Recent reviews by Dark

Absolutely stunning and brutal game. LOVED every minute of it. From the unrelenting challenges and bosses to the sheer level of detail and size that went into crafting this world and its inhabitants, and the care that went into each and every moment of the game, one surprise after another, blown away. 45H to 100% completion (in-game time tracker seems to not count certain things like loading screens, pause, and more).

I can't stress enough that despite people's supposed misgivings, this game's difficulty is still fair but punishing. A constant reminder every time I started to struggle it was because I was being reckless, impatient and greedy. There are lots of times where that pays off, but every boss was always a consistent dance, always had solutions, always had a method, always beatable without incident. Patiently finding those solutions and not getting in your own head goes a long way.

Overall it handled the various structures of progression really well, lots of variety and secrets and abilities that completely change up the gameplay, the story was a lot more up front and better told (and interesting), and NPC's are wonderful throughout and have their own stories and journeys that you can carry to satisfying conclusions. It's great to see a dev that puts that level of attention to detail into every little aspect no matter how small. 10/10

Honestly more disappointed than anything else. It's a well made game, sure, but it's also very safe and pedestrian as far as metroidvania games go. There's nothing new, nothing interesting, no wow factor, it's just very vanilla ideas retreaded again and again in countless other games (many of which do it better). If you're a genre veteran looking for something great, you may be somewhat satisfied with this but likely not all that enthused by it. Less savy metroidvania gamers, probably will vibe with this a lot more.

What's most disappointing is that, for being their 2nd game, they didn't seem to learn anything from their previous game. All the same problems and deficiencies in the first game are here too, like the rather poor sound design that makes the game feel very unfinished (every single cutscene is completely silent for no good reason), the extremely linear maps that don't feel good to navigate, the over-correction of "QoL" features that handhold far too much and take away all sense of discovery and exploration, the lack of a proper crafted experience they want you to have from a difficulty perspective (which leads to hilariously bad balancing with many enemies either ignoring the rules of the game or turning it into a bullet hell which you lack the tools to deal with), and many other odd choices that don't fit this genre.

Despite turning dials up as high as possible, the game never actually finds a way to push back against you, it all ends up being very trivial, compounded by choices the dev made to remove staple mechanics like contact damage and the brief invuln period upon taking damage. This leads to a complete lack of physicality and strategic gameplay, where proper spacing, zoning, and area denial tactics are invalidated and you're left with just spam any button for maximum effect with no consequences or thought behind it. Or conversely, you explode instantly without even knowing what happened because an enemy decides to do a multi-hit/projectile attack and you instantly take 10 hits simultaneously. But since you can just walk into enemy hitboxes, and through them, you can also just confuse the AI and get it stuck in turn-around animations since there's no penalty to just living inside the enemies either. It's all just so unsatisfying and not well thought out.

Status ailments are yet another (commonly) poorly implemented afterthought. You'd think you could take advantage of it against enemies but you don't have a reliable method to inflict them to take advantage of them either, every enemy is resistant and you only have a small chance to inflict a temporary ailment for a few seconds, and the effect on enemies is negligible compared to when used against you, which you have no resistance to and the one that enemies love to use more than anything else is burn, which does 5% of your life per second and you have to do the dumb dance of spam dodge 4 times in a row to make it go away or it actually just kills you. Heaven forbid you're trying to do that in a boss fight, which many of the bosses inflict burn. Did I mention you only have 3 heals for basically the entire game, and the only way to get (1-2!) more is by equipping very specific end-game gear that you may not even want to wear and could have drawbacks? Whose potency is also tied to your gear choices and never gets high enough to make a difference?

At the end of the day, if you're looking for a very simple, run of the mill, vanilla metroidvania that's at least well put together, you can certainly do worse, but Hollow Knight or SotN or Axiom Verge or Ori or Dead Cells etc. this ain't, and the challenge just wasn't there even with maxed out difficulty dials.

