Trails of Cold Steel II
So this one is really interesting because it starts like right after the traumatic Gundam-esque ending of the first game. Our Main Man Rean Schwartzer wakes up lying on the ground in front of his mech, having been forced to leave his friends to fight the Big Bads and probably die in order to save the mech, and possibly be able to help more in the future. When he wakes up, he is informed (by the talking cat Celine, who is the familiar of Emma, the classmate who is totally a witch) that he has been passed out in the mech for a month, having used up all his energy in the fight, and the mech used his last energy to heal Rean over that time. So Rean gets up, and says “whelp, gotta get my crew back”, and the game is off.
We get to see Rean’s hometown Ymir for the first time. It’s not the first time the students are visiting it (they actually got to go on a brief break there during the first game, but we were just told about it being a time they got to chill and relax, but didn’t get to see it ourselves), but the first time we get to see it. It’s a snowy town up in the mountains, which of course has a snowboarding minigame attached to it, but it feels so far from the cities more central to the Empire where most of the game before took place. While technically Rean’s dad is a baron, and thus is a Noble, he has no real alliance with the Noble Faction at all, and honestly just mostly seems like the mayor of the town in terms of how other people treat him. It’s a nice place to set up as an initial base. And from here, Rean and the Talking Cat use the mech’s magic powers to teleport to other places.
Revisitation as Development
The previous game was divided into chapters (Prologue and then seven Chapters). This game is so far divided into Acts after the Prologue. So Act 1 was How Rean Got His Crew Back, which involved going back to towns/locations we visited on Field Studies during the first game, with some interesting changes. First is the obvious, in that each of the towns is dealing with life during the civil war between the Nobles and the Reformists. Sometimes this has meant new people in the towns, but also has meant an escalated military presence. In one particular instance, it meant an entire military base was now basically a crater.
On one hand, this is some obvious asset reuse. I think it’s easy to forget sometimes, but Falcom are at heart still kinda a small company, so that makes sense. But it also works as a metaphor for the kids themselves, learning their world and such. They are coming back to these towns and seeing that things change, and in turn they themselves have changed. And we keep running into kids from the school who fled during the conflict, each of them finding a little place to live sometimes in towns they barely knew.
Of course, we also find the other members of Class VII, all trying to lay low as the heat is on from the Noble Faction. Some of them are scouting out the Nobles (Fie, the youngest student, who also grew up in a mercenary clan, is of course all about that; there is very much a feeling of this being Her Shit), while others are exploring the places they barely got to know in the first game (Emma the Witch and Laura are figuring out the Ghost Castle). Even Jusis, who is the son of one of the heads of the Four Houses (the big noble families in Erebonia), eventually joins us again, only after we find him back with his family and feeling all kinds on conflict over wanting to help his family but also thinking the Nobles are being assholes. His brother is also, conveniently enough, one of the military leaders of the Noble Faction forces.
The Civil War
It’s weird! So the Nobles of each of Erebonia’s provinces have gotten together to rebel against the Emperor and the Reformists. At the end of the last game, if you remember, the Nobles worked with the terrorist group (it became pretty apparent that they were funding them) to assassinate the Chancellor, who was ostensibly the leader of the Reformists, who were both looking to reduce the power of nobility as a whole, but also to centralize power under the Emperor. The terrorists themselves also seem to be full of members of a shadowy organization known as Ouroboros, who apparently show up in all the Trails games.
Near the end of the first game, Prince Olivert and Laura’s Dad started to work towards the creation of a third group, who seem possibly to be the only group representing the common people, which is interesting as the leaders so far are both parts of the Nobility, though both have expressed some reservations about that concept. They also have their own airship, which ends up being our home base once everyone is reunited near the end of Act 1, and you spend Act 2 flying this around Erebonia (well, the Eastern half, the Western half probably isn’t going to show up until a later game).
Ostensibly, we are fighting the Noble Faction for most of the game, so it would make sense that we are aligned with the Reformists, but in actuality, we end up aligned with the Emperor, who owns the airship we call base, and whose daughter we rescued and gives us license to use the ship. It ends up being an important distinction way later in the game, but we will get there.
