Yeah, I had the same thing with Juna. It took a while for Erika Harlacher's take on the character to grow on me but eventually it just clicked.

Finally, the two voices that I was waiting to hear have finally made their appearance, and I couldn't be happier.

Not gonna lie, was expecting new voice batches to come out towards the end of July. With this I have seen all the characters voices I really wanted to see

I'm glad they got them back, but Estelle sounds a little on the nasally side, compared to how she used to sound. Maybe I'll need to hear more, but I'm a bit iffy on it. That said, I suppose it's not a huge surprise it'd be different given how long it's been since the VA played her. JYB is still JYB, so I've no complaints there.

I haven't actually even checked out the new VAs, guess I should do so sometime soonish. That said I suppose hearing Estelle is the same is kind of nice. I would have been ok with a new person since she had so little voice work originally, but keeping the VA the same is certainly ok.

Posted by: @trailsofpersona

Spoiler

Beyond hype

Renne sounds great but had to go back to see and YES! RENNE BRIGHT!!!!

And now you know what was up with my innocent whistling last week. xD

Not sure if we will get more a few weeks leading up to release, but surprised with the lack of any marketing stuff since the last time I posted in this topic. Anywho...

We're just over a month away from release, and I am hoping that being this close there won't be a sudden month or two delay announced. With the game coming soon I thought I would post what I am excited for, using only stuff known from marketing materials. If I decide to post something more Spoilery I'll make sure to mark that. 

First, I am looking forward to finally having the Erebonia saga finished. I know Hajimari can be partly a CS V, but this game will finish the main conflict that has been set up for quite a while. CS I came out at the end of 2015, so almost 5 full years to get to this point. To put thing a bit more into perspective, CS II came out a little bit before the 2016 US election, and now IV is going to come out right before the 2020 election day. It will be nice just to have this saga complete because after a certain point you just want to see the conclusion after so long. No matter my opinion of the actual game once finished, being done will be a huge plus.

Fanservice galore (not the titilating kind). We already had returning characters from Sky and Crossbell in III, but they are turning it up even more in this game. I make no secret of Estelle being my favorite characters, so having her back being playable is always a huge plus in my book. The potential interactions with various characters is limitless, and I am hopeful my dream playable duo of Estelle and Fie will be able to happen in this game. We also have Renne back so I am prepared to start crying at any moment, and hope to have some fun interactions between her and Tita. There's more I'm looking forward to, but from the others I know about that would be in spoiler territory, so I will hold off on that.

Being able to have completed opinions on characters. As much as I've posted about my thoughts on certain characters, especially Rean back on the Xseed forums, I've held back to an extent based on not having the full picture. While Hajimari may do stuff to change my opinions some, with this game done I can have a complete picture of the saga and be able to see how each character worked starting at point A and ending at point B. I will do my best to give each character a fair shake, though I heard that much like CS II this game is really Rean centric so not sure how much they can do with each character, especially with a bloated cast, to really change my opinion that much. Still, at least I can have the full picture.

New S-crafts and old S-crafts in 3D. Some of the S-crafts of characters from the 2D games I've seen look pretty cool, and I look forward to seeing how some of the others fare. As for new S-crafts, I already love Renne's. When it comes to the Cold Steel characters, at least the class VII ones, I always feel like their initial ones are fairly bland but their 2nd ones are pretty great. I remember in CSII all the new S-crafts being pretty awesome, so I hope all the new class VII get some great ones.

Punching the smug faces of Osborne and Rufus (metaphorically). Much like Duke Cayenne in CS II, these two have been smug for way too long and need to get their due diligence. The chance to finally beat them down for good will be nice. Funnily enough despite the con I still liked Rufus at the end of CS II, but by the end of III I was over him. I didn't mention Cedric because while I hate him, he's not worth it. Spitting on his face is enough justice.

Hopeful for more returning Thors students. It was fun seeing characters like Becky and Rosine and others return, but I hope to see more of them come back even if they don't get actual story time devoted to them. I know with the tone being set up for this game it wouldn't necessarily be appropriate, but dang it I want to see Alan and Bridget be all lovely dovey. We got one canonical couple that we've seen happen in cold steel, just let me see that in person.

