Cold Steel 3 is less that it's pretty fucking good, and more just confirmation that the Kiseki/trails series is the best modern jrpg franchise. The game is alright so far, but it's hard to put down because of Kiseki's way of developing hundreds of NPCs everywhere with constantly updating dialogue so they feel fleshed out. There's no other developer who makes locations seem so alive even if graphically they're kinda dull because graphics ain't Falcom's specialty. On top of that the games always have the most fun battle systems (at least since 3rd onwards, Sky FC/SC is a little plain/slow) and a million quests, fishing and stuff to do/find. They're just really fun games.
I'm 15 hours into Sen 3 and still in the first chapter, lol.
On the mechanics side for those interested, since each Kiseki entry adds a new sub-system to the battle system (although they drop a bunch between country arcs), the one added for Sen 3 is crazy batshit broken and fun. You can do orders at any turn of yours, these orders cost BP which you build up from those link attacks, their are tons of orders and they have insane game breaking abilities that last for X amount of turns. For instance, in the first 15 hours I've encountered:
-Reflect all damage for the next 4 turns on the queue
-Instant spell casting for the next 6 turns on the queu
-Damage + 20% for 8 turns
-Defense + 20% for 8 turns
+Criticals + 30% for 6 turns
Now the first two on that are game breaking crazy. But it adds strategy in how you use it like you wait until your last player on the queue before the boss(es) attack and then use reflect and all the boss attacks will do 0 damage and reflect all damage. This is instant and BP is easy to obtain. Instant spell casting for that many turns can be crazy too. These are the kinds of abilities you would normally get with a maxed out Master Quartz and they'd cost like all your EP to cast and be endgame stuff, now you're doing it every other fight.
But at the same time the bosses are amazingly broken OP as fuck because they know you can break the system back, so straight from the start they'll wipe you quick. It's pretty nuts and a lot of fun.
