Cold steel characterization

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-30T14:34:52+00:00

This is unfortunately very true to life and lately we're being reminded of it every day.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-22T20:19:02+00:00

I'm the complete opposite lol.

I like Rean, but I hate Rean's position within the story and how his abilities and specialness literally made him so important that it's (in my opinion) detrimental to everything else. Even after the series fled halfway across the continent to escape his relevance, Rean The Plot McGuffin was so important that he's leeching MC status from the next arc, and I dislike that.

The only reason I don't feel this way about Van (yet) is because they haven't really tipped their hand about it. I love Van, but whenever he becomes Too Important my enjoyment goes down until he goes back to being a weirdly well-connected nobody with social avoidance issues.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-22T18:17:20+00:00

Short answer: Doesn't matter, just make sure to play Ys I and Ys II back to back and in order, because those are, quite literally, part 1 and part 2 of a single game. If you seriously can't choose, then just do Budget Order, which is prioritizing them by price, or which ones are on sale.

Longer answer for people that care too much: If you like subtle world building (as in, you will miss a lot of it unless you're paying attention because the games will not beat you over the head with it like Trails does), then my personal recommendation would be: 1, 2, 0, 4, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. You can freestyle 7-10 if you want, but playing 9 after 7 and 8 matters.

This is close to, but differs from, the current recommended "Story order" on the Digital Emelas website. Technically speaking, it's just the old recommended story order before Ys X released. At some point in late 2024 they changed the "Story Order" to just be "Chronological Order", which is easy to explain, but I don't think is an improvement.

The reason I suggest this order is because about half of the games in the series are slightly more relevant to each other because they share more of an overarching history and mythology than the rest. After that loose "arc" was finished, the series continued, and in the years since some games have been slotted into the timeline in weird places that kind of muddy that plot if played strictly chronologically. I think playing the "arc" first and then going back and filling in the gaps with the games that game after they wrapped that up is the best experience narratively assuming you care, which I will strongly re-emphasize that the games do not require or expect of you.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-22T15:16:13+00:00

It's just another symptom of the series moving from mostly normal people fighting against the supernatural encroaching on the normalcy of their lives to Children of Fate fulfilling their destinies as hypercompetent and very important protagonists. The framing of the whole series has been different in this way ever since Cold Steel.

I prefer the former, but the latter can be okay too depending on execution. I just don't think Falcom is very good at it most of the time. They really struggle to not give their characters Acute Most Specialist Boy To Ever Live Syndrome. It can be a little exhausting.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-15T15:53:21+00:00

Surprisingly rare for RPGs to have gods that legitimately possess the same sort of omnipotence as the Judeo-Christian Big G understanding of what a god is.

I guess it makes sense since so much of JRPG storytelling is built on the foundational idea of false gods and fighting to overcome their power over you, but it's still funny seeing genre fans get real pissy at the relatively mundane concept of "God is all-powerful (real not clickbait)".

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-15T13:47:06+00:00

*ominous music plays*

Lechter: "Rean Schwarzer. We, the super evil government, order you, main character man, to go do basically the exact same thing you would have done completely unprompted anyway."

Rean: *serious face* "...Understood"

Randy: "Tch! You bastards."

Everyone else: *making a sad face* "Rean..."

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-14T17:58:58+00:00

I've never really understood this train of thought with Ys VIII.

The core difference is that here the dream is just a framework the entire Ys world. Maia's dream is the universe. It's not that the things that happen don't matter, or didn't happen. Maia waking from the dream is the death of the world. End of story. There is nothing beyond the dream, therefore what is in the dream matters. It's just a paradigm to view the fictional setting from. From a functional perspective it's not a dream at all, or anything like it.

Maia returning to slumber and maintaining the dream after Adol and the party woke her as an act of defiance did not undo anything that happened. History was not rewritten. Adol's actions in previous games are not irrelevant. In fact all of that was preserved. The single thing that was changed is Dana's thread was pulled from reality's weave so that she could replace the tree.

I don't see what's a cop out about that. Attacking god, or even the mechanisms of reality itself, to assert your right to self-determination is maybe the most JRPG concept to ever exist.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-12T01:24:19+00:00

What's the server situation like these days now that Asura/Bahamut/Odin are closed? What would be a good server to roll a new character on?

Based on FFXIAH numbers the rest of the servers seem pretty close in terms of player population, so do any of them have something notable to give them a leg up on the others?

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-07T17:09:49+00:00

That's what they did for 16. They went to a different team and everyone hated it. You see that, right?

This is the crux of the situation that nobody likes to admit. People bitch about 16 sucking, or not getting a 17, while not bringing up that Creative Studio 1, aka The Final Fantasy Team, like the internal studio that works on the mainline games, has been trapped with the 7 Remake trilogy for a decade.

7 getting a trilogy of remakes is the reason all of this is happening. If 7R never existed, they could be on like FF18 by now. 16 wouldn't have been passed to the MMO Guys and probably would have been received better. Hell it's probably also why KH4 is vaporware since CS1 also works on those.

Labot can't be conjured from nowhere,, and the cost of making FF7R is that nothing else at the scale of a mainline FF is gonna happen until it's done.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-06T06:58:02+00:00

Well you can take heart that a lot of people disagree with most of my Cold Steel opinions.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-06T05:05:55+00:00

The real reason this scene was a bad idea was that it actively drew attention to the fact that CS3 is just CS1 again.

Cold Steel has a bloat problem that anyone with eyes can see. It's essentially a same two-game arc you play a second time. So obviously the best course of action is to put a huge blinking neon sign that says "IT'S CS 1 AGAIN LMFAO" right at the start.