Crafting the dream party. While in the long run the management will be annoying, having so many playable characters and the possibility of crafting a team with any of them is a dream. I already mentioned the Estelle/Fie duo, but I want to just make my dream team of who I would think would go out and annihilate everything in their path. 

Those are the main, non spoilery things I will say. There are things I know about that are spoilers that I look forward to, as well as don't look forward to. Despite having my misgivings on certain plot points spoiled, I will try to keep an open mind to judge it fairly. 

Estelle is like my fave jrpg character ever...except maybe Renne. she's so awesome... Problem is she's really not great in terms of battle mechanics lol. Her 2 row quartz setup is not good for advanced magic suing sky/crossbell mechanics, and it's not good for cold steel mechanics where more rows means more ailment chances.. I wonder if it's still 2 row in CS, I guess I'll see. Her stats are middling at best.. Not even slightly above average, just kinda meh in every catagory except defense, which is not the greatest of stats in the cold steel arch where evasion is the best defense, scrafts basically 1shot you or not regardless, and everything else is of little consequence, not to mention if cs4 is at all like cs3, the badguys don't even get to move anywy because perma-break.... THAT said maybe that's what Estelle is good at. She SHOULD be a good breaker I would reckon since she's one of few characters with a blunt style weapon exclusively. Well I guess she tends to have a really powerful for single target s-break too... I tend to not use sbreaks though because they kinda break the games and make the highlight battles (bosses) over before you know it in the more modern games.

I was a bit perturbed that Renne was a caster in 3rd, I wonder if she keeps that role in future games. Seems like the CS arc already has a large variety of pure casters (especially if you get playable oliver and Alfin in hajimari, not sure... Wazy too I think? I forget, was wazy a 1 row caster or was he like all but 1 row? I forget) and it will be hard for Renne to shine if she's just another drop in that bucket. I can't wait to have her in the story though. They better not make her have a single scene for her that doesn't make me bawl! =P

Welcome back though, was wondering where you were hiding.

I guess on an objective Base, Estelle isn't terrible or great in battle. That said, whenever I play she almost never misses compared to Josh, the speedster who seems to miss way too much. Then add into the fact that in my most recent playthrough of SC and 3rd with my friend she was criting constantly with just the 20% crit chance. I remember in 3rd with the final match in the arena against Cassius and Loewe she landed a crit almost every single time, and her last S-craft did 23k against Loewe finishing him off. So in my experience using her, she's an absolute beast. Oh yeah, in 3rd as well against Walter both times you can fight him the only time she was ever touched was when he used his S-craft. So screw the idea that other characters set ups are more open to be broken, she is the MVP both for character and battle 😛

I've been lurking here and there, but been taking a bit of a detox from Trails so I'm fresh and ready for CS IV. Finished III with my friend recently and we've been playing other non Trails games to take a bit of a break. We started Zero but only got to Armorica Village in chapter one and haven't booted up again for a few weeks. 

Well, the loss of Laura, Osborne, Lechter and McBurn's VAs is a real bummer. It certainly explains why Osborne sounded so wrong in the early trailer for the game. I'm going to miss him, Lechter and McBurn the most, but hopefully the latter two's replacements do a comparable job. Laura I don't feel as strongly about, but it's still unfortunate to break the consistancy. I'm also wondering if, when Hajimari comes around, they'll just keep the new folks. I'd have to imagine so. Between that, the audio quality on some people and the general direction for some of the performances being less than stellar this time around, it's just an all around shame that the "last" game had to go out like this. It's hard to fault them too much, given the circumstances, but it's still disappointing.

I saw somewhere else someone had said Laura's and Osborne's VA were different. Out of curiosity, where did you find out about this? The amount of stuff NISA has been posting about the game has been very sparse, so not sure where people have been getting this information. It's a bummer that more voices have been changes, but between this being 4 games over so many years, and add the pandemic on top of that changes were going to be inevitable. Guess we can be happy that it wasn't more. 

Just a little over a week to go. I ended up canceling the physical copy and got the digital deluxe edition instead. Was able to nab it for $44.99 plus tax before they fixed it to the actual sale price it was supposed to be, and they didn't cancel my order so I got it for a great price. Somehow my work schedule was made for me to work this coming weekend and I will get next week Monday night off, so when Midnight hits I will be able to start the game instead of being at work, so hurray for me. 

