII is the game’s best idea. Juna Crawford is an exchange student from Crossbell, Kurt Vander comes from the Vander family that formerly guarded the Royal family, and Altina Orion belongs to the Intelligence Division and is the younger sister of Millium Orion. Ash Carbide, from Raquel, and Musse Egret, a noble lady who is actually the heir of house Cayenne, join later.

That is a lot of names. The field exercises structure does the heavy lifting. Rean is ordered by the Imperial government to resolve conflicts breaking out across Erebonia, most of them caused by Ouroboros trying to retake their “Phantasmal Blaze Plan” from Chancellor Osborne. Each exercise pairs the students with Rean’s old Class VII classmates, so the game keeps reintroducing the past without stopping the present.

Falcom has been building this world for years. Rutger Claussell, the Jaeger King and Fie’s foster father, and Arianrhod the Steel Maiden, an anguis of Ouroboros who is actually Lianne Sandlot, an Erebonian historical figure, both turn out to be alive. Both are Awakeners of Divine Knights, Zector and Argreion. The game also digs into where the Divine Knights came from: they are fragments of the Great One, a being formed when the Sept-Terrions of Fire and Earth fused after an intense battle. The Kins of Fire and Earth worked together to contain the unstable Great One.

None of that lands if you skipped the first two games. All of it lands if you did not.

Brave Orders, Break Gauges and Faster Turns

The combat is where Trails of Cold Steel III separates itself from its predecessors. It stays a traditional Japanese role-playing game with turn-based battles, still primarily menu-based, but Falcom put real work into speed. Transitions into battle scenes are more seamless, and more battle commands map to specific buttons instead of buried menus.

Two systems carry the changes. Brave Order lets players spend Brave Points, a resource built up during battle, for effects like buffs or heals. The Break system adds a Break Gauge bar to enemies. Attacking depletes that bar, and when it is fully depleted the enemy is weakened for one turn.

In this paper’s assessment, the Break system is the better of the two. It gives every fight a second act: chip the gauge, then commit. Brave Order is closer to a safety valve, useful when a field exercise turns against you, less interesting when it does not.

A Sequel That Assumes You Were There

Trails of Cold Steel III released for the PlayStation 4 in Japan in September 2017 and worldwide in October 2019. Ports for Nintendo Switch, Windows and Amazon Luna followed in 2020, with Google Stadia in April 2021. A PlayStation 5 port arrived in February 2024. A sequel, Trails of Cold Steel IV, came out in 2018.

That spread matters. Someone starting on Switch in 2020 or PS5 in 2024 is walking into the eighth entry of a series with no on-ramp. In this paper’s assessment, the game does not pretend otherwise, and that is the honest choice.

A recap would flatten the reveals about Rean’s birth and about what his friends have been doing since the prior games, which are the actual subject here. In this paper’s assessment, Trails of Cold Steel III is a sequel in the strict sense: it continues, it does not reintroduce.

The cost is real. In this paper’s assessment, the opening hours are a wall of proper nouns, and the field exercise loop repeats its structure enough that the middle stretch can drag. The cast is large enough that Musse and Ash get less room than their setups deserve.

What Trails of Cold Steel III Gets Right

In this paper’s assessment, what holds it together is Rean. Moving him from student to instructor changes the series’ center of gravity. He is now responsible for people who did not live through what he lived through, and the game uses that gap well, especially with Altina, whose connection to Millium runs through the Intelligence Division, and with Juna, whose Crossbell background sits badly against Erebonian expansion.

The Ouroboros and Osborne conflict gives the field exercises a spine. Chancellor Osborne took the Phantasmal Blaze Plan, and Ouroboros wants it back, which means the students keep walking into fights that are older and larger than they are. The Divine Knights material, including the Great One and the Sept-Terrions of Fire and Earth, is the game finally paying off mythology it had been stacking for years.

The battles stay quick, which is not a small thing in a genre where a single encounter can become a chore. Mapping commands to buttons and smoothing the transition into combat keeps the pace up, even if the menu structure underneath is unchanged.

The Verdict on Trails of Cold Steel III

In this paper’s assessment, Trails of Cold Steel III is a confident, dense role-playing game that rewards the investment it demands and punishes anyone who arrives without it. The Brave Order and Break systems are genuine additions rather than noise, the new Class VII justifies its existence, and the story’s willingness to resolve long-running threads about Rutger Claussell, Arianrhod and the Divine Knights gives the series a sense of momentum that most long-running role-playing franchises lose by their eighth entry.

The barrier to entry is the whole story. In this paper’s assessment, this is not a game you can start cold, and Falcom made no attempt to let you. That is defensible as craft and costly as product, and it is the main reason the score is not higher.

JRPG review · Nihon Falcom · PlayStation RPG · Trails of Cold Steel III · Trails series · turn-based RPG