The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III Reviews
A huge positive about the game is it only takes up 7.1 GB digitally on your Switch or micro SD card. This is pretty incredible for a game of this size and magnitude. There are so many games coming to the Switch that are clocking in over 40 GB. It’s welcoming to see developers take into account file sizes. Trails of Cold Steel III is an adventure well worth taking if you’re a fan of RPGs or just anime in general. It’s bursting with content and when I was actually playing the game I was not disappointed. For me the story became a bit much in places. Far too many dialogue sections interrupted the fun game play. This may suit some but I prefer to play a video game more than watch or read it. Despite this it’s hard to ignore that Trial of Cold Steel III is a great RPG and well worth going back to school to experience.
There’s very little to complain about with The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III on the Switch, it’s an incredible port of a fantastic game. If you don’t mind the odd fuzzy visuals due to a lower-than-native resolution of the display it’s being played on, the Switch port is the perfect place to play this fascinating JRPG, a game which will easily occupy you for over 100 hours if you’re going for a full 100% completion and around 50 if you just care for the story. Despite having no switch-specific features or extras, you do get a bunch of cosmetic DLCs to dress up all the protagonists – making the cutscenes much more entertaining and surreal.
Trails of Cold Steel III is a fantastic RPG with deep gameplay mechanics and a dense world to explore, but not one I’d feel comfortable recommending to those unfamiliar with the series.
In an age when developers often compete with each other on who can provide the darkest timeline, or those that put the heroes through what could often be considered torture, it’s a breath of fresh air to play a game as truly wholesome as Trails of Cold Steel 3. The complexity of the story leaves you hanging on every word, and each line of dialogue feels authentic and meaningful.
Overall, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III brings us a very solid game and a clear improvement in the franchise. With a wide variety of personalization of our characters, both in equipment and combat sets, it gives a feeling of a game with a healthy amount of game time to experience everything we have at our disposal. It will certainly be a game for any fan of JRPGs if you have played your predecessors, but if that is not the case it can be difficult to fit in, such is the dimension and complexity of the story presented. Even so, the producer did a great job of bringing a title of this dimension to Switch, for the port presents solid features and performance.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Trails of Cold Steel III is the turn-based RPG with the most options I've ever seen. We follow the Rean's story in a game with an epic soundtrack and unmatched anime design continues the plot perfectly of the previous Trails and demonstrates having a very methodical combat system, varied and incomparable with other games.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Apart from the typos and framerate issues near the end of the game, I don’t have any other grievances. Well, besides Millium’s voice actor being recast, but no one likes a recast voice actor when it comes to their fave characters. Overall, I adored Trails of Cold Steel III. Even without any experience with earlier story arcs, as a Cold Steel fan, this game felt like it was just for me. All of the characters are overflowing with charm and personality and the continuation of Rean’s journey one-hundred percent sucked me in. Honestly, I think this is the most well paced title in the Erebonia arc so far. It didn’t feel like it dragged on forever in the beginning and it kept a good pace the majority of the time. CS3 is around a hundred hours long when doing optional quests but rushing through battles. It’s just as long if not longer than CS2, which I admittedly complained a bit too much about in my previous Cold Steel review. In the end though, I had a ton of fun and suddenly realized that I’ve found myself having to wait for the next game, which is going to be quite agonizing. I only hope I get the chance to play it eventually and then I can finish this series of Trails of Cold Steel reviews. Don’t let the change in localization companies scare you away. While it isn’t ideal, if you’re a fan of The Legend of Heroes, or Cold Steel alone, I highly recommend picking this one up anyways.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III not only continues the journey of Rean Schwarzer but also that of the iconic series.
Trails of Cold Steel 3 is launching after a long wait between the first two entries and while the game manages to deliver on expectations, there are a few blemishes that hold it back from becoming the best chapter in this epic saga.
When a decent combat system has undergone adjustments and refinements over decades, one would expect an easy victory for a third entry. Indeed, Trails II had it made; a turn-based JRPG style of combat that was host to a wealth of tactical options, with multiple types of attack, intelligent enemy AI and cross-party link skills. Trails III doesn’t simply phone it in as there are a few extra elements to dig into.
Trails of Cold Steel III was a very fun RPG, containing all the good parts from II which I loved, with better pacing thanks to the Turbo Mode, and a story that sets up the next entry rather well. The story’s the main draw for returning fans, and newcomers are better off starting from Cold Steel I, but if you can only join in on this entry due to the Switch exclusivity, then you will still be able to get tons of fun from this game. Just be absolute sure to beat this before starting Cold Steel IV, as that’s definitely not a game to make your first under any circumstance, recaps be dammed. Thankfully, Cold Steel III is well worth a full playthrough, even if it’ll take you quite a bit to do so.
The long lasting story of the Empire within the Trails of Cold Steel series is passing the midpoint and hastily advancing towards the climax. In this game, there are various plot thickening events that may seem unfamiliar unless you’ve played the prequel. The game’s story is well known to commonly have tables flipping, plot twisting events so for the new players, it may be difficult to adjust to the pace of the main storyline. If you want to purely enjoy the gameplay, this iteration of the game has one of the best Falcom style JRPG user interface, thus you won’t have any issues with clearing the encounters you’ll face long the way. Lot’s of content to discover and various minigames will keep you seated until the end.
Review in Korean | Read full review
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III successfully shows Rean Schwarzer's growth and new adventure to reveal the true darkness surrounding Erebonian Empire. But Fans of "Trails of Cold Steel Series", who already met shocking endings two times at former works, would face a third impact. The series was believed to finish as a trilogy, but fans should do watch up to the fourth episode.
Review in Korean | Read full review
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III continues to craft an excellent story with solid combat and is handled with enough care that fans can rest easy when it comes to the series’ future.
As the first major “Trails” release on Nintendo consoles, Trails of Cold Steel III offers little to excite players entering the series for the first time.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III is difficult to recommend for Trails newcomers, though there are in-game resources to help bridge that gap. If you liked Cold Steel I and II, then there’s a very solid chance you’ll enjoy III, though plenty of scenes or lines probably still go over your head if that’s all you’ve seen. With that said, Cold Steel III is incomplete by itself. Despite its excesses, its narrative builds slowly into something that isn’t fully resolved until the next game, and it has shortcomings of its own. I still find Cold Steel III to be the best game of the four narratively overall, but it’s also held back by significant pitfalls in combat. Nonetheless, I still got a decent amount of enjoyment out of the game thanks to the better aspects of the story and the core fundamentals of the Trails battle system. It’s a high-maintenance game to get the most out of, with rough edges, but I still found it enjoyable more often than not.
Trails of Cold Steel III is a phenomenal RPG that genre fans need to play. After completing it and watching how it ends, I absolutely cannot wait to play the fourth and final game in this incredible series.
Trails of Cold Steel III is an important title for both Falcom and NIS. For Falcom, it's the penultimate entry in a story arc half a decade in the making - and an incredibly engrossing one, at that. For NIS, it's a step in the right direction after Ys VIII, and proof that The Legend of Heroes' localization is still in good hands moving forward. This is a continuity-heavy RPG with 13 years of video game history, and seven titles building up to it, but the combat and world are strong enough where even newcomers can enjoy the ride. Trails of Cold Steel III is the Erebonia arc at its best.
If you like JRPGs, this is another one you don't want to miss—just hope that Cold Steel IV gets a Western release before too long, because this one ends on one hell of a cliffhanger.
Trails of Cold Steel 3 is a masterclass in storytelling that improves nearly everything in the franchise's history.