Trails of Cold Steel, C3 (+Schoolhouse C4)
While I am not a criminal, I discovered an ingenious plan should I ever be mistaken for one on the course of this field study. First, I'll fight off the cops, not bothering to claim innocence for robbing the Bank of Crossbell or whatever. If I win, I'll clearly be innocent by right of might. If I lose, I'll tell them that I was just testing them, and that I have a lead on where the Real Culprits are - they've escaped to that town in Liberl with the hot springs, and I'd be happy to escort them there. It's such a compelling, believable story. I should know, because I ran into it this Field Study. Suspicious girl who we've seen messing with army installations before is flying around the site of an attack, decides to attack us to "test" us, we beat her, and she gives us this obviously true tale, except with the Real Culprits hiding in the local Ancient Ruin. And she didn't explain who she was or how she knew this or anything, but I guess she didn't need to after such a believable story.
Anyway, afterward, turned out she was part of the Chancellor's elite loli secret spy / internal subversion team. Should have guessed. Her boss was put in charge of fixing things up with the Republic, too. General Vander thinks that because Captain Lechter is one of the Chancellor's "top men", that success is nearly assured. Seems awfully optimistic to me. After all, wasn't the General himself one of the Empire's "top men", and he didn't exactly get the job done in Liberl, no? Not to mention the many problems that people actually WANT to solve but can't, no matter how many high-performers are thrown at them. I didn't tell the General this to his face, of course. Shame I didn't get a chance to train with him, though, he's supposed to be quite the swordsman.
Speaking of training. Back at the school... and a month later... man, some of these clubs are slow at doing obvious things. Apparently Frieda, the Fencing Club captain, never actually faced off against Patrick Hyarms, new hotshot of the first years in the Fencing Club? The Club doesn't have THAT many members. He got rekt, of course, and was for some reason really surprised and torn up about this, despite that being the expected outcome. And apparently I've never faced Laura yet. What kind of training are we DOING...? Even if we aren't fighting each other outright, this is a military academy, so you'd think we'd at least be doing drills and seeing each other's practice moves together...
There's also a suspicious red door at the Old Schoolhouse now that "couldn't be made with modern technology." Rean you dingbat, although Alisa is in trouble for not contradicting him either. Everyone know that the Zeram civilization was like 1500 years ago or something. THEY might have made weird shit that we can't. 220 years ago, when this academy was made, we know plenty about, and there was no Orbal Revolution, no fanciness. Their tech is our tech but worse. You can beat that dang door!
--
Yupyup, still good times. Nord Highlands were pretty great. Easy as pie, but still great. Arc Slash >>>>> everything, watch the Unscathed XP bonuses pile up.
So utterly random compliment of the day: Trails of Cold Steel is simultaneously really player-friendly about travel times, but also still letting you appreciate the actual distances involved. When you're in a town, you just press square, and can instantly scroll through a list and teleport to whatever shop you want, notable local places, street locations, and any exits to nearby field locations. It's great. But you can't teleport to other towns/dungeons. And furthermore, the game bothers to take its time in getting there, to appreciate the scale of Erebonia a bit more. If you want a field trip to feel like a very special trip out to Saskatchewan, then we're going to have plot scenes for the full 12-hour journey, complete with getting up early, taking the train to City A, transferring (and nearly running into others) and splitting up with the other group, taking a different train, transferring again, looking for snacks, running into someone else off to see a passenger, then hopping on a random freight train headed for the border, meeting with some people there, then riding horses before the sun sets to actually get to your destination before it's dark, followed by collapsing early. So many games are too nice about this kind of travel that it kills the experience of it a tad.
Also, unusually for Trails (at least compared to Sky), the game was willing to take some minor characters that you run a quest for and have a name and know exist... and actually kill them. Feels bad man. Interesting. I'm definitely cool with a slightly darker tone for an Erebonia story.
Of course there was an obligatory pervy old man with a heart of gold hiding out in the middle of nowhere. Sigh. Well anime stereotype #34 checked off, I guess. Old people talking about how hot their daughters / granddaughters are is even sketchier than it used to be thanks to one Donald Trump, though. We also have the quest to stop the pervert photographer at school... and by "stop" apparently we mean "give him a talking to where he mostly only shows remorse at getting caught." Yeah I'm gonna play my SJW card here and say to just expel him anyway, don't bother.
