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I'll start with something topical, so I don't have to keep coming back to external factors. I played with a fan translation, and for the umpteenth time, I was amazed at how it turns out that dedicated enthusiasts working for free do the job faster and better than so-called "professionals" for money. Yes, there are typos, and in some places, the translation could have been better, but overall, the text corresponds to the original audio, and there was no embarrassing modern slang, as in the last two official releases. It's truly a pity that the axiom "the market will decide" often doesn't work in reality, because we live in a world of monopolies, where the quality of the product sometimes does not correlate with its profitability. On the other hand, if I were Japanese, I probably wouldn't care much about what's happening with the global version...
The fan translation, by the way, is incomplete. It seems to be about 98-99% complete. Information about characters and monsters in the notebook, a new series of books, and several locations with secondary characters have not been translated. One of the untranslated parts was the second one, which made me feel a little down and I even thought about stopping and waiting for a more complete version, but fortunately, it got better later on. I was also glad to note that I can still read many everyday dialogues, which means that the dream of learning the language and replaying these games in the original is not so unattainable.
Now, a little history. I fell in love with this series in the spring of 2017 when I played both parts of Trails in the Sky, then the third part came out in August, and Trails of Cold Steel in September. Half a year later, the second part was released. All this was an incredible adventure for me, full of the most diverse positive emotions, although not without a touch of sadness that this fairytale world and the people who inhabit it are so different from what I have to deal with in life. Over time, this feeling only grew stronger, and after the release of the fourth Cold Steel last year, I wanted to dissolve in blissful oblivion. Together with this game and the two Crossbell games, by the way, there are already ten games, and considering that the average completion time for one part is ~100 hours, this is a journey that lasts at least a thousand hours. At the same time, now it's like only the middle, so I really hope that the same people who are working on the series now will continue to work on it, and that they will not lose their approach to it.
My personal perception of the "Legends" has hardly changed in these five years, but if in Trails of Cold Steel III and IV I played with a feeling of unprecedented delight, then now the state of my soul was somewhat colder, but not because I didn't like anything or lost interest, on the contrary - everything was just great, and in terms of satisfaction, this part is not inferior to the previous nine. Maybe it's because there was a bigger break between the games in the past, maybe because this time I sat down to play spontaneously and didn't wait for the long-awaited release, or maybe it's because antidepressants have dulled my emotionality... This was mainly expressed in the fact that ラウラ, for one reason or another, no longer evoked such strong feelings in me as before, which is, of course, a little sad, because it has been exactly five years since I met her. And if we set aside the strong feeling of attachment and look at the characters according to some objective, but consistent with personal preferences, criteria, then the situation does not look very optimistic. For example, you can compare her with リーシャ according to my taste preferences.
| ラウラ | リーシャ | |
| Name | ⭕ | |
| Voice | ⭕ | |
| Clothing style | ⭕ | |
| Combat style | ⭕ | |
| Figure | ⭕ | |
| Character | ⭕ | |
| Occupation | ⭕ | |
| Origin | ⭕ | |
| Role in the plot | ⭕ |
The developers, apparently, heard my many years of whining and finally added a difficulty level higher than nightmare, which seemed very easy to me since Cold Steel. Now there is a "Abyss" difficulty level, which I played on. But, of course, if at the beginning it was very difficult in some places, then closer to the end, when you work out a strategy and properly select quartz and equipment, it becomes as easy as before. The auto-attacks of the last boss, for example, dealt 0-3 damage to one of my protagonists, while he had more than 40,000 HP. So, maybe it's a good thing that after ten games, the developers decided (sort of) to switch to real-time battles. After all, during this time, they have already tried everything that can be tried, and this is especially noticeable in this part. There is a lot of good and diverse equipment with quartz, weak items have been buffed, new upgrades have been added, etc., you can come up with all sorts of different builds for yourself and play however you want, but in the future I would like to see something new. Black Crystal and Aeon Shield, by the way, are more broken than anything I've had in my experiences.
Speaking of the protagonists, there are three of them here. There are much fewer city patrols than in any of the previous parts (except for the third Sky), and you just switch from one to another as you progress through the story. I thought that the third protagonist would be エステル and her friends, but I was surprised to find out that the third route turned out to be a team of new characters. However, they all quickly became very dear to me, and it was just as interesting to play with them as with the routes of ロイド and リィン.
Separately, I would like to note that in this part there are many mini-games and side stories, where attention is paid to certain characters outside the main storyline, which could not but please. There is even a gacha, but fortunately, since this is an offline game, you don't have to pay for it...