The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV has been out in the West since 2020, but only on PS4. I imagine that most Trails fans will have purchased the game without delay on PS4, having had to wait for 2 years for its localisation. If you’re looking to purchase the game on the new PC or Nintendo Switch versions, I can only assume you are one of two types of people: either you’re a diehard fan looking to purchase the game again on a new platform, or a Nintendo Switch owner who has seen it go up on the eShop and is wondering what the deal is all about.

For those who came in late

If you’re in the latter category, be warned: Trails of Cold Steel IV is not a forgiving game for newcomers. To even have a chance of understanding the game’s incredibly large story, you’ll need to have played Trails of Cold Steel III at the very least, as IV directly continues from III’s cliffhanger ending. But it’s recommended to start as early in the series as you can bother with, or else you’ll end up missing heaps of backstory. This is one hell of a task, though, as to start at the very beginning would mean playing through not just the previous Cold Steel games but the Trails of the Sky games, plus the Japan-only Crossbell series.

Trails of Cold Steel IV is the climax of one wild ride, and I’m sure the ending was satisfying to the vast majority of fans. I’ll have to take their word for it – Cold Steel IV does such a poor job of inducting new players that I literally lost the plot within the first two chapters.

The problem is not that the game has a lot of backstory and lore, nor that it requires your attention to detail. At the core of Cold Steel’s problem is that it doesn’t seem to care how big and unwieldy it’s become. The first two chapters wisely only focus on a handful of the series’ dozens of characters at a time, but once it gets into the swing of things, cutscenes will commonly have more than 10 characters all weighing in their 2 cents. These dialogue scenes are bloated with lengthy exposition, and a story as massive as this one needed a far more engaging way to be told.

Cold Steel IV on Switch

The Nintendo Switch runs Cold Steel IV almost perfectly, albeit at 720p and capped at 30fps. There were only a few dropped frames around the more busy areas, and it’s certainly nothing that would ruin the experience. The portability of handheld mode is a godsend for those long dialogue scenes, since you’re not stuck to a TV screen for the whole time. The lowered graphical quality is mostly only noticeable on text, such as place names and menu options, where they appear fuzzier.

The two major downsides to the Switch version are actually nothing to do with performance. Trophies that were available on the PS4 version are gone from the Switch, which makes all those minigames throughout the game a little less rewarding. The completionists among you might find this to be a dealbreaker. In the PS4 version, there were some bonus extras that were rewarded to those who had save data for the previous games in their system: one set of bonuses for each title in the Trails series. The Switch version only offers this bonus for save data for Cold Steel III. This is presumably because it’s the only other Trails game available on the platform, but it seems stingy.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV is a game made for fans, and no-one else. It’s not a bad thing to know one’s audience, but it’s a huge turn off for anyone who doesn’t want to sink an average of 400+ hours into the previous games. Cold Steel IV focuses on the long-awaited climax of the long-running series, and it certainly delivers on ramping up the stakes to the max. But with only slight updates to every other aspect of the game, it just ends up feeling like I’m playing Cold Steel III.