Intermission
Before we get into Act 2, we get a strange intermission where Rean ends up on the Noblity’s flagship, and gets a bit of time to talk to each of their main members, who are basically the Bad Guys. This gives each of them a bit of time to explain their backstories, something I liked a lot. It’s not to say I agree with any of them really, but they do a decent enough job of explaining why they are who they are.
A lot of time is given to Crow, the former member of our class who actually assassinated the Chancellor. His hometown was basically taken over and annexed by Erebonia by the Chancellor, which led to his grandfather, who was mayor, basically fallling from grace and dying in shame, which Crow blamed on the Chancellor, leading to him falling in with the Imperial LIberation Front and killing him. The game just has him explain this, and doesn’t have Rean or anyone else really place a lot of judgment on Crow for this, which is interesting. Throughout the whole game, Rean is really upfront about his desire to get Crow to join back up with the class; he really feels that Crow is his friend and wants him back.
Sidenote: If you play Falcom games, you probably end up on the Falcom subreddit at some point, and find out there are a lot of reactionary nutjob Falcom fans who are super vocal there (I have to remind myself that they are just the most vocal people, but it still sucks). Anyhow, at one point, I was looking for something and ended up there, and saw a thread titled something like “Why is Rean so eager to forgive a TERRORIST (Crow) in Cold Steel II”, and it was just like…Jesus, people, the whole game is full of people trying to figure out how to navigate relatively (for a videogame) complex situations, and you just jump to TERRORIST!!! because of course you do. It was a moment that made me think a lot about how people want simple Good v. Bad stories, and appreciate that this game is trying at least a little bit to complicate that.
The intermission of course includes the “join us” moment that JRPG Baddies often do. Eventually, Rean ends up busting out, saving the Princess, and heading back to the Class VII airship.
First You Get the Team, then You Get the Country
Act 2 is mostly about Rean and the crew taking back the cities they know and love, and eventually the school itself. The fight to take back each town from the Noble Faction reveals a bit more about the towns and the people there, and usually whatever characters are attached to the town. Also, this is where we get to fly around and pick up the greater Thors Academy student body. One of the things the first game did was at least give a decent number of students little backstories and personal interests, so it’s fun to find them and see what happened to them after the Nobles took over the school, when many of them fled like Class VII did.
The Noble Faction is definitely depicted as a Problem. While the mercenaries fighting for them, many of whom we got to chat with during the intermission, don’t seem inherently Evil (at least any more so than most mercenaries), the Nobles start doing some BAD SHIT as they feel their grip on power slipping away. After we freed one town, Celdic, a market town with something of a Scottish/Irish/Gaelic (not trying to be dismissive here; Falcom seem at times like weebs for Europe, with a similar level of depth to their cultural understandings as this would imply) feel to it, including the accents of some of the people, the Noble decide to…burn it all down. Like they wait until Class VII isn’t there, and do a lil war crime.
Jusis, the member of the team closest to the Nobility, has a major crisis when he finds out his father seemingly out of spite ordered the attack, killing several people. Jusis is big on the whole idea of being a noble means accepting responsibility for what your noble house does, and wants to solo getting vengeance on his family. Of course, Class VII is not going to let him do that alone, but it’s an interesting moment of someone in nobility attempting to deal with shit.
The whole time this has been going on, we have been getting drip fed some of the history of Erebonia. Over 250 years ago, Erebonia went through a different Civil War, wherein someone made claim to the throne and it caused general chaos to ensue. What finally led to the end of this was the rise of Driechels, who would raise his own army in the north, eventually team up with a woman known as the Spear Maiden, and take over the country, from whence shit was mostly peaceful. We find out that the mech that Rean has was Driechels, and there are other parallels. Laura, one of our team members, is from the same town as the Spear Maiden, and while we were there in the first game, we even briefly saw a ghost that might have been her. At a few times in the game, Rean gets hallucinations that we eventually figure out are Driechels’ own memories.