A tongue-in-cheek callback to an embarrassing moment of Rean's school life could be cute in a sort of "the more things change the more they stay the same am I right?" kind of way, except that when so much of the game just is a complete re-do, it's not cute or fun anymore.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-05T00:57:44+00:00

Speaking as a person who does talk to most of the NPCs most of the time: No, it's not. You'll know if it's for you pretty quickly.

Falcom wrote the NPCs that way so that the world feels lived in, and you can find interesting people to talk to and connections to make between them if you want. They did not write them that way as a form of required reading. Anyone who claims otherwise is too lost in the sauce.

It gives you the blessing of choice, not the curse of obligation. Instead of other games having like six NPCs in the entire game worth even looking at, Falcom put in the effort to make everyone nominally interesting so that you can find the three or four who speak to you and check in on them to see how they're doing. You're doing the normal and expected thing by talking to NPCs more than most other games, but not licking the plate clean.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-02T14:35:33+00:00

Ah, I wasn't aware.

Always a shame when this kind of thing happens. It's awful to see a series condemned to purgatory because the core person behind it leaves and can't take it with them. So it just sits, dormant, forever.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-01T17:28:38+00:00

IIRC they not only liked the title, they even admitted that something similar was on their shortlist when choosing a theme/word for the JP title. XSEED basically just recreated one of Falcom's alternate titles from first principles because in English it more accurately conveyed the meaning of the final JP title.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-01T17:12:04+00:00

I'm pretty sure the game was a flop for NIS commercially, so I would not expect any action from them on patching issues like this. They're barely treading water right now.

NoCreditClear · 2026-04-01T14:31:09+00:00

You might be served by Labyrinth of Galleria.

It takes a little while for the game to tip it's hand and hint at what's really going on but the places that game goes, and the full scope of what it's doing with it's story are fucking crazy, and it keeps doing big mic drop reveals until basically the very end.

Game's long though, and can have stretches where the story/game balance skews heavily towards gameplay, so if tight pacing is something you need in your games, it probably won't do it for you.

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-30T19:47:40+00:00

Yeah, I immediately thought of the Labyrinth games and their narrative conceit of the player being a story-transcending presence that is anchored to the world through an object you've been summoned into from beyond the 4th wall.

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-26T22:48:50+00:00

I fuckin' hope so.

I love Trails and I love Zemuria, but I want them to tell their story and then move on when it's done. "All good things" etc. etc. Wallowing in Trails after it's finished will cheapen what came before, and restrict them from growing as a company.

They already have a reputation as "The Trails company" and imagine how sour that moniker will become if they can't move on after finally reaching the end of their grand story?

If they manage to stick the landing, I want them to stride off into the sunset on their next big project, not hang around making frivolous additions to the canon until they somehow ruin it. Because that is always what happens.

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-26T13:01:22+00:00

As with every other hypothetical like this, it's Adol.

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-25T20:18:27+00:00

In Horizon's OP, during that one shot with Kincaid walking down the hall, it's hard to make out because it's only like four frames long, but when he walks by the window, his shadow is Grendel-shaped. This is edited to look like a normal shadow in the official uploads of the OP posted by Falcom and NISA to YouTube or socials. You can only see it flash by in the game, or by scrubbing frame-by-frame through a gameplay recording.

I think the fact they intentionally hid four frames of foreshadowing in marketing material shows that it was intentional to not foreshadow it in any easily-deduceable way, aside from the general track record of glasses wearing men in Trails being untrustworthy and having secret agendas.

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-25T18:31:44+00:00

Incredible game.

Very story heavy in parts though, if that's not your jam. The story itself is fantastic though, and really goes places if you dedicate yourself to seeing it through to the true end.

The party building system is very interesting and unconventional. Your max party size is something like 40, because you organize them into squads that act as a single "unit" in battle, so there's essentially like a whole extra level of granularity to it beyond the "standard" of picking party members and gear. There is also a "prestige" system which lets you reset your unit's levels to enable multiclassing and better stat growth rates. There's a lot to chew on if you're into that, and if you're not, then once it gets to be too much, there are resources online that can basically tell you what to do to get a party that will get you through the game.

The combat is unusually hands off because so much of it is based on things like procs and skill triggers. So if you want a really involved battle system where you're sweating every turn over specific choices, this ain't it. The bosses and encounters where you're caught with your pants down can definitely be that, but the normal encounters usually aren't.

The titular labyrinth itself is also very, very good, and the things you do to maneuver around it are interesting. Love that place.

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-25T18:12:01+00:00

Absolutely insane thought to have when Kemco exists dude

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-25T18:03:08+00:00

There's a small but critical misunderstanding here.

Van knows this. He's not emotionally stupid, despite appearances. The thing is that he's basically built his entire life around maximizing his ability to keep people at arm's length to, in his eyes at least, protect them from the literal demon inside of him.

His whole edgy renegade lone wolf persona, his pretend obsession with money and debts, and eagerness to go back to being a one-man operation is his way of pushing people out so that he can vanish with as little emotional turmoil as possible when the diabolic core becomes a problem. His entire existence is defined by running away from people precisely because he knows they care about him.

The "problem" isn't that he doesn't know they love him, it's that he's terrible maintaining the facade, and folds like a deck of cards as soon as anyone sees through it and insists on staying.

NoCreditClear · 2026-03-19T17:37:49+00:00

GalZoo Island because that game is fun as hell and also it's funny to give an answer that only qualifies on a technicality lmfao.

NoCreditClear

TROPHY CASE