4/5 ★ – WardCove's review of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd.

This series has got me by the balls and won't let go. The characters and the story are brilliant. It was an absolute pleasure to finish up the Sky trilogy and I can't wait to get to the Cold Steel games somewhat soon. Let's get the negative out of the way first. The battles move to slow and even the running and exploring around the map can be a bit slow. Luckily I played on PC so I can have everything sped up so it wasn't an issue for me personally, but that's the big negative. The only other negative, which is minor, is the pacing is a tad off. It's so hard to nail the perfect length of any video game. Some feel right at 3 hours long and some feel right at 80 hours long and that pacing differs for every individual. This game, for me, lasted probably 5-10 hours a bit to long. The story never let up, but I didn't want to do any more dungeon exploring by the end of it. But it was very close to perfect. The story and the characters are the absolute best. Falcom excels in this area probably better than any other rpg developer. I am more invested in the characters in this trilogy than I have been in an RPG since the boys in FF XV. Even the things that annoy me, like Josette and Estelle constantly going at each other, feels like they are real people with real emotions. We get to learn more about Kevin Graham, and this game introduced one of my absolute favorite characters in the series so far, Ries Argent. I can't get enough of this storytelling and I can't get enough of each character. While I do have my favorites, I like each and every character and care about them extensively. While I think FC and SC are a 5/5 star, this game got a 4 only because I didn't like the...dungeon crawling gameplay loop as much as I liked the exploratory feel of the first 2. It's not bad though! Quite the contrary, it's very good! In fact I don't think I've ever had as much fun with a dungeon crawler before. It's just not on the same level as the first two. I did every single door in the game, which are a nice psuedo collectible thing that gives you story snippets that add a lot to the world building. And while every door wasn't great, in fact some were not fun at all, the door you are rewarded with to get all of them was well worth it in my opinion. I'm glad I did them all. Trails in the Sky trilogy is going down as some of my all time favorite games. Which is really saying something because I played these games with a lot of hype surrounding them. I am thoroughly impressed and I can't wait to play more Trails games and also I'm super pumped to play more Falcom games in general. These games made me a believer and I'm not looking back. If you like RPGs with a good story these are must play games.