Val the Moofia Boss

Are you talking about Rean not getting as much EXP as the students? I believe that's because for the segments where you can use Rean and New Class VII together, the mobs are higher levels than New Class VII but lower level than Rean, so Rean gets less EXP. In the segments where you can use Rean but not use New Class VII, the mobs are higher level than Rean, so Rean gains levels rapidly as usual, so by the time the next Rean + NC7 segment comes along, Rean is once again higher level than the students.

It's the same system as it has always been: the amount of exp a character earns scales in relation to the mob's level. If a character is underleveled compared to a mob, they gain a ton more exp. If a character is overleveled compared to a mob, they get a lot less exp. Hence, you can quickly get underleveled characters up to the required level with minimal grinding, and you are discouraged from trying to level grind any further.

My only real problem with the voice acting in CS3 is for Campanella, and for a few spear carriers. I feel that the students, random guards and townsfolk who get one liners don't sound good. Campanella's voice was miscast. He grates my ears. I never liked the character before. I feel he is a discount Seta Sojiro (trollish, young boy right hand man of the big bad), but the voice definitely does not help him. I didn't like his Japanese voice acting either when I played Crossbell. He comes off as an ass, and not the likeable kind. Peter Beckman not returning as Osborne in CS4 was the biggest loss. Well, there is also another character in CS4 whose voice I felt was miscast (that one general)

As a game, I prefer Vantage Master to Blade. VM is more fun mechanically, and I also liked how they did the FF8 and FF9 thing where there were plenty of NPCs you could walk up to and duel (whereas in CS1+2 you could only play Blade a handful of times). I also liked the art on the cards and the tidbit of lore. I'm more attached to Blade because of the character connection to Crow. Wish Rean could have taught the kids how to play it. As far as JRPG card games go, FF8 Triple Triad = CS3 Vantage Master > CS1+2 Blade >>>>> Tetra Master (holy crap was Tetra Master baaaaad. It was 95% RNG. You could have the best cards and still lose half the time due to RNG). Half truth. About half of the people who localized CS3 had worked on prior Trails games. Eric Budensiek [Editor] Moet Takahashi [Translator] Ryan Thomson [Translator and proofreading] (worked on CS1 + 2) Kris Knigge [Editor and consultant] (worked on CS1 + 2) Brittany Avery aka Hatsuu [Editor/localization producer] (worked on FC, SC, the 3rd, CS1, CS2) Valerie Arem, the English voice of Aurelia LeGuin, is still the voice director. And Durante is still working on the PC ports, just as he did for CS1+2. Almost all of the English voice actors for CS1+2 returned for CS3 (with the exception of Millium's). So the people behind the English localization of the Trails series hasn't really changed that much. What did change was the name it was being published under... and the higher ups. The higher ups at XSEED were really passionate about Trails, so they went the extra mile and recorded extra English dialogue for scenes that weren't voiced in Japanese. But NISA is owned by Marvelous, and Marvelous doesn't care about putting extra effort into anything that they don't own. Hence, why there no greenlight for extra voicelines like in CS1+2. The English dub of CS4 has a lot of changes in voice actors. Ostensibly this is due to Covid, but I believe that if it was being published by XSEED, XSEED would have taken the time to wait until the voice actors were available. I think it's pretty clear that the people are passionate about Trails, but it doesn't matter so long as the higher ups say "we're going to pay you to work on this game for this many days and then you have to work on a different project, no we're not giving you extra money to do extra work".

