Media in Review: Trails into Reverie
(This review will have spoilers for both the Crossbell arc (Zero/Azure) and Cold Steel 3/4)
Like Cold Steel 4 before it, Reverie is a game that is stuffed to the brim with narrative responsibilities. First and foremost, the game is trying to be four things all at once and at best does maybe two and a half of them well. Rean's route is probably the best of the bunch, and largely focuses on the aftermath of the events of Cold Steel 4, both literally (the inciting incident is Prince Olivert disappearing on his honeymoon) and thematically (What happens when a huge war machine gets shut down and war just...doesn't happen?). Lloyd's route is about the occupation and subsequent liberation of Crossbell, which you may note is the same story they did for Azure, and indeed the same story they did for Crossbell in Cold Steel 3/4. There's something to be said for the SSS being the ones to finally bring freedom to this poor little country, but literally anything would have been better than this twice-reheated mush. C's route is the game's original story, following a pair of child assassins and their doll learning to be human. It's...fine. It goes some incredibly stupid places, but does just enough to stick the landing that I can't even be mad about how dumb it all is.
Finally, it has a wealth of original content in the form of "Daydreams", little standalone episodes that explore a character's mindset or simply show what they've been up to in the time between Cold Steel 4 and now. Some are cute, some are funny, some are poignant, and some are just silly things like taking the Magical Girl Alisa tease from Tokyo Xanadu and making it a full-on three episode shmup, complete with its own original plot; it's great! How well any of these land for you will depend a lot on how attached you are to any given character, but by and large they do an okay job of "Hey we did [Character] dirty in CS4, let's give them a little time in the spotlight."
All of these are unlocked by playing through the Reverie Corridor, a procedurally generated dungeon where everyone gets sent a few times throughout the plot to train (it is both in-text and mechanically a place to go grind as necessary). The few times you get whisked away there during the plot are...not great for pacing, but once you reach the postgame that's the only thing you can do, which helps considerably. Really, the game's biggest problem is that it needed to pick which side of the fanservice/original story line to fall on, because it's awkwardly trying to do both. Sky 3rd did the former much better (or so I understand, I had enough after Sky FC), and Cold Steel 2 was firmly in the latter, unlocking the Reverie Corridor only at the very end of the game after the plot was completely finished. As it is, Trails into Reverie is fine. It could be much worse, and it could have been much better with minimal tweaks, but that's not the game we got. Though it's not my least favorite Trails game, I did find it pretty exhausting to play and I bailed somewhere around Floor 7 of the Reverie Corridor, mostly because I'm ready for a new setting and era of Trails. On to Calvard and Trails through Daybreak!