The Legend Of Heroes Trails Of Cold Steel / Tropes A to M

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A - D

• Absurdly High Level Cap: In the original Cold Steel, as well as Cold Steel III, level 99 is the maximum level for any character. Level 68 is generally the recommended level for fighting the final boss in Cold Steel I, and that's on Nightmare Mode. The are no optional bosses and therefore no practical need for anything close to level 99. Reaching Level 80 or higher with Rean in Cold Steel I will grant you some bonus items in Cold Steel II, but that's it. This also applies when loading Cold Steel III clear data with a level 65-75 Rean when starting Cold Steel IV. Furthermore, gained EXP is relative to your current level, so after a point, even fighting the toughest enemies will grant only a negligible amount of EXP. You can even things a bit by taking advantage of easy multipliers, but it's still a grind. The maximum level in Cold Steel II and Cold Steel IV is 200. While you'll probably get well into the 150s if you play New Game Plus and maybe the 160s, there's not much point in going higher than that. The one thing that helps are the DLC Shining Pom Bait/Droplet items (Bait for I and II, Droplet for III and IV.)
• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: The Thors student council (or, rather, Student Council President Towa Herschel) takes on many duties that should really be done by the teachers themselves. Averted in the third game, where the members of the Branch Campus Student Council aren't even named (and membership on the council is explicitly stated to be punishment for failing to find a club), much less get shown doing anything, but then played straight at St. Astraia's, where Elise's position as Student Council President gives her enough control over the school's budget to control whether or not to accept donations to the school, and grant hardship scholarships on her own authority.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Heimdallr is riddled with underground waterways dating back to the Middle Ages, including secret passages allowing one to cross between districts and occasionally pop up in unexpected locations.
• Academy of Adventure: Thors Military Academy is designed to educate the future leaders of the Imperial Army. The Headmaster is an ex-marshal, the school doctor was a field doctor, at least one instructor(for the military subjects) is on detached duty, classes include all the standard subjects you'd expect of a high school plus combat skills, strategic planning and tactics on the field and the use of Tactical Orbments, Class VII goes on Empire-wide field trips and one of the buildings on campus is constructed over ruins from the Middle Ages and is unsurprisingly haunted. The Old Schoolhouse in particular also serves as an Eldritch Location that Class VII ends up investigating several times and even serves as the final dungeon of the first and second games.
• Ace Custom: Averted for the most part as any mechs aside from the Divine Knights are all mostly standardized and mass produced, even the ones piloted by the some of the main cast are just repainted versions of the standard Soldats aside from the weaponry that they use.
• Action Girl: More or less the entire female cast, given how they're students or instructors at a military academy. The most standout examples are Laura S. Arseid, Fie Claussell, Angelica Rogner and Sara Valestein.
• Action Prologue: Cold Steel I starts off with old Class VII driving the terrorists out of the greatest fortress of Erebonia. Ditto with Cold Steel III where the new Class VII has to blow up one of the Aions at the top of the Juno Naval Fortress. Both cases have the players at a high level to ease people with the controls and the battle system.^note Interestingly enough, in Cold Steel III's case, players are at a much higher level compared to the prologue.
• Actually Four Mooks: Boss fights at the end of the Old Schoolhouse in the original Cold Steel often manifest as a single enemy appearing before the party, but end up being more than that during the actual battle. For that matter, this is standard for field encounters as well.
• Adults Are Useless: Completely averted. Most of the adults in the series that the main cast have to rely on are all quite competent at what they do. Especially seen with Sara, who despite being a drunk who likes to mooch off others and shove her workload onto Rean, is incredibly strong and is considered one of the top fighters of the series. Aside from Instructor Mary and the Vice-Principal Heinrich, the rest of the teaching staff at Thors are no slouches themselves either as seen during the finale of the first game where they all take on a squadron of Panzer Soldats on foot without hesitation. And Mary graduates from this in Cold Steel IV where she ends up fighting against Rean, and joins in the Crossbell concert to help distract the guards while Rean and his group climbs up the Orchis Tower.
• Aerith and Bob: Character names are a mixture of common real-world names, rare real-world names, and invented names. For example, in the prologue to the first game, the characters are Sara, Emma, Laura, Rean, Gaius and Jusis.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: Sara likes doing this to Fie, who puts up with it but tells Sara how annoying she finds it. Laura's father also does this to her when they see each other again for the first time in months. Laura is more embarrassed that the gesture is seen by her classmates than by the gesture itself. Rean also has a tendency to do it to any girl he's close to (Alisa, Towa, and Elise are all on the receiving end, much to their collective frustration). In Cold Steel III, if you get Fie's bonding event, she specifically requests this of Rean, "So I can keep doing my best on this path." Of course, he obliges.
• Aggressive Categorism: Machias and Jusis both display this at first, unable to see past their anti-Noble and anti-Commoner prejudices respectively. To be fair, in Erebonia this isn't an uncommon attitude and both have reasons for holding it. Some clever maneuvering by Sara and time spent with Rean (who straddles the line between the classes) and the other members of Class VII helps them get over it.
• Air Vent Escape: Used several times starting in Cold Steel II as a way of bypassing security or just accessing hidden treasure chests. Nobody in the party is unable to fit in the vents, though some of them do complain about the cramped conditions.
• All Myths Are True: The 'Myths and Legends of Erebonia' books you can find in Thors' library exist to hang a lampshade on this trope. When you see the final volume, it will mention several legends that the player knows to be true because they've recently fought and killed (for a given value of killed) those legends. Other myths the books mention serve as foreshadowing, playing the trope straight to one degree or another.
  • In Cold Steel III, a certain True Ancestor vampire makes her appearance for the first time.
• Alliterative Name: Defied by Copper Georg, who said he spelled his alias George Nome rather than George Gnome specifically to avoid this, because he thought having an alliterative name sounds stupid.
  Georg: "The idea of having 'G.G.' as my initials sounded silly to me. Repetitive. That's really all there is to it."
• Always in Class One: A very obvious aversion, the protagonists were all specially placed in Class VII, which leaves a missing number between them and all the other classes. Class I and II are for the Nobles, III through V are for the Commoners. The lack of a Class VI just underscores how different the protagonists are meant to be. It also serves as a nice nod to the Arc Number for the franchise.
• And the Adventure Continues: At the post-credits stinger following the Golden Ending of Cold Steel IV, Rean is shown lovingly gazing at all his photographs with family and friends. And if he does do a final bonding event with a girl, he would then receives a message from the girl he picked for the final bonding event, before departing, presumably to continue to more adventures.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different:
  • During the Divertissement Chapter of Cold Steel II the player briefly ends up playing as Lloyd Bannings and Rixia Mao throughout the entire segment.