Those were my thoughts on CS3 as well. I thought that the school segments were very well executed, but it's just not the direction the story should have gone after CS2. One of the things that disappointed me about CS3+4. They threw out the CS1+2 assets, so no revisiting Eastern Erebonia. I would have loved to have revisited Celdic and seen how they were recovering. Or see the rebuilding of Garellia Fortress. Or had seen how Bareahard was under Jusis' rule. Or seeing those three Laura fangirls again and seeing how the Arseid dojo was getting by. Or going to the Eastern side of Heimdallr and visiting Elliot's and Machias' houses and going to the old Bracer guild again. Or just visiting mom & dad at Ymir. Honestly, I would have been fine if CS3+4's environments had remained at the same quality of CS1+2's if it had meant we could have gotten Eastern Erebonia too. The environments in CS3+4 are not a large leap from CS1+2's. The noticeable leap is in the character models, not the environments. It also doesn't help that I wasn't too impressed by a lot of the new CS3+4 towns. I feel that most of the towns are just remixes of old towns. Parm is just a different layout of Celdic. Saint Arkh is just a different layout of Bareahard. Raquel is just a different layout of downtown Roer/Heimdallr/Crossbell. Leeves is just a different layout of Trista. I don't think these new variants are better than their old counterparts. I feel way more attached to the old locations. I felt that the only worthy new locations were Ordis, and a village in CS4.

I felt that the change of the color scheme from CS1+2 to CS3's blue was jarring. Feels inconsistent with the rest of the Cold Steel series, especially when you see the calendar change. Combining the effects of master quartz is a ton of fun.

Are you talking about the pre-rendered video at the end?

The Japanese dub was inconsistent, where you had scenes where some characters would speak while others wouldn't. This was probably due to the expense of the voice acting talent, as Falcom hired expensive voice actors for their name recognition. Voice acting is a huge deal in Japan, similar to being a celebrity like a movie actor. When Trails of Cold Steel was being localized in English, XSEED did not have access to the source code, so they could not add in new voicelines for the PS3 and Vita releases that were not there in the first place. Only replace the files. That changed with the PC and PS4 ports, as XSEED were given the source code, and could program the game to play new voicelines. That's why the PC and PS4 ports of CS1 and CS2 have consistently voiced scenes (including scenes and characters who were never voiced in the original Japanese release). Also, some voice lines were rerecorded with better takes for the PC and PS4 ports. That's why we recommended playing on PC or PS4, because you get more voice acting and better voice acting. IIRC Toval and Micht weren't voiced in the PS3 and Vita releases of CS1, and in CS2 Wallace and Aurelia weren't voiced either. That was all stuff XSEED added in their ports. CS3+4 were localized by NISA, not XSEED. NISA didn't put in the extra effort that XSEED did, so there are no extra voicelines in the PC or Switch ports. So it doesn't matter which version of CS3+4 you play. That's one of the reasons why the Western fandom was bummed out by NISA getting CS3 and not XSEED.

Peter Beckman's voice acting was half of what made him great. Shame he didn't voice Osborne in CS4.

If you want to cheese the game, just equip stack as much delay on Rean, Fie, and Gaius (the quartz are: impede 1, impede 2, and Zeus gem). Then spam their delay crafts: Arc Slash, Bullet Cyclone, and Savage Fang. This will delay the enemy's turn for as long as possible, giving you more turns to recover between attacks. Also remember to cast buffs twice, like Chrono Drive for 50% speed increase on your team, giving you even more turns.

For my first CS1 playthrough, I played on Hard mode. My clear save says Rean was at level 64. The final right was pretty hard and I had to retry a lot. For my first CS2 playthrough, I played on Hard mode. Rean was in the 130s.

CS2 full

There isn't much gameplay stuff left. Maybe just a 2 hour long dungeon. But there is at least 10-15 hours of story left. Don't skip it. It's good. Best part of the game IMO.

Fun build recommendations! Try out dodge tank Gaius! (spoilering in case you want to figure out these builds yourself, no story spoilers in here) Berserker Gaius Also, Elliot the Nightmare Lord is a fun build!