As whole, Act 2 has a pretty different structure from the first game and even the first Act of Part II, which were both very linear. Not to long in the act, we get the keys to the airship, and can basically decide where to go from there. The game restricts it a bit to keep us moving through the plot, but eventually we can go wherever pretty quickly. Fast travel is…kinda a new thing for these games? The PSP ones were very much “you are walking everywhere”, which was definitely part of the appeal there. But it doesn’t detract in this game that we can fly around. It sorta adds to the feeling of Class VII getting more and more powerful.
Eventually we end up getting most of our classmates back, and getting a sword for our totally bitchin’ mech, and we go take back the school itself. A small faction of noble students stayed in the school (including Patrick, who was a total butthead in the previous game) and so they want to fight us when we get back. Though we initially thought they were holding the teachers hostage, turns out they had already let them go after the Noble Faction’s soldiers left the school, but they wanted to see how badass Class VII had gotten. Turns out, pretty badass, so we take the school back. The lone remaining Noble Faction stronghold is the capital city.
One of the things I liked in this section is that Rean and the team are really dedicated to saving whoever they can. When one mercenary kills himself after losing to Rean, the whole class basically says “nope” and so plans ahead to stop that from happening again. Class VII are super dedicated to being the best kids, so they can’t have that happen.
God, these games are so nice and sincere.
Finale
So after we get the school back, shit gets real and real weird all at once. We find out that there was a red mech buried under the Imperial Palace that basically caused the whole 250 years ago war by threatening to bring about Armageddon, and Driechels used his mech and his team to shut that down. Well, turns out the head of the Nobles wants that power, and uses the prince he kidnapped way before the game started to do it, because only his (Driechels’) bloodline can activate the mech. Also it turned the palace into a big red tower that we had to climb with lightly randomized floors, probably because of Persona 3. So we go to the top, fight the baddies, and win, and even get to team up with Crow one last time.
I have to say last there because, as a result of all the shit going down, Crow gets killed. And everyone in the Class hates it (the post-big-battle game definitely reminds us of this). The game did a pretty good job of showing Crow as a dude who lived through some fucked shit, and made shit more fucked, but for reasons that are, if not entirely sympathetic, understandable. He hated the Chancellor for what he did, so he killed the Chancellor for it. He even seems almost lost after that happened, not knowing what to do with his life, so sorta default ending up with the Nobles because they were footing his bill for the assassination. So in the end, it is pretty sad to see this fucked up kid get killed, or at least it was for me. Your ability to buy in on it might be different.
BUT OH SHIT THERE IS SOMETHING MORE. The Chancellor isn’t dead. He just shows up, hints that a body double was who took the bullet, and now is taking over Erebonia again. And it is revealed that people on both sides of the conflict were working for him in secret, which is some shit. Rean is pissed about this because it means that Crow’s whole life goal was a failure, and he died without completing it. So yeah, pretty sure I know who the new bad guy is, ha.
The baddie gets got, and the shit gets chilled but nothing for Class VII feels the same. Though they got the school back, and want it to be like it was, it’s just not. They’ve only been away for a couple of months, but they can’t go back to unseeing the war. All of them, except Rean, basically decide to go back to their homes to help rebuild after everything that has happened. I think that is probably a lot of what this game ends up being about, that feeling of remembering some time in your life you really enjoyed, but not being able to go back there. Wherever “there” was is as much a time as a place, and it’s gone. And the Class is OK with this, but it’s sad. There’s a lot of “kids growing up” in this game.
Bonus Shout Out to Another Game
So during the game, there have been some clear references to other games in the series, specifically the Crossbell Arc (Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure), so it wasn’t really a surprise that, during the post Finale bonus part, we get to play as two characters from those games in Crossbell. This is a really cool move for the game to make because, as a result of the chancellor coming back, Erebonia invades and annexes Crossbell. So we get to see how other people might view the Empire, and even get to fight against Rean as these characters. It’s a little sudden to see this shift, but it works at hinting how the series is now expanding out again.
What’s interesting here too is that Rean starts to seem conflicted. He’s become, somewhat accidentally, a solider in the Erebonian Army, since they want access to his sweet mech, and though he obey orders, it seems like he’s not happy doing it.
There’s so much in these games, I feel like I’ve left a bunch out, but oh well. I can start part 3 now, since I told myself I had to finish writing about 2 first.