  • In Cold Steel IV, players don't get to play as Rean for quite some time until the Intermission stage starts and Class VII goes in to break Rean out of confinement. And just before Class VII steps into the final dungeon, the dungeon itself is encased in a barrier that must be broken down. Five pillars are scattered throughout the lands, funneling energy for the barrier so instead of Class VII dealing with them, players instead control five different teams with different party member compositions. Mercifully for the players, they don't have to edit their equipment, master quartz, or orbments especially since all five teams have to fight their respective boss fights sequentially.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Dress-up costumes are accessories are occasional rewards, findable treasures or purchasable items in both games. Much of the downloadable content is also costumes or accessories, including some that allow you to dress up in clothing of characters from previous installments in the franchise. One of the sidequests in Cold Steel IV actually makes this into a plot point. It involves fixing up Rean's tattered old instructor coat from Cold Steel III and completing it allows use of it as an alternate costume.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: If Alisa is the person whose dance event you saw, she'll start to give Rean one of these right before the ending.
• Anti-Frustration Features
  • Fishing is considerably simplified from the earlier games. Instead of having to guess what bait can catch what fish, and what fish are in a given area, you simply get to fish X number of times at a given fishing hole before it runs out of fish, with an optional item allowing for temporary restockings.
  • Orbment customization is much simpler than in previous arcs, with individual Quartz holding specific spells rather than needing to what combination is needed on a line to generate a spell. Master Quartz also level up far more easily than in Azure.
  • Cold Steel I allows you to purchase missing volumes of Red Moon Rose from Micht's shop so if you missed finding an issue you can pay to make it up later and still get a Zemurian Ore at the end of the game. The Zemurian Ore Fragments also return from Trails to Azure, allowing you to get up to three ultimate weapons in your first playthrough and an infinite number once you're in New Game Plus, provided you're fine with lots and lots of U-Material grinding.
  • Cold Steel II allows the same sort of thing. It also provides many more easy opportunities to grind U-Material items, which is useful, since there's a lot more things they're good for. Also, once you get Beryl on the Courageous, she'll tell you where things stand in terms of compatibility with fellow members, which is essential for the character ending Trophies, and the game also clarifies the exact event requirements for those endings.
  • Cold Steel III further extends that by having region-specific items that can be combined into nice accessories become available after leaving the region in question at certain shops (albeit at a cost penalty).
  • It is possible to become trapped between two NPC characters in certain cases, fortunately, if you're in a town, you can just use the quick travel to teleport out. Also, unlike many games, you can save at anytime you're not in battle or viewing a cutscene. The game also provides you with plenty of access to stuff like maps and help.
  • If you get knocked out during a boss battle, the game offers the option to weaken the boss and retry in addition to just retrying. The weaken and retry option goes away on Hard and Nightmare difficulty modes.
    • This can actually be done multiple times, should weakening the enemy once not be easy enough.
  • In Cold Steel I and Cold Steel II, if a member of Class VII isn't in the party, they can't be used to cook, which can be irritating if you want to make a unique dish and the only person capable of making it is out of the party for story reasons in that chapter. Starting in Cold Steel III, any party member designated as permanent (New Class VII, Old Class VII) can be used to cook once they've joined the party for the first time, whether they're still playable or not.
  • Cold Steel I and Cold Steel II had several battles that look like Hopeless Boss Fights, but actually awarded bonus AP if you managed to reduce the boss' HP to a certain percentage (and sometimes within a certain number of turns). You were never told this was the case. In Cold Steel III, you are explicitly told if a fight works like this, and the HP threshold you need to reach is even marked on the boss' health bar. In Cold Steel IV, if the battle has a limited number of turns for bonus AP, a turn counter will also be added beside the AT bar for easier tracking.
  • In Cold Steel III and Cold Steel IV, if players decided to Speed Run through the game, then the only character players need to worry for levels is Rean as the other soldat pilots will automatically level up to where they should be at the story^note An example would be Juna who starts off at level 49 in Cold Steel IV, skips through the normal fights and sidequests, and fights with Ash against Rutger with Zector, her level jumps from 50 to 62 for that one fight.
    • In Cold Steel IV, this gets extended to normal combat as well, with the characters who were benched receiving experience points, albeit at a reduced amount. This is to prevent having to grind with party members you don't want to use just to have them catch up.
  • Bonding trophies are much easier to get in Cold Steel III than in either Cold Steel I or Cold Steel II. In both of those, you had to reload and replay a scenario to get them and only if you had enough affinity with the character in question. In Cold Steel III, you're given a maximum of 9 festival tickets to spend with characters. At the end of the event you gain additional bonding level and if you've reached the max or were at it already, then you get the special event and the trophy. Afterwards, either way, you can move on to another event without having to reload until you've spent all the tickets, or, past a certain point, you have the option to manually forfeit the rest of your tickets if you decide you don't need them.
  • In Cold Steel IV:
    • Getting the Golden Ending requires you to beat the game once, then reload a save file to just before the final dungeon in order to unlock a hidden sidequest. Afterwards, the game mercifully lets you skip through the hours-long dungeon and five boss battles along the way and go straight to Osborne, after which you get to fight the True Final Boss. Furthermore, unlocking this ending normally requires you to beat all sidequests in the final chapter and have defeated all cryptids to unlock a final sidequest. However, if you didn't do this, you can get a portal after reloading in order to access this sidequest. In a New Game Plus playthrough, if you haven't unlocked this quest, the portal actually appears the second you set foot into the final dungeon.
    • The 99 limit for U-Materials from previous games is removed. This prevents players from being unable to get U-Materials from winning battles, or other methods such as fishing, due to inventory overload.
    • To prevent accidentally having an incomplete monster guide due unknowingly not filling up a few certain entries and stats, a check mark will appear on fully scanned enemies' entries so that you don't have to re-read the entire guide worrying about missing any information.
    • A running tally of opened treasure chests appears on the main screen of the notebook, meaning that if you're following along with a guide, you can be certain you haven't missed certain chests if you're trying to make sure to get them all for the achievement/Trophy.
    • The ability to skip all cutscenes is added, which is appreciated compared with having to repeatedly hit the skip button in a game which can hit you with many, many cutscenes at one time.
  • All of the titles in the series will sometimes hit you with a lengthy series of cutscenes followed almost immediately by a battle. When this happens, though, you will be given a screen with the choice to either save or proceed. Of course, even if it didn't you can skip cutscenes anyway, but it's still appreciated.
  • 1 and 2 have bosses use their S Crafts seemingly without warning (it's tied to their CP gauge you can't see, so unless you're keeping careful attention to their every turn it will just happen when you aren't expecting it) which could often wipe your party. In 3 and 4, bosses now power up the turn before they use their S Craft buffing their stats and giving them full CP to use the ability, which makes it hurt even more and still potentially wipe you but the player will now know exactly when it's coming and so they can prepare a defense for it.