Edit: Finally fixed in Patch #6

Edit: Still not fixed as of Patch #4

I'm just so tired of the bugs. Every time I even attempt to play this, I spend nearly all my time just filing bug reports instead of playing. So many things continue to not work, and now they broke subtitles with the latest patches among other things they claimed to fix and actually didn't. I'm just not interested any longer in playing these half-baked, bug-ridden messes. There was 3 years of early access to figure out these core issues, they have a massive team, there's is no reason to be putting up with this disruptive of an experience. There's better things to do than be pretend beta-testers on what should've been the final product we paid full price for.

The rollback is atrocious. People teleporting all over the place, it's practically unplayable online, even though the game is telling you it's 3 green bars of connection. It's really bad and they need to fix it.

Also a bug where it disconnects your controller, and doesn't recognize it if you plug it back in without having to quit to desktop and relaunch. Literally unplayable.

Gameplay is just frustrating unpolished and the meta starts to grate on you with the really stilted narrator who doesn't understand intonation and inflections

They stole 87 minutes of my life. Those jerks.

Marred by a complete lack of quality control throughout the entire game, and an overall lack of obvious quality-of-life design choices that anyone should've thought to include in this game, makes it less enjoyable and far more tedious and frustrating than needed. Coupled with very unintelligent writing, inconsistent gameplay, glossed-over plot holes, recycled/repetitive and uninteresting visuals and environment (unless your thing is snow. because that's 100% of the visuals), this game is a far-cry from what was originally promised in its original campaign long ago.

Being that this is the 3rd game in this "series", I cannot in good conscience recommend this game. tl;dr, it's vapid, grindy, dungeon-cralwer, recycled, and overall meaningless to the Trails universe as a whole.

I had this same issue with Second Chapter (SC) as well, and it's not improved in this game whatsoever: Overuse of recycled assets and environments. At least 90% of this game, if not more, consists of the exact same environments, locales, assets, art, effects, voices, sprites, menus, you name it. It's all the exact same as FC and SC. No work to improve or change anything at all, which when you're working with such a small place like Liberl, a 3rd romp through it is too much.

To make matters worse, this 3rd game is essentially just a dungeon-crawler. The entire game is 1 giant EX dungeon from start to finish with no way out and no "world" to speak of. You'll spend almost your entire time progressing through this dungeon and grinding, given that you are trapped in it for reasons I won't go into detail here. There are none of the refreshing, world-building interactions and exploration that make other Falcom games so attractive and worthwhile, because there is no world, only the dungeon. It's a very poorly thought out decision from Falcom to make a 3rd game in this series and then construct it in this way that is in stark opposition to the well-detailed and written RPG's they are known for.

If you think this game serves much plot purpose for the Trails series as a whole, like all the other entries in the series do, you won't find much here. This game's plot is just for the protagonist's, Kevin's, sake. It only has meaning to him, for him, and not much else. Instead the developers opted to pad this game with fluff through optional side-stories for each of the Sky characters, to tell you a little more about each of them at some point or another. This is really the only thing I can say you should expect to gain out of this game, and come for if you're that into the entire cast: A little more "epilogue" side-story for each character after SC. You may find a little bit of lore explanation here for certain organizations or terms sprinkled throughout the side stories, but the execution and delivery of these within the context of this game's overall design leaves much to be desired, and begs the question if this is worth slogging through for the small tidbits of additional lore that can be found elsewhere.

There's nothing to really say about the grindy combat. Most of the game is spent in combat, it's the same combat as FC and SC, you have to start all over again with gear and quartz and slots and sepith like usual. The only thing I'll add to this, is that very quickly you'll be overwhelmed with the available cast of characters availble to you to use, some 20+ characters or so, and at various points in the game you'll have to make multiple parties with them and progress through areas simultaneously with these groups.

There's a lot of juggling of party compositions, and the one complaint I will make here is that they do not give you a proper solution to build and level the myriad cast they throw your way. Only the 4 members in your current party gain experience, and when you have such an enormous cast to choose from, and the game throws several sections where you need to make use of 8, 12, even 16 members at once, the grind rears its ugly head again and you spend hours wastefully grinding all these characters up for whatever the next chapter's challenge is.

With that all said, I reitterate that I cannot recommend this game to anyone short of an extremely hardcore Trails player who just wants to play more of the exact same, recycled content from FC and SC.

Those feels. Holy **** they're real. 10/10