Posted on: March 28, 2023
HeavilyAugmented
Verified ownerGames: 546 Reviews: 17
All Downhill After This
Crossbell duology has been a nice reminder why I enjoyed the prior Trails in the Sky trilogy from Falcom before the era of Rean Coldsteel. All the positives from the older games feel like they're at their best in Azure due to really polishing out the formula of exploring, doing side content, and potential quartz/arts builds while still retaining the solid world building and overarching plot built up from FC. All of this on top of another great PC version by Durante and PH3 who somehow made what is essentially a PSP game feel fresh with excellent AI upscaling methods for assets and new effects like reflections on bodies of water. I do have some issues (the amount of potentially missable side quests are a bit annoying this time around compared to Zero (I have no issue with hidden content, just that there was enough to get me paranoid to pull out a guide before every "point of no return" moment), still stuck with only doing one "final" bonding event like Zero, Ellie feels like a third/fourth/fifth/sixth/seventh wheel of the cast even compared to Noel, final chapter brings back SC levels of unnecessarily dragging the end game out) but really, if you've already stuck around playing these games for this long, the problems are mostly negligible.
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