So, Legend of the Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2 is a really good game. But as I played, things came up that frustrated me to no end, as they did in the previous entry. Now, JRPG's still stand as my favorite genre of gaming, so when I say this I say this with nothing but love in my heart.
JRPG's? Why are you so insistent on doing everything you possibly can to waste my god damn time on trivial bullshit? Now, you may assume at first I am talking about grinding, but I actually don't mind that (Though there are some games like Digimon World 2 where the grinding gets way out of hand), if I like the game it means I enjoy the mechanics, so grinding can be a bit of fun for me. No, there is a far more prevalent nuisance, and that is side-quests and missions that add nothing to the story, tell you nothing about the characters, and offer no mechanics of enjoyment to speak of.
There were multiple quests you would tackle in Trails of the Cold Steel that involved you needing to talk to Person A who is of no consequence and you will never see again, then go talk to person B who is of no consequence and you will never see again, then go talk to person C and then finally turn in the quest. During this process, I learn nothing about the world or plot, and worse yet I'm not actually doing anything other than retreading ground I have already been across in the game. But if you want AP for a higher score at the end of a month to get some goodies, you have to do this.
I could forgive quests like that if they were at least funny or offered a fun little side story to distract from the main plot for a bit, but they rarely if ever do that. And that's not the only kind of quest that does this in Trails of Cold Steel.
One quest has you kill a monster at the end of the road to help out the town. Alright, so far so good. Run around a map, fight some monsters, help the town with its troubles (which is indeed your job here, so it's not some pointless aside). But you get the second quest to do as well, fixing lights that chase off monsters. There are thirteen of them. All of them are along the road you travel to the monster, meaning you will not deviate from the path in order to fix them. There is nothing trying to kill you as you fix them, there is no mini-game you are doing to fix them, you just take a few moments to click a light, read a line of dialog saying 'I'm totes fixing the light guys' and it's fixed. And you do this thirteen times.
Seriously, would ANYTHING of value be lost if you just... didn't do that? Worse yet, every so often, something like this comes up and it's a required quest. “Oh, that guy you are looking for was here, but just left, find him over there!” and you wander over to like, three different places you've already been before finding him. When something like this happens, if it's a least a lazy way to show you around a town or something to introduce a series of mechanics or shops or what not, fine. Something useful was accomplished, but that doesn't happen in Trails of Cold Steel. It's just jerking you around from place to place.
When sending your characters on a quest, a side quest, anything, there is something you need to do. You either need to invest the characters in the story, the characters, the world, or the gameplay. And Trails of the Cold Steel, time and time again, puts you on these quests that do none of these. And while I'm a fan of the game, hours could be cut from the playtime while loosing absolutely nothing of value.
This is not something unique to Trails of Cold Steel. Let's look at a game that was a surprise hit for me this year, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. You can pick up quests to look for certain objects for your client, and several times you know where that object is? Directly by the entrance. And the object is always some unspecified thing for a Digimon client you literally know nothing about other than the fact they want their thing back. I'm not exaggerating any detail here, that is exactly what the quests are.
You have to go to the board, go talk to the client, get the object, turn in the object. And there is a small load time between all of these steps as you travel from area to area to do it. You have done nothing gameplay wise, and you learn nothing about anything. There is even less going on for those side quests then there are in Trails of Cold Steel. Yet just like in Trails, you are doing this to raise your rank in something to get more stuff.
And more then feeling like wasting your time, it feels like you are being rewarded for wasting your time. I think at times these developers are too focused on the reward aspect of side-questing, and forget that even for small quests and asides we are still here to play the game, to immerse ourselves in the story and world, and we end up with so many things that just feel like wasted time.
I'm am going to roll the clock back a few years, and I am going to bring up one of the greatest games of all time, Chrono Trigger. Now, I don't expect every game of the genre to live up to this standard, but this is a good example to set.
Pretty much everything in Chrono Trigger after the first run of Ocean Palace is a side quest. Nothing that has to be done. But every single quest tells you something about the world you live in. Every quest gives you insight into your characters or some kind of closure to their story, they all offer some kind of challenge to overcome. Be it restoring the forest in the present day by defeating a monster in the past, also allowing you the chance to alter the history of Lucca's Mother. This is not something that is required to beat the plot, and honestly not even to learn anything necessary to understand the plot. But you get a unique boss fight out of the deal, you alter the course of history if only in a minor way, you learn about the characters of Robo and Lucca, and you can actually save legs of someone close to a character in your party.
Nothing about doing that side quest feels like you were just wasting your time, and that’s without taking into consideration you got something out of the deal, that being a neat accessory and any of the gear/items found in the dungeon itself. And clearing all that out takes longer than the aforementioned quests in Cold Steel and Cyber Sleuth. But what it doesn't do is waste your time on nonsense no one could possibly care about.
It comes down to me wanting content in my game that doesn't feel like padding. I like a good long RPG, Persona 3 and 4 are some of my favorite games of all time, and each one of those titles took me a lot longer to beat than the first Trails of Cold Steel. You can have a lot of content so long as you make that content worthwhile. If you aren't going to put in the effort to do so, just cut it. If those kinds of quests were just dropped and not replaced with anything, both Cyber Sleuth and Trails of Cold Steel would have been superior products to what they are now, addition by subtraction as it were.
So once again, I say this with nothing but love in my heart for the genre, please stop wasting my goddam time.