About 20 hours into Trails of the Black and it's pretty good. I have issues with it, but it has the following which I like:
-CARS
-Quest ending choice branches (Mass Effect -lite style)
-Occasional actual detective puzzles
-no Rean
-Did I mention that the main guy is a gear-head and there is a lot of CARS and even choose your own adventure Initial D racing?
Calvard seems like an interesting place. Story is very slow but world building and NPCs are great as always with these games. Music isn't Falcom's best, but it's not bad either. Solid ost and good art.
20 hours in I'm still not sure where I stand on the battle system. To its credit, Falcom finally did a real reboot of Trails battles and this doesn't feel like Sky/Crossbell/Cold Steel. Otoh, being an all new system, and not at end game stuff yet, I'm still figuring out how to break it and some fights drag out a bit in simplicity where all I can basically do is knock off 1,500-3,000 damage per turn and the boss has 30k HP so it takes like 10 turns which is a lot for Trails where everything tends to be fast and broken.
Also, can I say how tired I am of every Trails boss in every game going into RAGE MODE in the last 20% and healing like 20% HP and buffing all stats? This is fucking lame.
Given Trails past, each sequel will iterate on the combat and add new sub-systems, so I think with some more sub-systems this good be a really cool and fun battle system. Right now it's not a bad battle system, but it's not fast, great or deep. Feels...interesting but limited. Though this might open up more later in the game when I have more crafts/spells/skills/characters to play with.
Like one thing I really hope they add in the sequel is this game does a better link system than Cold Steel. Instead of changing your link from a menu, you just walk within a few feet of the character you want to link with and you're linked and do a bit more atk/def and follow up attacks. The downside is having to group your characters together. Anyhow what I'd like to see in the next game is the ability to stack links so if you have three characters next to each other, you do one attack and get 2 follow up attacks from both other characters nearby. The way it's executed here that seems logical and a no brainer but it doesn't happen and just picks one of the two you are next to as your follow up attacker.
Oh and so far, given how the map of Calvard is done, there's no indication this is going to be a 4 part (first half/2nd half) country. There's no easy division of Calvard's map and it sure seems like you'll go to all the major places in Calvard in games #1 & #2. So maybe they'll learn from Cold Steel and at most do a 3rd/Hajimari style epilogue wrap up game at the end, but I don't think this is going to be a four game arc. Should be done in a couple years if they stick to one game a year.
But this game is definitely going to be 100 hours like CS3/4. It's paced exactly the same, especially if you talk to every NPC after every time of day update. I'm like midway through ch.2 now at 20 hours.