I think it fits their characters and their relationship honestly. It's like Nagisa and Tomoyo from Clannad. Tomoya and Tomoyo making out one million times makes sense given their chemistry. Tomoya and Nagisa, on the other hand, don't really do that, but that doesn't make their relationship with each other any less valid. Alisa comes across as being a typical schoolgirl, so the kiss makes sense. Laura and Emma aren't really that. Re: ingame books IMO Red Moon Rose was the only ingame book I liked. Carnelia was okay. It helps that it's relatively short. Gambler Jack and Back Alley Dr. Glenn were boring. Haven't gotten around to The Doll Knight and 3 & 9 yet. EDIT: Just remembered that there is a sequel to Gambler Jack, I think. Maybe I'll read it. Might need to reread Gambler Jack. It's been so long I can hardly remember what happened.

It can go into Fire, Mirage, or Water.

If you equip the quartz, you can tab over to the arts page and scroll down to that Lost Art to see what it does, without having to test it in battle. The 200% party wide heal, and the Time manipulation one are fantastic. Also the CP one.

It's a Lost Quartz, which you can socket into a character's orbment to give them a Lost Art, a powerful art. You can only use a one Lost Art per battle. Each Cryptid superboss drops one.

Made me cry too.

Don't worry about the order in which you do the shrines. You have to clear them all anyway so you won't miss anything.

So Guan interviewed Kondo for Kuro no Kiseki. https://gu4n.medium.com/interview-with-kondo-toshihiro-aiming-for-the-trailss-new-direction-with-kuro-no-kiseki-638614dc7f89 Kondo is suggesting that turn based combat might not be gone forever. I guess he's leaving the door to return to it depending on the reception of Kuro no Kiseki. This line caught my eye, though: So Kondo is saying that turn based combat hurt the pace of the game? What? What on earth? I do not understand this statement. Also Kondo confirmed that Enami Katsumi is the character designer. *Sigh*

Elliot has two uses: craft healing (aka on demand, instant healing, no need to wait for your art to cast, but if you're using an item healer with Moebius than that will be better) and inflicting nightmare on enemies. My favorite build with him is to equip him with Juggler, and then stack Nightmare quartz on him, and then spam his Nocturne Bell craft. Enjoy watching your enemies burn while asleep. For Gaius, I've already mentioned the counterattack build. The other thing you can do with him is throw Chevalier on him (which you get from completing the training courses on the Courageous). Chevalier makes you do more damage the less health you have, which pairs nicely with Gaius' Wild Rage ability. So if you can buff Gaius' STR by 50% during battle, and pop Wild Rage, you can then pop an S-craft or a Savage Fang and deal huge damage. Millium is good at dealing high AoE physical damage (her basic attack is also AoE) and inflicting status conditions. She is also the only other character besides Rean who can deal the most damage in one single turn, as she has a 4S S-craft (so equip Murakumo on her and jack up her crit and STR).

Eh, I'd argue that a Gaius (who has long reach and high STR) + evasion build + wrath (counterattacks after an evasion always crit) + Murakumo (crits deal 3x damage) deals more damage on average. Or even just a crit build Rean + Spirit Unification (50% STR up buff and 5S S-craft) + Murakumo. I think Tauros is overall a DPS loss due to the time delay (which can be crucial, like using items to heal and such).

Well my point was Sky SC spoilers

That depends on how good the portrait art is. The portrait art in Sky was incredibly expressive. Unfortunately, Enami Katsumi's portraits for Crossbell were not, and often times felt flat. I felt that the Cold Steel 3D models were more expressive than the Crossbell portraits. If Katsumi can't draw expressive portraits like the Sky ones, then honestly I'd rather just stick with the 3D models. There is also the problem that you can't draw a 2D portrait for every NPC in a game with hundreds of NPCs. This was one of the flaws of Sky and Crossbell, where you could narrow down the list of suspects to a small pool based on whether or not they had a portrait or not. If you had played Sky before playing Crossbell, then in Crossbell it is likely you will have figured out who the villains were, simply because you're acquainted with the Trails formula and know what to look for, and since there are only like 2 dozen characters with portraits, you can pretty much pick out the culprits on the spot (because they're the only people with those portraits who meet the criteria). I was pretty shocked by the character reveals in Cold Steel. It wouldn't have worked if there were character portraits, because I wouldn't really be surprised.