This anime is a piece of horrendous shit, I mean it, a giant turd that stinks so much you could get sick, so if you can, stay away from it. The only and I mean ONLY instance in which you could CONSIDER watching this is if you played the original game, despite not playing myself I still think it isn't worth it even if you did. Story takes place in a sci-fi fictional world with heavy focus on politics. Our protagonist lives in a desolate, impoverished military dictatorship which independence is being threatened by imperialistic superpower whose leaders are plotting on how to annex their smallerneighbor. Our main character, Lavi, decides to join the military. Despite being a rookie it quickly turns out that she is op compared to other soldiers, for those and other reasons she quickly catches attention of nations elites and is sent on a mission to inflirtrate a hostile empire. Premise is quite interesting, with politics, intrigue, espionage, vast world, large cast of characters and even mechs, unfortunately this show fails at all of those aspects dramatically.
To show to you the quality of writing in this show I thought it best to summarize the first episode.
Our protagonist is on a escort mission delivering some cargo, she is in a helmet covering her face and not speaking for some reason. After 5 minutes of walking and exposition they come across a village nearby that is being attacked by some monsters, its time for a side mission during the escort mission. We have some action (more on that later) and its time to survey the village. It turns out Lavi is talking with side characters as they are repling to her, but we don't hear her which is very awkward. After a while we see that there is an even bigger monster, oh no! Thankfully our mc is able to get rid of him, but during the fight she loses her helmet to reveal that *drum roll* she is a girl... no way! And now she talks and will never wear a helmet again, yes thats right all of this was for an epic reveal that this small soldier with slender figure is in fact a female. We get to the capital and start to explore it, during the tour random npcs start to beg our characters to help out with their problems, but they aren't interested in another side mission. Some more exposition of things characters should know and than out of nowhere some Rogan guy pulls over with his squad and starts talking with Lavi about her grandfather and how he was a hero and now there is a huge crowd behind him chanting his name so he decides to make a warmongering speach about how he is going to start a revolution and thats the episode. First episode is literally protagonist being harassed by random missions and events. This represents the average quality of episodes in this series, but don't worry it can get much worse (clown episode).
Let's talk about the plot. As you could see in my example, plot convenience happens and it does so very often. Everyone randomly stumbles upon each other/knows where to go. End is predictably rushed and I wasn't happy about it.
While there are slow moments, from time to time writers will just introduce new things in a rapid fire pace. They do so mainly with sudden new plot threads you need to care about and when it introduces another batch of characters. The huge amount of storylines leads to most if not all of them being underdeveloped, same goes for characters. As late as in tenth episode we are introduced to another very important place for Lavi's full with new people and no matter how much anime wants me to care I never will. Our hero is a very boring protagonist. She is a model soldier with no charisma or interesting personality. Instead writers went with the "cool silent type" except she isn't cool. Later on she has to confront her legacy which is a bit interesting, with her starting to care about the well being of everyone and turning more into generic type of a protector.
In political shows it is important for the viewer to care about the politicians as a characters and have interest in the fictional world, unfortunately we only get to know two of the many more of those politicians. Maybe you will care about them, but I never did and even a fancy hair colour didn't manage to change that. There are no cool intrigues to be honest. They didn't even manage to pull off a mystery in a political show, when someone gets assassinated it is immediately obvious who did it. As for the world, while being very big and detailed could be considered as a benefit it turned out to be too vast. Authors had to bombard me with exposition to explain as much as possible about everything even tho many of the details turned out to be irrelevant to the story.
Ok, but what about all of the spy stuff? It's bad, obviously. For the infiltration arc let's call it, anime enters episodic format. Every episode is basically a side quest ranging from boring to an awful clown episode. I could make a rant about how goofy and stupid that episode was, but let's just move on to the overall problem... everyone is stupid.
To be clear that isn't exclusive to only infiltration arc, stupid moments are quite common and I will show some examples in the most non-spoilery way possible.
Government decided to send some military instructors as spies without any spy training. Inflirating a foreign country Lavi uses her real name to soldier of a hostile government. While being pursued Lavi's team decides to take a break and they decide to just start chilling making a campfire... this whole mission was carried out terribly. Not to stay with main characters I will tell one more example that kept infuriating me. The palace in the capital, where all the leaders are, is completely empty and with almost no security. Countless times someone just walks in wearing a random uniform and gets to do whatever they want.
With all of those negatives is production quality good? Can we see at least some cool action? You should know the answer by now. Fights are bad and stiff. There is a lot of cgi which doesn't blend well with 2d. Visually speaking the only interesting part are all of the various cities, other than that it is very bland.
To conclude, this anime is a hot pile of garbage with no redeeming qualities. I hope it will be the worst thing I watch this year.