  • Enemies have differing vulnerabilities to different weapon types and elemental attacks. Bosses have standard vulnerability to everything, making the outcome of boss fights less dependant on who happens to be in the party, and what equipment you happen to have given them.
• Anti-Villain: If the story had started several years earlier and focused on Crow, the audience might well have been cheering for him and not Rean thanks to his backstory. He's also genuinely concerned for his subordinates and at one point or another comes to the rescue of all of them, even though doing so sometimes risks his cover. His friendship with Class VII is also genuine enough that his ARCUS resonates with the others before entering the Old Schoolhouse for the final time. Yet he's still The Dragon to the Big Bad of Cold Steel. By the end of Cold Steel II, Rean would agree.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: In Cold Steel III, when the party visits Bryonia Island, Ash Carbide poo-poos the idea of occult stuff. The other characters point out that he already knows Celine, a talking cat.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: When orbal technology allows you to turn one arrow into a Spam Attack Wave-Motion Gun, you would use a bow too.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: The rallying cry of Osborne's reformist movement. He's not entirely wrong either.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The Mirage art "Albion Wolf" destroys any barrier or reflect and buffs before it applies any damage to all the enemies in the field. This is very useful in Cold Steel III at the Sanctuary of the Dark Dragon where there are enemies that look like mirrors and there are two kinds of them: one reflecting physical and one reflecting arts. While it won't deal any damage to the one reflecting arts, it still saves the players the hassle of the art getting reflected back to the player. Even moreso in Cold Steel IV with the True Final Boss fight since the other two flunkies will keep chucking out defense buffs and reflects on the main body over and over again even when the player is invoking a Brave Order which doesn't even cost a turn. It allows players to outright skip the two forms and just charge towards the main body.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Deployed against Crown Prince Cedric in the final dungeon of Cold Steel IV. Cedric is so single-mindedly dedicated to Osborne and his plan that he has apparently failed to consider the There Can Be Only One nature of the Rivalries and what it means if he actually manages to win against the heroes...
  Kurt: ...Cedric! Are you truly prepared to fight Chancellor Osborne? The man you've chosen to follow?
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Chairman Irina Reinford doesn't mind one of her directors taking her prisoner and stealing control of her company, or the fact that said director then used the company's resources to back a coup attempt. What she does object to is the fact that he moved into her penthouse while she was locked up.
• Artistic License – Economics: Duke Albarea either doesn't know or doesn't care that the relationship between tax levels and tax revenues is not linear. So he keeps cranking up the tax rates on the merchant classes to the point where the tax burden impacts their ability to do business at all. The merchants try to point out that continuing at this level of taxation would ultimately reduce the amount of commerce done in his province, to the point where extracting more taxes from fewer people would result in lower tax revenue than what he started at, but he doesn't listen, and instead has the Provincial Guard make life difficult for the merchants in an effort to bully them into accepting the tax hikes.
• Artistic License – Education: Overlaps with Mildly Military. It's mentioned that only forty percent of graduates from Thors' Military Academy end up joining the military, even though the purpose of a military academy is to produce junior officers. The behavior of the students also warrants discipline several times, yet the most anyone will get is a scolding for their actions. For instance, during one of the training exercises in the third game, Ash sneaks into the Hector one of the teachers was using during the exercise, and attacks Rean unprovoked, forcing Rean to fight back. Despite attacking a teacher, Ash only gets scolded for his actions.
• Art Shift: The move to 3D allows for more dynamic cinematography than was possible with the sprites used in previous games.
• Ascended Extra: Some of the students of Thors in the previous game are actively participating in the plot of Cold Steel III. To wit, Vivi is now a photography sidequest, Munk now runs the Trista Station at Leeves and is also another sidequest, Rosine's sidequest involve obtaining Black Records and shows off her prowess with a crossbow, which she defeats a beast with the help of Thomas and Roselia, Linde is a nurse at St. Ursula who then transfers to Leeves, Dorothy is the receptionist of Heimdallr museum, and Alan is now a soldier in the Imperial Army and pilots as Spiegel. And that's just to name a few.
• An Asskicking Christmas: While there's no mention of that holiday being celebrated in Zemuria, Celdic is razed on December 24th, and Class VII goes after the responsible party on the 25th. The battle to liberate the capital takes place on the 31st.
• A Taste of Power: An interesting take on this trope via In Medias Res. Instead of having abilities taken away, the prologue of the first game has you playing as the main party (and Instructor Sara) at around Level 50 during a late chapter of the story, letting you go crazy with their Crafts and S-Crafts until it ends. It then cuts to a level 3 Rean on his first day at Thors, but you know you'll have access to all those abilities later. A similar method is used with the new Class VII in the third game.
• Authority in Name Only: Emma and Machias may be the Class VII President and Vice President, but whenever the class is in a situation where leadership is required, everyone looks to Rean.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Valimar's Spirit Path ability can take people anywhere in the country almost instantaneously, but after it's been used, Valimar is out of commission for the next day or so, making its utility limited. This is used to provide an in-universe explanation for why Rean can't use Valimar in the first half of Cold Steel II outside of a handful of boss battles - Valimar's recovering from the last Spirit Path usage. The second half of the game grants the team an alternative form of long-range transportation in the form of the Courageous, and as such Valimar is on call more often.
  • The Lost Arts are incredibly powerful (And give a 10% experience bonus for every use), but the extremely slow cast time and high EP cost (100% of the caster's max EP, whatever that may be) make them highly impractical outside of boss fights unless you either use Overdrive (instantaneous casting), a Master Quartz that returns a percentage of damage as EP (the offensive Lost Arts do so much damage that it essentially makes the casting free), or a 0 EP random turn bonus (instantaneous casting and no EP cost).
• Background Music Override:
  • A portion of "Atrocious Raid" plays almost continuously throughout the sequence in Garrelia Fortress in Chapter 5 and doesn't stop until the final boss battle, save if you use one of the orbment charging stations to heal your party, and briefly before the first firing of the railway guns, which reveals that they start off with blanks.
  • In the final dungeon of the first game, the usual enemy battle music is forgone and, instead, "To Grasp Tomorrow" - the dungeon's BGM - continues to play straight up to the dungeon's end.
  • "Blitzkrieg" and "To Gamble All or Nothing", like "Atrocious Raid", play continuously throughout their dungeons.
  • For Cold Steel IV, "Doomsday Trance" plays continuously at the Black Workshop where the three teams have to meet up.
