51. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III - Switch
Trails of Cold Steel III serves as the beginning of a payoff to all the underlying plot threads that have been laid across all the Trails games (in the Sky, Cold Steel, and the two unlocalized games). And it does a great job at that. But I will warn you; it is only the start, as it ends with a massive cliffhanger that frankly makes me regret having picked it up without the fourth game having been localized. It's coming, but it's going to be painful to wait that long.
Gameplay-wise Cold Steel III is an incremental improvement on the first two. There are a lot of quality of life changes; almost all of the hidden quests now provide map markers to get you started, as well as a bunch of hidden items also having map indicators. Recipes are now learned from restaurants as a special menu item, so they are easily acquired (rather than from random NPCs). You'll still need a guide to truly 100% if that's your thing, but for the most part you won't feel like you're being locked away from rewards because you aren't obsessive at talking to every damn NPC in the game.
Another noticeable gameplay change is that your ARCUS unit now lets you equip two master quartzes (and you lose a regular quartz as a tradeoff). The second master quartz provides a fraction of the normal stats and only gives you its primary passive, but you still get all the spells. And more importantly, this system lets you create some absurdly powerful combinations. Rather than choosing from between a handful of "this makes your physical attacker awesome", pick the best two and watch as you steamroll everything in your path. The game also rejiggered some of the calculations arounds arts, so creating a mage is worthwhile again.
There are some changes in battles now. They've made enemies not instantly notice you, so you can get back attacks more frequently. But now those are only double advantage; to get a triple advantage you expend a resource. But this resource also works on the extra strong mosnters, so it's best saved for that. There's a new system of orders, where you can activate a passive bonus for the team for a limited number of player turns at the cost of the same resource that powers your link attacks. But these can be incredibly strong. Which leads into the final change; the break system. The devs finally nerfed delay into oblivion, so you'll basically never push enemies down the turn order (both chance and amount are drastically reduced). But there's a new system to stop enemies from getting turns. Every enemy has a break meter which goes down when they take damage. It is related to but independent of damage; a given hit that does more damage will do more break damage, but some attacks will do more or less break damage and you can specifically buff it. When an enemy's break meter is depleted they lose their upcoming turn as if they took a basic action, then their next turn is just them recovering from the break status. While in break status EVERY hit triggers a follow up. And there is a specific quartz that increases your damage against broken targets. You'll want to lean hard into break damage, as fights are always easier when enemies don't get to act.
On the story end of things the game plays out similarly to the first game; you're now an instructor at the academy and lead your students in the same sort of activites; free day on campus, then training battle, then go do a field exercise in a remote town and do a bunch of plot stuff. There are less chapters but each chapter is much longer and meatier than the original game. Additionally, the game tosses out the main antagonists at you quickly, whereas the first game was much more about subtle machinations going on before it all blew up. From the start it's clear that the main plans are about to kick off. And there are a lot of things going on with these plans; the true depths won't be revealed until the end of the game, at which point it ends on a cliffhanger akin to as if Final Fantasy VI ended with the final cutscene at the end of the Floating Continent and then went "To be continued".
Cold Steel III continues to carry forward a strong series and has a lot of payoffs and fun nods to previous games. If you've been following the series up until now this game is essential, though you may want to wait until after the fourth game is localized. It again has a Backstory option at the start to catch you up, and while you need to have played previous games to fully appreciate all the nods and references the nature of the story does allow you to start with it.
