izigame.me

This game is another stellar addition to the massive story this series has been building up towards. The new smaller main cast is, once again, exceptionally written with deep character moments even though at this point they can seem to be a bit formulaic. How they showed another side to the previous casts stories, including the MC, through their interactions with them is simply brilliantly done. The evolution and growth of these characters throughout the course of this series is something that I have always wanted from the Persona games, but I digress. There are of course a few blemishes here and there, more easily apparent I'd say than in the previous titles, but these shortcomings can be easily brushed off considering the scale of the story they are trying to portray.
Trails of Cold Steel III is essentially Part I v2.0 with a few QoL systems added. To be honest, I was a bit disheartened with some of the said QoL as I found it made most of what made the previous games enjoyable pretty much trivial. At the end of the day, these additions made exploration tedious and made me play the game in a very lazy manner. This trend extends to the game's combat. I'd say that this game is the easiest one in the series so far which story-wise makes a bit of sense but even then doesn't make it a pill easily swallowed. Put simply, the break system encourages players to play the game a certain way and doesn't incentivize experimenting with different builds and strategies to overcome the more difficult fights. This leads to most battles, and sadly even the last boss battles in the final chapter, being a no-brainer. To be fair, I did play the game in Hard difficulty instead of Nightmare.
The game's story, in my opinion, is both the best and worst in the series so far. Plot-wise, the game finally starts making its way to resolving the overarching story it hinted at since Part I. Needless to say, the stakes are as high as they've ever been and, apart from the first 10-20 hours, story progresses in a refreshingly quick pace which draws you in and never lets up. At this point however, the "puzzle-box" way of the game trying to unveil its story is starting to show its wear and the writing does make a few missteps along the way, but overall the quality is still quite high. Unfortunately, the story does use tropes that I hate in badly written fiction and there are now a lot more "deus ex machina" moments that just brings down the overall experience. I just can't stress enough how disappointed that a lot of key events in Part 2 are trivialized here---in hindsight they did the same in Part 2 for Part 1 but it just makes this plot convenience more unforgivable here. I had hoped that the story would go an even "darker" route but maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part. To top it all off, the game ends just as abruptly as it did in Part 1 which I think does this game a disservice. An epilogue chapter would've done wonders for this game and the next but that's just me.
Despite all the negatives, I still enjoyed my 100+ hours in this game. Don't get me wrong, this game is incredible and I would rate this, though not as good as the previous games, among the best that the JRPG genre has to offer. An easy recommend and you'd have to be crazy to have invested at least 200 hours at this point and decide not to get this one.