The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

As someone who loves the game, it's honestly a horrible first sell for the series. It's easily the slowest moving entry in a series of deliberately paced games and it doesn't do the best job of training you to gorge yourself on lore and optional NPC dialog (the series' greatest strength). It also doesn't respect your time at all, which is a cliche, but chapter 3's highland sections are tedious to an unacceptable degree without turbo and many other sections aren't worlds better about it. BUT, if you can buy into or have bought into the overarching story of the continent, its excellent. Game has some of the best worldbuilding out there. On top of that, the combat is excellent and the quartz system is brilliant (what if materia was actually as good as people pretend it is?). The game also doesn't really waifu bait that hard, certainly not to the extent of a Sakura Wars, or even a Persona title. It doesn't really remind me of SW at all and it'd clearly be disappointing in that regard. Best I can do is a comparative analogy: Trails is kinda the Code Geass/Gundam of video gaming. And as a game, it probably has more in common with Xenogears and Suikoden than anything else, even if it's still not completely apt.

The sum of its parts doesn't work, and the single parts are even worse. It's very much a game of its time in every possible sense of the word, but what really makes me wonder how much I could possibly love any of this is how incompetent and nonsensical the writing can be at times.

i enjoyed it a lot but thats mostly just because i enjoy the series, without the first 5 games im not sure

This was my first Trails game and it got me hooked, I dunno what to tell you