• Badass Crew: Class VII in general. You have Rean Schwarzer (An Eight Leaves, One Blade style practitioner), Alisa Reinford (Heiress to Zemuria's largest industrial group and quite capable with a bow), Elliot Craig (Whose father leads the Imperial Army's 4th Armored Division), Laura S. Arseid (Daughter of the Radiant Blademaster), Machias Regnitz (Son of Heimdallr's governor), Emma Millstein (A witch from the Hexen Clan), Jusis Albarea (A son of the Albarea family, one of the Four Great Houses), Fie Claussell (A former Jaeger), Gaius Worzel (A spearman from Nord recommended by Zechs Vander), Millium Orion (A member of the Imperial Army's Intelligence Division), Crow Armbrust (Leader of the Imperial Liberation Front) and finally Sara Valestein (A former Jaeger turned Bracer later turned Instructor at Thors).
  • To help deal with a quest that takes place late in Cold Steel III, Rean and Lechter call in the following characters help them out: two A-ranked bracers (Agate Crosner and Sara Valestein), someone from ZCF (Tita Russell), someone from Epstein (Tio Plato), the half-noble prince of Erebonia (Olivert Reise Arnor in his Olivier Lenheim costume from The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky), an Ouroboros Enforcer (No.IX, Sharon Kreuger), two Ironbloods (Claire Rieveldt and Lechter Arundel), and the Ashen Chevalier (Rean Schwarzer), with another member of one of the Four Great Houses as support (Patrick Hyarms). Then partway through, Ash decides to join the group, partly to chat with Lechter.
• Badass Teacher: Thors is a military academy and most of the faculty are current or ex-military. It comes with the job.
• Badass Longcoat: Quite a few characters wear one in Trails of Cold Steel II. Some notable examples include Rean, Elliot, Laura (sort of), Jusis, and Sara.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The majority of the games in this arc end with an antagonist victory:
  • At the end of Cold Steel I, the Noble Alliance and Imperial Liberation Front have launched a coup, taken the capital, and are moments away from seizing Trista when Rean is forced to flee.
  • At the end of Cold Steel II, Osborne comes out on top in the end more powerful than ever having outplayed the Imperial Liberation Front, the Noble Alliance and Ouroboros. He also ends up stringing along an unwilling Rean into his plans thanks to the latter's status as the Ashen Chevalier forcing him to accept. And all he did to achieve that was play dead for two months while events unfolded.
  • At the end of Cold Steel III, Osborne has gotten himself the pretext he needed to start a major war with Calvard, and started the Great Twilight, spilling the Curse of Erebonia across the entire country.
  • Zigzagged at the end of Cold Steel IV. Osborne has been defeated and the war stopped before it got past the opening skirmishes, but it turns out that the purpose of that war was to make Ishmelga, the ultimate source of the Curse, vulnerable so that someone would be able to permanently kill it, which was done, so he still got what he wanted out of it.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • Rean loses most of his stuff and about 30-60 levels between the first two games. Justified, as between games he ended up fleeing a losing battle and spent a month recovering from severe injuries taken during said battle. This, however, doesn't quite explain why the other characters join the party at about the same level as whatever Rean has at the time, even though they clearly haven't been idling. It also feels very odd that accomplished fighters such as Toval, Sara, etc., would be carrying around the same basic levels as your party. On the flipside, everybody retains their crafts from the original game, including S-Crafts, and they swiftly start gaining new abilities as well. Laura and Emma have even managed to gain new abilities prior to meeting back up the group.
  • In the second game, Valimar can no longer use Spirit without a subcontractor or use Qinggong to buff himself.
  • In the third game, Rean is leading a new team and is using an improved version of the ARCUS called ARCUS II and thus is incompatible with the old orbments that he has. However, Rean relearns Gale very quickly suggesting that he could always use his old crafts but just holds back enough for his students till they get better. Meanwhile for old Class VII, some of them still use their old crafts and improve upon them while also using different S-Crafts, suggesting that they trained really hard that they feel that their old crafts aren't worth using anymore, although their levels all drop to be comparable with the new Class VII's at the time of joining up.
  • By the fourth game, Juna, Kurt, and Altina lose a lot of levels at the start of the game due to them sleeping for two whole weeks (it's implied that old Class VII also lost some levels but they were able to wake up a week earlier and were able to get their old strength back). Juna, Kurt, and Altina also lose their quartz and equipment while escaping the Gral of Erebos plus the ARCUS II units were improved in the meantime so even if they had their old quartz and master quartz, it would have been incompatible anyway. After a week of training however, they mostly get their old strength back. Meanwhile, Ash was in a coma for two weeks while Musse was able to escape the Gral and thus is actually stronger when she comes back to the party. Interestingly enough, Rean's ARCUS II equipment is upgraded despite being captured for a month's time in-game in chains and actually has the highest level when he first becomes playable at the Black Workshop at level 90 compared to everyone else who are hovering between 82-87.
• Bash Brothers: Laura and Fie become this after sorting through their differences.
• Battle Aura: One way to tell when someone's getting serious is if they put up a visible aura of power.
• Battle Butler: Celestin, Patrick's servant, fights with martial arts. Sariffa, the Florald family maid, packs two guns with her.
• The Battle Didn't Count: Cold Steel II has a frankly painful number of incidents where Class VII wins a boss battle, the boss then invokes this trope, and then an NPC shows up to pull a Big Damn Heroes in a cutscene. After a while it seems like the job of Class VII is to clear a path for the NPC who follows them.
• Battleship Raid: Happens in Cold Steel IV where Rean, Alisa, Musse, Sara, Angelica (the four ladies are required for the section), and the rest of the members raid the battleship Gargantua, to disable the generator emitting a beam of light protecting one of the shrines that Rean needs to go for the Divine Knight duel while Crow piloting Ordine and the Courageous II distract the battleship from outside.
• Beautiful Dreamer: In Chapter 6 of the first game, Rean is supposed to meet up with Towa in the computer lab and, when he comes in, he discovers that she has fallen asleep at one of the desks. You can choose to let her sleep or poke her cheeks to wake her up but, either way, Rean ultimately decides to let her sleep until she wakes up on her own. It happens again in Cold Steel II, but this time she wakes up almost right away, and laments that he always seems to find her this way.
• Be Yourself: Valimar essentially tells Rean this in Cold Steel II, noting that there's little point in him trying to be someone or something that he's not.
• The Big Bad Shuffle: In the first game, the main villain appears to be the masked terrorist C, aka Crow Armbrust. Then the second game's villains are Crow's benefactors, Vita Clotilde of Ouroboros and Duke Cayenne, leader of the Noble Alliance. Then both Vita and Cayenne get outplayed by Chancellor Gilliath Osborne, who finally becomes the Big Bad in the third game after years of plotting in the background. Finally, the fourth game reveals that behind all of this is Ishmelga, who serves as the True Final Boss of the saga.
