The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3 Review – Revisiting a Classic

Recently, NIS America made massive strides towards bringing The Legend of Heroes series to the West. This is perfect as the original release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel created a massive amount of interest in the fascinating franchise. With a fair amount of time passing since the original PlayStation 4 release, Nihon Falcom revisited The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3, and the conclusion, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 4 by upgrading them for PlayStation 5. Promising a number of improvements on an already strong game, is it a must for fans, or is either version fine?

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, or understandably forgot over the years, there is a rather substantial overview included in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3. Each section is dedicated to different aspects outside of both previous adventures. This is a great way to catch up, and I remain impressed with how much content they cover given these are incredibly complicated narratives.

Trust Me, You’ll Need This

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the world, it’s time to start The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3. This adventure picks up a couple years following the events of the last game with a war breaking out. At this point Rean is now an instructor over previous students, and newcomers as well.

Throughout this adventure Rean and his class will need to deal with several conflicts, and other problems. Overtime The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3 will also reveal what the students were doing prior to this, as well as touching on Rean’s past.

This a small overview of what the main adventure is like, something that is hard to explain as The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3 requires previous experience, or the aforementioned overview to understand. There are simply a multitude of moving parts, with this adventure getting them all in place for the conclusion of the Trails of Cold Steel arc.

While narrative is what makes these experiences so impactful, Nihon Falcom still delivers a traditional turn based RPG experience. Part of what makes things interesting is the importance of tactics. This starts with engaging enemies before they catch you, with encounters difficulty hinging on approach.

In battle players have the option of normal, or special attacks. Doing a normal attack has a brief animation, with the potential for a teammate to join in. Unlike a lot of experiences, each teammate attack allows players to decide which move makes the most sense for this situation.

Often times the best tactic is to look at positioning and use a special move. This is due to many of these attacks impacting an area over a specific enemy. I would often try to bait enemies by putting a stronger character in harms way, and then attack anyone foolish enough to engage. It works extremely well, though on higher difficulties players need to adopt more advanced tactics.

Sometimes that means kill orders, whereas other times it’s playing defensively. Regardless of the path taken it’s fun because there is more to fighting than trading blows, healing allies, and always taking the initiative.

Enhanced Visuals

Since this is the released version for PlayStation 5, I wanted to touch briefly on graphics, and performance. Since The Legend of Heroes games are not known for their impressive graphics, look is only somewhat improved. Characters and attacks look a little better than their PlayStation 4 counterpart, though the world remains rather bland. Even if things look sharper, the visuals were never that complicated to begin with.

Performance also isn’t that impressive. Within minutes I noticed some camera panning causing jittering, and dropped frames within the first couple of battles. This isn’t something I am particularly sensitive to, and even then it could obviously be seen even minutes into this adventure.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3 Review Verdict

Editor’s Note: The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3 was reviewed on PlayStation 5, and a copy was provided to us for review purposes. In addition to that, some portions of this review was repurposed in our The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 4 review due to similarities/timing of release.