I've been considering giving those a try, but I'm a little burned out on several common annoyances in JRPG (grinding and main characters having an annoying tendency of being generic, mainly). What can you tell me about them beyond good/bad?
Well for one it has some really solid positioning-based combat, like the Grandia series or Skies of Arcadia. Every character can use spells, unique special attacks, and a limit break if you max out their special attack gauge, and you can customize a character's spell selection by equipping them with orbal quartz, which work almost exactly like materia in Final Fantasy 7 except that quartz crystals don't level up. Cold Steel also has a team attack system where you can link your characters together into teams of two and they'll support each other, like auto-healing after an attack or performing follow-up attacks on weakened enemies. There's not a whole lot of grinding involved, but I enjoy the combat enough that I might have done a lot of it and just forgotten because it never really annoyed me.
For characters and plot I'm going to stick to Cold Steel since it's what I'm most familiar with, but Trails in the Sky involves a whole different cast of characters unrelated to these guys.
The plot of Trails of Cold Steel is a lot like the first two volumes of RWBY, if you have any familiarity with that series. It revolves around a handful of students who enroll at Thors Military Academy and get sorted into an experimental group called Class VII. Traditionally Thors students are separated into different classes by social status, but Class VII is composed of both nobles and commoners, all of them from wildly diverse backgrounds, and almost immediately their personalities start clashing with each other in various ways and they have to learn how to get along and trust each other.
The group's adventuring is accomplished by having their teacher, an irresponsible but deceptively competent Misato Katsuragi-ish character, send them on field studies to various parts of the empire. There they perform tasks such as slaying monsters, helping the locals, getting mixed up in local politics, and generally growing as people, learning about the different parts of the empire, and eventually getting wrapped up in a shady conspiracy involving a terrorist organization.
The characters hit a lot of traditional anime character stereotypes to some extent but it seems like they do so mainly so they can later break those stereotypes in other ways. One of my first big surprises was how they kicked off the nobles vs commoners conflict,
not by having the cold and aloof-seeming noble student (Jusis) get pissy about sharing a class with commoners like some washed-up Guiche clone, but by the hot-headed outspoken social justice advocate (Machias) take offense to Jusis's presence and be portrayed as being in the wrong for being the aggressor in that situation. Then there's lead female Alisa, who has a fairly typical tsundere moment early on when Rean, the main character, accidentally gets a face full of cleavage and she slaps him for it, only to later apologize for being such a bitch over something so inconsequential. Any character who looks like a pure stereotype is eventually proven to have more depth and complexity than is first apparent if you take time to get to know them. Even Patrick, the
actual washed-up Guiche clone in this story, gets a dose of character development and becomes an ally of the group after spending a few months being a two-dimensional elitist snob.
But the greatest strength of the Trails series, and the main reason I now rank it higher than Final Fantasy on my list of favorite JRPG franchises, is the world-building. Geoff Thew did a great analysis of this in one of his Mother's Basement videos, so I'll link that here in case you have some time to kill, since he makes the case a lot more artfully than I can.
The short version is that the Trails series has better world-building than just about any other RPG on the market. It takes place in a rich
Valkyria Chronicles-esque modern fantasy world in the middle of what's called the Orbal Revolution, which is like the industrial revolution but with commonly-available magic and in fast forward. Fifty years ago the Zemurian continent was pretty standard European fantasy setting, but thanks to the discovery of orbal energy technology has jumped ahead about 200-300 years by our reckoning so that now there are airships and tanks and radio and so on sitting alongside a society that hasn't caught up with that technology yet. This results in widespread conflict; the old aristocracies are now challenged by powerful merchants and mega-corporations like the Reinford group, and the advent of upward social mobility has brought commoners and nobility into conflict like never before since democracy isn't really a thing that's been invented yet.
The Trails series sells this world through two primary methods that distinguish it from other JRPGs. First, each game takes place in a single nation and centers on local conflicts involving that nation's politics, economics, religion, and so on rather than doing the Final Fantasy thing of having globe-trotting adventures but not really fleshing out any of those nations beyond the bare minimum. The plot of the Sky trilogy takes place more or less entirely in the kingdom of Liberl for example, while Cold Steel takes place in its neighbor, the Erebonian Empire. The plots of these games are also contemporary to each other; it's not necessary to play the Sky trilogy to enjoy Cold Steel but the events of Sky are referenced by the characters as recent history that they have an outsider's understanding of, and there are some reoccurring characters and NPCs that cross over between the stories.
The second method is the use of its NPCs, who all have their own stories and daily struggles playing out on the side of whatever you're doing. In Cold Steel for instance there's a family in the main town that has no plot significance whatsoever but if you talk to them you'll discover that the parents are having a domestic dispute and the kids are worried that mommy and daddy don't love each other anymore. Every time a major story beat occurs these characters will have new dialogue developing the situation, and other characters from around town like the other kids who are friends with the children of this couple will comment on what's going on with them, and there are dozens of such stories going on with other characters, not just this one. This makes the world feel like it's alive and fully-tangible and helps to sell the significance of these more local and personal stories.