• Big Damn Heroes: Rean's efforts to escape the Pantagruel with Princess Alfin falter when his Super Mode runs out while being cornered by Zephyr, Ouroboros and the ILF. Then the Courageous shows up, bearing Class VII, Sara, Toval, Claire, Sharon, Prince Olivert and Viscount Arseid. Olivert is quite thrilled with it all, expressing only that he wished their entrance could have been more dramatic by having an effect of flowing rose petals.
  • With the numerous amounts of this trope happening in both parts, the game might as well have renamed as Big Damn Heroes: The Series. At some points in II the trope seems to be invoked so often that it appears that the real job of the party is to buy time for an NPC to show up and save the day for them. Thankfully, it gets toned down in III, which instead has that happen with members of Old Class VII showing up in the middle of chapters, but the examples in the Chapter finale instead being an NPC providing the party with the means to save the day themselves.
• Bishie Sparkle: Crow gets these sometimes. Also, Machias and Elliot whenever they meet Vita Clotilde and try not to act like the fanboys they are. Millium also gets them on occasion. Patrick as well when trying to get Rean to come to the nobles' salon at the beginning of Chapter 2 in the first game.
• Bittersweet Ending: The ending of Cold Steel II. The War is over, both Duke Albarea and Duke Cayenne have been brought to justice, and Elise and the Imperial Family are safe. But Crow is dead, Class VII is no more with its members all going their separate ways and Osborne is more powerful than ever. Cold Steel IVs normal ending has Rean complete the Great One and destroys it for good, saving the world from Erebonia's curse but in the process, he, Millium, and Crow all die as their lives are tied to the Great One.
  • The default bad ending of Cold Steel IV. Good grief. Rean, Crow and Millium sacrifice themselves to rid Erebonia off the curse once and for all. And a very sad song plays over the credits as shots of the entire cast crying are shown. However, everyone else who survived are now free to live their life in a land that is now free of a millenium old curse.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: There's little to like about the Noble Alliance, who base their morality on an inherently discriminatory class system and whose actions include heavily taxing the citizenry for the benefit of the nobles, destabilizing the country in areas where the reformists hold sway, starting a civil war, hiring terrorists, Jaegers, and Ouroboros to help further their schemes, kidnapping the royal family, and razing a town in order to punish them for not resisting the Imperial Army. However, while the Reformists seem to be the better bunch on the surface - particularly given how dedicated they are to equality for all (and the fact that they oppose the Noble Alliance's depredations) - they have plenty of skeletons in their own closet, especially given Chancellor Osborne's tendency to annex neighboring territories by force and intimidation, including Crossbell, Jurai, and a botched attempt to do the same to Liberl as well as his motivations to expand and centralize authority with little heed paid to those who are harmed by such actions. Additionally, the Noble faction actually shares the Reformist's imperialistic tendencies, since they started the 100 Days War and would have tried to annex Crossbell if they had won the civil war.
• Black Market: The Erebonian Empire has a relationship with its foreign neighbors, particularly Calvard, that can be described as... complex, at best. Naturally it has a black market, and in Cold Steel III you get to meet some of its leaders and even buy some of their merchandise. Most of this trade traditionally ran through Crossbell and formed a major part of its economy, and when a curse-influenced Erebonia cracks down on it in IV it leads to significant economic hardship for the locals.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • In the third game, the vending machines found around Branch Campus and the Derfflinger have a can of Dr. Paper on display (you can't actually buy it, though). Other cans in the vending machine include a "Falcom Zero" soda using the same typography as Coca-Cola Zero and a "Sports" soda with a similar color scheme to Sprite.
  • Various shops in the third game sell a stick-shaped snack that comes in all sorts of flavors called... Pecky.
• Boarding School: The students live just off campus in three dormitories. The Nobles get a big fancy one with servants, the Commoners get a rather less fancy one and Class VII has the least fancy of them all, at least at first.
• Body Backup Drive: Alberich and George were revealed to have prepared one for Millium so she may be brought back to life in the Golden Ending of Cold Steel IV. Conversely, Valimar's sword may also count as one for Millium as her soul spends the end of the third game and almost the whole of the fourth one trapped in the sword.
• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger: Cold Steel I ends with Celine forcing Valimar to retreat against Rean's wishes, rather than continue a hopeless fight against a fully powered Divine Knight and a pilot who knows how to use it. The remainder of Class VII engages Ordine from on foot to buy Rean time, despite having no hope of winning. Ordine draws its weapon back to strike and then the game ends...
• Bonus Dungeon: A variation happens in Cold Steel IV with The Shrine of Sanctus, which is actually of critical plot importance for the Golden Ending. It can only be unlocked during the final chapter of the game and only if you have completed ALL sidequests and obtained ALL Lost Arts. Toval then calls Rean to explore the shrine that houses Argres' spirit except players are allowed to explore the shrine, get some Active Voice Events and obtain the treasure chests in the area. If players don't unlock the place and finish the game, then players have to reload a cleared save file, backtrack to the entrance of the Tuatha Dé Danann to start the quest and immediately fight the boss without exploring the place. The upside however is that players do get to hear the voice of a person who tells Rean to do the quest, implied to be the Grandmaster.
• Book Ends:
  • The first game begins with Class VII arriving in Trista by train. The second game ends with Class VII, sans Rean, heading into Trista station and departing to their disparate destinations, their time as a class now over.
  • The first time Rean and Crow team up is against a giant golem in Cold Steel I. The final time they team up in Cold Steel II is against Vermillion Apocalypse, the fusion between Zoro-Agruga and Testa-Rossa which is even bigger than the Divine Knights.
  • In Cold Steel IV, the third mandatory boss fight for players has Juna finishing off the magic knight by summoning her Drakkhen II. In the third last boss fight of the game (for the normal ending), Rean has to summon Valimar to defeat McBurn's demonic form.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Dimensional Gravemakers. They appear in Cold Steel 4 late in Act 1, have high health and resistance to the four basic elements, can buff their speed, and can inflict Vanish status. And the worst part happens with they're low on health or recover from Break status, where they can deal heavy damage to the party and can Vanish multiple people in a row or at a time. Hope you have some Dark Pendulums handy...
• Boss Subtitles: Many of the bosses come with these, for example, "Icy Beast Unsurtr" and "Heavily-Armored Soldat Hector." One of the most notable examples is "Enforcer No. 1 - McBurn The Blazing Demon" - notable because it appears only after you have seemingly defeated him in battle, only for him to then "turn up the heat."
• Both Sides Have a Point: Osborne is trying to break the power of the Four Great Houses on the grounds that their leaders are primarily concerned with maintaining the power and privileges of the aristocracy and disregarding the responsibilities that are supposed to come with them. But on the other side of the equation, the Imperial Liberation Front, who are backed by the Four Great Houses, despise Osborne on the grounds that he doesn't care how many lives are ruined in the pursuit of his goals. Both sides are correct.
