E3 2015 – The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Preview – Feel the Steel

The Legend of Heroes is a series that has been around for over 20+ years in Japan but hasn’t had the best history with North American audiences. That doesn’t seem to faze XSEED Games, as they are localizing the first chapter of the Trails of Cold Steel series for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita.

In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, players take control of Class VII of the Thors Military Academy. This group of nine handpicked students has been formed without care for rank or social background, and must now delve into the political landscape of the great Erebonian Empire. My demo of Trails of Cold Steel took me into the future after these group of nine students had first been introduced and now acted like a well-oiled squad.

Trails of Cold Steel is a strategic turn-based RPG where you control four students of Class VII at a time on the battlefield. Each student has options between using various different physical or magical attacks on their enemies. You also have the ability to perform a strong S-Break skill that does a lot of damage but also sucks up a lot of your mana.

New to the series is the ability to pair two students together in a link, which then allows them to perform a link attack. These attacks are random and usually appear whenever the character attacking and their partner are close to each other, trigger a button prompt on the screen to complete the link attack.

For a game that’s being released on the PS3 and Vita, I was really impressed with the overall look of the game. It won’t blow you over with any of the visuals, but the character models were really impressive and the special ability animations during combat were really well done. The game will also feature cross saves, which is a great way to level up your characters no matter where you are. 

Perhaps the most intoxicating part of the entire demo was the background music playing during combat and exploration. It just fits in so nicely to the game that it had me doing the white man’s dance while running from fight to fight.

I went into the appointment not all that hyped about this game but left feeling truly pumped up to delve deeper into the world of these nine students. Look for The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel when it releases later this year for the PS3 and PlayStation Vita.