I'm interested to see how my opinion of this game will end up being. In different places people have claimed it being another Cold Steel II on steroids, and with CS II being my least favorite of all the games I expect this to be low on my list. On the other hand, there are returning characters that I am extremely hyped for that may help mitigate negative feelings. On the other, sounds like of the 4 Cold Steel IV is the longest of them, and as many problems I had with II, it was the shortest of the 4. 

Hope I can finish the game by the end of the year. Different things going on right now and in the near future will make it so I won't have much time to put down a lot of time each day. Took me over a month to finish CS III when life wasn't as crazy.

I too am curious how I will rate 4 against the rest of the series, and was nervous about i being compared to CS2 in particular when cs2 is my least fave game in the series. However lot of the elements I dislike in 2 I suspect wont be as much (if at all) an issue in 4. Things like the cheesy saturday cartoon-esque valimar comes to save the day let's have all the enemies sit there and wait for 2 minutes very conveniently. I also would like to guess that it wont have so many bail-out moments as 2 did since it IS the end of the arc and the writers are hopefully willing to let the playable characters stand up to their adversity on their own now instead of having an NPC swoop in and save their asses so often. I'm ok with it being done the way they do it in CS3 btw like when a certain couple of enemies and their forces ambush a certain train, so if more like that happens that's ok.

I do remember feeling like the  BGM of 4 was less impressive than 3 when I listened to both prior to playing either game. But 4 uses alot of 3's music I think so maybe it wont be as noticeable. I do think it's a shame though that the train music in CS1 never got re-used. I thought it was a great theme that really set the mood.

Anyway I suspect I'll like cs4 much more than 2. Though I'm even more hyped for Hajimari. I hope we get that one in the west =P

I wasn't too hard on the constant saving in CS II, for the most part. End game it did start to get a bit ridiculous. My biggest gripes were how pretty much everyone outside Rean were sidelined in the second act, the second act in general just being poorly paced and never really fleshed out the whole idea of them being the 3rd option that Prince Olivert envisioned them to be. Also the fact that the one part where their decision to take on the Nobles was finally going to have some sort of consequence and suddenly Rufus is like "My fathers a dick, we will turn a blind eye to this". I could write an essay on why I think the second act is poorly conceived and how it drags the game down so much. From what I know IV is like II in that it's extremely Rean centric again and that a lot of characters get sidelined again, and if true that will definitely get on my nerves. 

I am doing my best to not be sour on some spoilers I know in regards to end game stuff in CS IV, since context may alleviate it and not be as bad as I thought. As for Hajimari, I am pretty confident that it's a matter of when, not if, the game will come out. I feel more like it will be a 2022 game, though with PS5 coming out this year I could see them wanting to get it out in 2021 before PS4 games start to become overshadowed by PS5 games. 

Some copies of the game leaked early and videos were put up on youtube. You can see in the credits that they've got new people. Well, that and footage from the game.

Woof, reading the review from RPGsite and the section about the localization...Sieg being mistakenly named Zeke? Haha, that's our NISA!

The constant need for them to patch their locs of Falcom games is really disappointing. Given the current state of things, I can understand the hiccups on the vocal side of things, but stilted dialogue and basic stuff like names is not something I'm willing to be quite so forgiving on.

I was a little worried the localization was going to be rougher. I know there was less than a year between CS I and CS II but those games were overall smaller in script size and XSeed at that time figured out how to do things pretty efficiently. Add on top Covid which had to have made things more difficult this was going to happen. 

Biggest thing that stood out was talking about pacing, which to me is exactly how I felt about CS II. First act is great, 2nd act is a mess, then the 3rd act is an improvement. Main thing that will change how I view this overall is if there is satisfying development for me during the 2nd act, which Cold Steel II failed to really deliver on that front. Just about 72 hours from now I can start my journey, and tomorrow the game should preload for me. 

Another thing from the RPGsite review was the talk about needing all the previous games. I remember playing Cold Steel III that one could still overall enjoy the game having just played the Cold Steel games. However, for better or worse, it seems like Falcom went two games where knowledge of all games before will really change your experience. You can understand the game, but with so many characters and references to past games and payoff from games from a completely different arc, the experience between series fans and only those who played Cold Steel is going to be very different. This will probably continue, but at least with the new arcs there will be the advantage of the first game being overall new player friendly since it would be more about building up the setting.