• Bouquet Toss: Millium catches the bouquet at the reception for Olivert Reise Arnor and Scherazard Harvey's wedding, seen in the credits of the true ending of Cold Steel IV, much to the apparent chagrin of Jusis.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • The Medal of Dawn is the reward in Cold Steel I for maxing out your Academic Rank and it's fittingly the best accessory in the game, giving big stat boosts (+100 to STR, DEF, ATS, and ADF) and complete immunity to status conditions, stat debuffs and AT Delay. It's also only possible to earn the necessary Rank after the final dungeon so it's generally only useful if you plan to play New Game Plus with item carryover but not level carryover. It also provides Rean with a lesser but still impressive accessory if you load a save file with that medal (Or rather, the Academic Rank that provides that medal) when starting the second game.
    • The second game averts this, if you manage to track down every Last Lousy Point: if you manage a perfect run of Sidequests and secret conditions up to the Point of No Return in the Finale, you can get the Lion Heart, Cold Steel II's equivalent of the Medal of Dawn just before the chapter's final set of dungeons.
  • Outside of being able to view one extra optional bonding event (If one of the party members bonding is Rean) in the last chapter, the only reward for getting a level five link between any two party members in the first game is an upgraded version of the second link attack. Since it's impossible to get a level five link until shortly before the third (Far more powerful) link attack is gained automatically by story progression (In game 1. In the sequel, Burst is available the moment the party gains a fourth member, which is still well before level 5 links are available), most players won't use the Rush v2 attack very often.
  • In-Universe, the final boss of 2, Loa Luciferia tells Class VII and their supporters that defeating it won't give them any reward. They take it on anyway as a means to show they're True Companions who will rise to the challenge no matter what.
• Bread and Circuses: In Cold Steel IV, following the implementation of Operation Jormungandr and draft, the Erebonian Empire begins hosting huge military parades to rouse fervor and offers conscripted soldiers free tickets to Mishelam Wonderland, a theme park, in order to give them a last day of fun to enjoy and something nice to think about before they head off to the frontlines. Later, your party uses this to their own advantage, putting on a concert and giving the local garrison free tickets to reduce the guard detail on Orchis Tower.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: If you get Sara's dance event in the original Trails of Cold Steel, Rean suggests that she isn't mature. Sara replies that she is mature. And reliable. And reliably mature.
• Breaking the Fellowship: At the end of the first game, Crow and the Noble Alliance succeed in defeating Class VII and Rean is involuntarily whisked away from the battlefield by Celine and Valimar. He discovers afterwards that the rest of Class VII scattered across the country to evade the Noble Alliance and pursue their own goals. The first segment of the second game is, accordingly, is him working on Putting the Band Back Together.
• Breaking Old Trends: This arc changed a couple of things in regards to how S-Crafts are handled:
  • FC and Zero let all playable characters use S-Craft during the tutorial. Cold Steel I and III, however, make most of the main characters have to wait to gain access to them.
  • Previous arcs gave some characters access to a second S-Craft during their first game and third one during the sequel. As of Cold Steel II, no character ever gets more than two S-Crafts.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Millium does this on a handful of occasions, most memorably this gem (which doubles as a Brick Joke):
  Millium: "Now THIS is a final dungeon!"
• Bullying a Dragon: The Intelligence Division, having become aware of Rean's connection to Master Yun Ka-Fai, sends some of their foreign agents to intimidate the old man...who is a legendary swordmaster and the one who taught some of the most dangerous people on the continent everything they know about fighting. This goes about as well for them as one might imagine.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Last we checked, ostriches don't have leafy growths on their heads and can't petrify other living creatures with their breaths.
• Calling Your Attacks: Pretty much every character gets in on this, particularly during their S-Crafts.
• Call-Back:
  • Cold Steel III starts off the Class VII orientation with Schmidt pulling the lever to drop Rean's class down the pit, much like what they experienced in the first game. It also ends with Juna on top of Kurt, the same way with Rean and Alisa. This time however, Rean warns everyone and gets his balance right away.
  • Class VII's first meeting with Rutger Claussell in Cold Steel III is a near-perfect repeat of the SSS' first meeting with Sigmund Orlando in Azure, something most non-Asian players would not have caught on their first playthrough due to the late export of the Crossbell duology.
• Cast of Snowflakes: The plot relevant cast within the Cold Steel games is already big enough, but there is quite a hefty amount of colorful Non Player Characters as well, some people have little stories of their own in which Rean can get to follow by visiting them after certain Chapters if possible, Thors' students in particular have a greater amount of little backstory tied to them which is handily recorded in Rean’s Student Guide Book, much of their story is unveiled through side-quests, the given and the hidden ones.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: The biggest one happens after everyone saves Rean and Alfin at Pantagruel, only to find out that if the good guys fought against the bad guys, it would just end in a stalemate. Olivert suggests to just forego the fighting and have a party instead with Sharon and Bleublanc, two Ouroboros Enforcers, actually wanting it with Xeno offering the drinks. Duvalie and Altina aren't having any of it though.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: At one point Cold Steel II, Rean is talking various bosses during a truce period, and some of them change from casual outfits to their combat outfits between cuts during the conversation. Most obvious with Duvalie, who is wearing a different dress at the end of the conversation than she was at the start of it.
• Chekhov's Classroom: In the first game, the subjects everyone is cramming for during the special bond events at the beginning of Chapter 3 just so happens to be the subjects you're going to be asked about during the interactive portion of the Midterm Exam. The only way to view all the events in question on a single playthrough is in New Game Plus mode with the "Max Bonding Points" perk chosen.
• Chekhov's Gun: A more literal example than most occurs in the third game, as the Calvard-made gun that Ash picks up in the Chapter 4 dungeon is the same one he uses to shoot the emperor later, setting the events of the final chapter into motion.
  • In Cold Steel IV, the "Earthen Prison" gift that Argres gives to Rean ends up saving his life (and inadvertently, Crow and Millium) by separating Ishmelga's curse away from him and traps Ishmelga in the physical realm, allowing the playable characters to finally defeat him.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Literally, as the identity of the sniper who shot down the Imperial Liberation Front's ship in Chapter 6 is a major reveal during the Wham Episode at the end of the game. It's Crow, who also turns out to be the person who shot Osborne, as previously foreshadowed in Azure.
  • As of Cold Steel III, George Nome and Franz Reinford are both this, as they are revealed to be part of the gnome faction from the Black Workshop.
• Chest Monster: It wouldn't be a JRPG without one. If you spot a dark red chest with silver trimmings and ornate markings, yeah, prepare to fight for whatever that's in it. In Cold Steel II, there's another type that can only be fought with certain characters in the party and result in those characters being able to use Overdrive with each other when you win. If the required characters aren't in the party, they produce a pun instead. It was absent in Cold Steel III but the trial chests are back in IV.
