GAME REVIEW | "Trails of Cold Steel" Ports Nicely To PC
First off, before reading this, you might want to look at my actual review for The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, as my feelings on it aren't all that much different from when I wrote it.
Now that some time has passed and many patches have come out, it's time to finally provide a mini-review for the PC port of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. The quality of the transfer is actually quite the feat, as infamous modder Durante worked on this game to make sure that the game ran smoothly without blemishes. There were also a number of never-before-seen features like Turbo Mode and additional English voice acting. With Turbo Mode, you can run the game at various fast paced speeds while holding down a specific button. This makes battles and cutscenes go by faster if they are a little too slow for your tastes. It really helps cut down on any downtime the original game had.
The improvements to the graphics are already very evident in this release, as there are setting to match the Vita or PS3 version specs for those with older systems. You can also finally have the ability to play the game in 60 frames per second. This is great because the console versions were locked at 30 FPS, but still had dips due the hardware lacking the power to run the game at a consistently stable rate. The additional voice acting rectifies a problem in both the original Western and Japanese releases where certain characters like Rean would at time not have voiced lines.
XSEED Games went back to hire the English voice actors that had these missing lines in various scenes. Originally it was awkward to hear some VA's speak, but not others. Over the time since its release on Steam, XSEED has continued to fill the gap, causing the total increase in voice acting to be 50% more than the original. Of course since this is a PC release, modders have done Japanese voice-acting mods. There's less voice acting there, but if you are curious about how the game sounds in Japanese, that something that you can do.
If there were any problems with this release, they'd be that Cold Steel PC is Windows only, and that the DLC still has to be purchase. This isn't an issue to take up with XSEED though, but rather Falcom. I bet if XSEED Games could make it free, they would. But if you have a good-to-great PC gaming rig, it's the best way to play Trails of Cold Steel, along with its sequel that's arriving later this year. I'd definitely recommend it.
Promotional consideration provided by Marc Bianchi and XSEED Games
Eric Kelly is a freelance writer of games, and has a podcast called RPGrinders. You can donate to his Patreon here.