Not Recommended
If you have not played Trails of Cold Steel (Sen no Kiseki) 1 and 2 don't even bother watching this anime. This is not an adaptation of the games' story meant to get new fans into the franchise, this is an original side story to the games and expects you to know the story of at least the first two Cold Steel games (but it has references to every Trails game, not just Cold Steel) If you are a fan of the games like I am you're probably going to end up watching the anime regardless of what I say, making this review kind of redundant,but aside from finally getting to see North Ambria after hearing about it for 12 games, this anime doesn't add anything of value to the overall story of Trails and simply isn't worth watching.
As the anime's name implies, this is the story of the North Ambrian war that happened between Trails of Cold Steel 2 and 3. However rather than focusing on the war itself this anime spends most of its run time developing its characters and simply foreshadowing the upcoming war (this is still Trails after all and it's paced exactly like the games).
So instead of the war, the story follows our 4 main characters as they travel to Erebonia to search for information about Rean, and I honestly liked those episodes quite a lot. The cast has a good dynamic with each other and it's cute seeing the culture shock they experience as they explore Erebonia's big cities since they're all from the poor countrysides of North Ambria. Add in a few cameos from different game characters and you have a pretty strong beginning that, despite being essentially filler, makes you like the characters and get invested in their anxities about the upcoming war. But that all changes when they leave back to North Ambria and the actual plot of the Northern War gets going. The actual plot is rushed and convoluted, and even the events that are specifically mentioned in Cold Steel 3 happen so fast that if you haven't already heard what happened there by playing Cold Steel 3 I wonder if you'd even understand their significance.
This sereis needed more than 12 episodes if they were going to spend half of its episodes touring Erebonia instead of progressing the plot, because as fun as their Erebonian tour was to watch, it's because the show spent so long on that tour that the main plot of the show simply does not have enough time to develop.
The art and animation are also quite frankly terrible. The whole show looks incredibly cheap but I could forgive that if the animation was good to compensate for the cheap art, but no, even the animation is cheap. The animation is so cheap that in episode 3 there's a fight scene against the episode's villain that happens entirely outside of the screen as you just hear the sound effects but don't get to see anything. And while that is the lowest point of the show's animation, the highest points really aren't much better.
Ultimately I'm not sure what the point of this anime is. It's clearly not meant for helping new fans get into the series because it just does not explain its setting or any of the concepts, so new fans would be completely lost. But for old fans there really isn't much to offer. You already know how the war is going to end because you've heard about it in Cold Steel 3, and that wouldn't be bad if the anime was great on its own, but it really isn't.
I can only recommend this to Trails megafans like myself who obsess over everything Trails and want to finally see what North Ambria is like after hearing about it for 12 games, but if you're a Trails megafan like myself you're most likely going to watch this regardless of what I have to say in this review.
Not Recommended
The TL;DR is that this was made as an ad for a gacha game and thus I recommend steering clear of this. For anyone who is not a Trails fan, this anime is utter garbage. For anyone who IS a Trails fan, this anime is THE BIGGEST insult to the entire franchise. If you like Trails or are thinking of trying it, play the actual games and feel free to forget this thing ever existed. For context: It chronologically takes place between Cold Steel 2 and Cold Steel 3, during a major event that happened in that period. One would think this anime would focuson said event and explained what happened in detail, portraying the key characters from the game through the perspective of a new cast, right? But no. Nothing happens during the vast majority of this anime. They even take time to introduce some goddamn random ahh clown that serves 0 effing purpose in episode 3, only to disappear a moment later.
The only relevant episodes are roughly the last 3, and even those give you less information than a mid-conversation recap from Cold Steel 3 does. It explains nothing, yet only adds more questions. It's only purpose is to serve as an ad to the Northern War mobile gacha game they released, and quite frankly, everything about this is horrendous (even the gacha game itself). The character designs, the pacing, the cuts, the fact they put up a flashback scene literally 5 seconds after you've seen the said flashback scene. In short, steer clear of this giant pile of stinky. It's not worth your time and it won't explain anything.
Not Recommended
As a massive fan of the series I'm aware of how complicated it is and how tough it was going to be for this anime to achieve any kind of balance between new and existing fans. Well, they succeeded on evening the playing field in one way, it stinks in every conceivable way. If you're looking for a story about, you know, the Northern War, well tough, because this isn't about that almost(!) at all. It's a story of JRPG Preset Characters 1 to 4 going on holiday, then some politics happens. I'm being as careful as I can, without being specific, so I don't haveto trigger the spoiler warning. Certain fans will go in expecting certain events to take place that simply don't in any major way. They know what I mean. It's important to know that going in.
The characters are dreadful in almost every conceivable way. The story makes little sense in its own right and none in the greater context of the world. It's so badly written I lost track of what on earth was happening at multiple points, and I've played every Trails game with an official localisation within the last 12 months.
Everything outside the stuff mentioned above is generically bad, it's horrible but doesn't make me want to put out a lit cigarette on my eyes and ears.
The Kiseki Nut on Youtube has a great breakdown of why this is bad, just know it is and avoid. The sole highlight is that in Nihon Falcom's direct hands I think Lavian might be kinda interesting. Maybe.