• Chick Magnet: Rean.
• Civil War: What Olivier and his third way faction were trying to prevent throughout Cold Steel I. They fail.
• Clark Kenting: In a reversal of the normal application of this trope, Machias conceals his identity as the Imperial Governor's son in II by taking his glasses off. It works with the people he's trying to hide from, but everyone else sees through it in an instant but plays along because they don't like the Provincial Guard either. In III, Rean tries using a pair of fake spectacles on occasion to avoid being publicly recognized as the Ashen Chevalier. It doesn't work.
• Class Representative: Emma and Machias.
• Class Reunion: Happens a lot with members of Rean and members of old Class VII in Cold Steel III to the point that the reactions of New Class VII become like a Running Gag.
• Class Trip: What separates Class VII from the rest of the school: every month, they're sent on an educational trip to a different area of the Empire.
• Cliffhanger: The first game opens up with one where Rean is screaming for the railway guns to stop their firing at Crossbell. Then it turns out in Chapter 5 that the guns were pre-loaded with blank charges to prevent accidents, and Class VII has ten more minutes to get to the guns while they're being reloaded with live ammunition.
  • The first game's ending, which arguably surpasses Trails in the Sky FC's. The ending of Cold Steel III takes it even further as we see Osborne delivering a Neck Lift to Rean in their Divine Knights and the game abruptly fades to black and the music stops right away. Then credits roll.
• Climax Boss: "True Zoro-Agruga" in Cold Steel III, to the point of having a fight closer to the traditional "final boss fight" than the game's actual Final Boss.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: At Thors, Commoner students wear green uniforms and the Nobles wear white uniforms. Class VII has students from both groups and they all wear red uniforms.
• Company Cross References:
  • A trio of villains consisting of a short-haired male planner, a hulking man with a huge weapon and a stripperiffic female mage, Gideon, Vulcan and Scarlet or Guruda, Gadis and Bammy? For extra points, the Imperial Liberation Front's motto is written in Latin while Guruda and co were aligned with the Romun Empire.
  • Loa Erebonius in Cold Steel I is a massive one to the Gagharv Trilogy and one fans have been wondering whether Falcom would make ever since FC regarding whether there was a connection between Erebonia as the name of the Empire and Erebonius, the Spirit of Darkness in Cagesong's summon magic system.
  • Another shoutout to Ys happens in the Chapter 3 free day if you happen to choose to bond with Laura and help her shop- she finds a Dogi strap attractive.
  • Pikkard and Noi dolls are on sale in Celdic.
  • A smaller PenPen doll can be seen in Millium's room.
  • In Cold Steel III, you can get a DLC called "Rean's Unspeakable Costume" for Rean, which according to the description, is due to Rean's clothing taste being easily influenced in his younger years and that he's really ashamed by it. It's actually a reference to the Magical Alisa franchise, a Show Within a Show in Tokyo Xanadu. Likewise the "Magical Alisa" DLC does the same to Alisa in Cold Steel IV.
  • Sara Valestein's name is a double Ys reference: Sara was the name of the fortune teller in Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen, and Valestein Castle was a location from Ys III and Ys: The Oath in Felghana.
  • Towa Herschel shares her surname with the protagonist of The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails, Nayuta Herschel, and her ultimate weapon in Cold Steel II is called Boundless Trails^note In the Japanese script, it's called Star Spirit Gun "Nayuta", a different reference to the same game..
  • In the Japanese script, Towa's brave order is called Kokonoe Formation, named after Towa's Expy in Tokyo Xanadu, Towa Kokonoe. The English localization took out the reference and replaced it with the generic name "High Heavens".
  • Musse's real name is Mildine. One character in The Legend of Heroes IV: A Tear of Vermillion is named Muse, and her real name is... Mildine.
  • The Vantage Masters minigame is inspired by Vantage Master. Despite being a Collectible Card Game while the original was Turn-Based Strategy, the card game retains several aspects of the original including the game being flavored as a duel between summoners, summoned creatures being elementals known as Natials, and a hexagonal grid littered with magic crystals that increase your mana.
• Company Town: The Reinford Group owns a lot of the property in Roer as well as the largest stores. Since the town is technically also the seat of the Rogner family, they don't completely control the town but it's very obvious that Reinford dominates the landscape.
• Compensating for Something: Fie thinks this is the reason Prince Olivert built the Courageous.
• Concert Climax: The climax of the first game actually occurs in between final preparations for a concert (the one Class VII is putting on) and the concert itself. Of course, this being Cold Steel, it manages a Double Subversion. The subversion: The Concert technically follows the Climax. The subversion of the subversion: There's another 30 minutes left and the real climax is at Osborne's public address a week later.
• Conscription: Conscription is a part of Erebonia's National Mobilization Law, which is passed in the wake of the attempted assassination of Emperor Eugent III, supposedly at the hands of Calvardian agents. The draft targets any male Erebonian citizen from the ages of 18-45.
• Continuity Nod:
  • As with every other game in the series, these are all over the place, starting from the opening sequence making a nod to concurrent events in Azure plus a Call-Forward to events that will happen shortly afterwards. The calendar system makes it very easy to date events in the previous arc since there are nods to just about every major incident.
  • When entering the Reinford Building, the camera lingers on models of the Lusitania from The 3rd and a limousine of the same model used by Dieter in Zero.
  • When Olivert first appears to introduce himself to Class VII, it's to the fanfare that usually signaled his arrival in the Trails in the Sky games. He's even dressed up in his Olivier outfit before switching to his royal outfit.
  • The game also features a few purely musical examples. When watching maneuvers at Garrelia Fortress, Steel Roar -Verge of Death- plays, a sidequest in Heimdallr requires the player to find a record of Amber Amour and Emma's solo in the concert is the ending theme 'I Swear' from SC. Olivert is the first one to sing along. Makes sense as he's from that game.
• Cooking Mechanics: Continuing from Trails in the Sky, there are several dozen recipes that can be found throughout the game, each with four different variations with their own unique effects. Different characters are better suited for cooking different recipes than others and each game has different amounts of recipes that players need to fill up for some really good late game quartz and sometimes master quartz.
• Cool Airship:
  • Olivier managed to convince the ZCF and the Epstein Foundation to help him build a second Arseille, which he then customized extensively. Dubbed the Courageous, it isn't as fast as the original model but it's larger, more heavily armed and armored and is still faster than anything else Erebonia has. It's Class VII's transport, eventually.
  • Also, the Pantagruel, which is the flagship of the Noble Faction. It's built on the exact same scale of the Glorious and has similar design.
  • In Cold Steel IV, the Courageous II is a better version of the previous ship as it's finally decked out with some of the best equipment which includes a main laser gun, homing lasers, and missile pods.
• Cooldown Hug: Elise gives one to Rean in the second game after he goes berserk seeing the damage the jaegers hired by Duke Albarea did to Ymir and believing that their parents were killed.
• Cool Old Guy: Headmaster Vandyck (two meters tall, wields a BFS) and Klaus (not even winded from fighting at four to one odds and able to diagnose problems with Rean's swordsmanship while doing it). Alisa's grandfather is also pretty cool, though not in a Badass way.
• Cosmic Retcon: How Cold Steel IV's Golden Ending can come about, with a bit of fourth wall breaking thrown into the mix. After you reload clear data from your initial playthrough, you're given the option of investigating a vortex that's suddenly appeared outside the Empyreal fortress. Doing so results in a vision where Class VII, along with Toval, explore the Shrine of Sanctus and discover an uncorrupted form of Argres, the Holy Beast of Earth, who gives Rean a Plot Coupon after clearing its trial. However, outside of clearing the Bonus Dungeon requirements beforehand, the Shrine cannot be explored in a regular playthrough, implying that the Grandmaster may have influenced causality itself to allow fate to be defied.
• *Cough* Snark *Cough*: In the original Cold Steel, if you have Rean totally bomb the exam in Chapter 3, Alisa will comment, "I was expecting a little better performance from a certain someone, though... *cough*Rean*cough*"
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable:
  • If you choose to do a study session with Crow in Chapter 3, he teaches Rean about CPR, and then suggests that CPR on a pretty girl is a gateway to "fireworks."
  Rean: Every time I think anything positive about you, you go and say something like that...
  • Later, at the start of Chapter 4, Instructor Sara talks with the class about CPR. She jokingly suggests that Rean and Alisa give the class a demonstration, then says that everyone there needs to know how to do CPR... whether it means locking lips with someone of the same sex or the opposite. This is accompanied by a heart emoticon.
• Crapsack World: Erebonia has been presented as something like this since the first game. As with Crossbell, it's not quite as bad as it was made out to be (in both cases, our prior exposure has been through parties with reasons to accentuate the negative) but it's definitely one of the most troubled realms on the continent. For example:
  • The country still possesses a feudal power structure which is only slowly granting more power to the Commoners... and the person behind those changes is Osborne. And by "still", we mean that it's pretty clear that Erebonia is the only true autocratic monarchy left on Zemuria, with it being ringed by states that are more or less democratic, and all of them, including fellow major power Calvard, distrust Erebonia due to its autocratic nature.
  • Relatedly, tensions between the social classes have been simmering for years, decades really, and are just waiting for a spark to turn things into a very nasty civil war.
  • Lingering disputes with Calvard over the disposition of Crossbell, resentment from recently annexed territories (and relatedly, the underlying sting of having been humiliated on the field of battle by tiny, independent Liberl) and a new terrorist movement are only making things worse.
  • To cap things off, Ouroboros isn't just working behind the scenes, they're supporting both sides.
• Crash-Into Hello: Alisa and Rean meet in the first game when Rean pauses in the middle of the street to take in the sights of Trista and Alisa walks into him.
• Creative Closing Credits:
  • The closing credits of Cold Steel II present a series of photographs giving hints into what the members of Class VII and certain other key characters are up to following the events of the game.
  • The creative credits of Cold Steel IV show scenes of the cast attending Prince Olivert Reise Arnor and Scherazard Harvey's wedding.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The fights against Sara and Victor will end with your character(s) defeated, at best you might annoy them slightly. Of course, one is your combat instructor (Who according to the Battle Notes is level 49 at a time when the party is roughly level 15) and the other is the best swordsman in the Empire (Level 80 when the party is roughly level 50) so the result was something of a foregone conclusion. The fight against C (Level 60 when the party is roughly level 40) in Heimdallr's catacombs will end after a few turns, though if it continued it would have become this.
  • Turned around at Legram when you have a match against the students, who don't even get the dignity of an actual battle before they're shown to be defeated by Class VII. Then Class VII has to fight their teacher, who puts up an actual fight.
  • The Panzer Soldats utterly and completely wreck the First Armored Division (the Imperial Guards no less), destroying even the most advanced of tanks with a single blow each.
  • Crow inflicts one of these on Rean while both are operating their respective Divine Knights, with Crow pointing out that he's had three years to learn how to pilot his machine while Rean has only had a few minutes.
  • If you carry over your levels and equipment on New Game Plus, you can easily devastate Sara, even in Nightmare mode, by flashing her with Rean, Machias and Jusis's S-Breaks before she can even get a turn. So the game cheats by making it so that you can only reduce her HP to 1 and then she flashes your party with own S-Break for 49,999 damage each to annihilate them. If any of them had any sort of guard status up to protect against it, she'll just do it again.
  • Similarly, you can have Rean hold his own against Victor for a while if you keep healing, but eventually he will hit him for 49,999 damage and it's over.
  • At the end of the first Act of Cold Steel II, all of the most major players of allied forces of the Noble Alliance descend upon Ymir. Obviously things do not go well for our intrepid heroes. It ends with Rean agreeing to come the Noble Alliance's flagship airship for a meeting with the Noble Alliance's leader, Duke Cayenne.
  • In the epilogue of Cold Steel II, the boys and girls compete in five swimming matches, but Laura and Fie are always sent out for the last four matches, resulting in the girls winning easily. Though the competition becomes a Curb Stomp Cushion if Rean manages to win the first match.
• Curse: In Cold Steel III, this is the reason why so many terrible things have happened throughout Erebonia as Joshua's, Loewe's, Claire's, Lechter's, Olivier/Olivert's, Rean's, Osborne's and Ash's Dark And Troubled Pasts have shown.
• Curse Cut Short: Rean's response to Rex's Look Behind You trick, when he catches himself and stops short of the final word.
  Rean: Sonofa...
• Custom Uniform/Non-Uniform Uniform: Sort of. As noted, Class VII gets red uniforms that set them apart from the other students... except that these are basically just red-colored jackets or vests, and the actual design is pretty much the same as the standard Thors uniform. Everyone's outfit from the waist down is unique - while the girls all wear pleated skirts and the boys dark slacks, the color pattern on the skirts varies, as does the styling on the trousers. Footgear tends to be distinct from student to student as well.
  • Heck, exactly how the individual members of Class VII wear their uniforms differs quite a bit, with some characters only having very small differences (Rean and Machias are mostly similar, except Machias' jacket has some ropes on it which Rean's doesn't, while both Laura, Emma and Fie only really differ in what they wear around the neck as well as skirt-colors).
  • Angelica also has a "custom uniform" in the sense that she doesn't actually bother wearing her Thors attire, instead going around in her biking suit. Nobody really complains because she's the daughter of one of the most powerful families in Erebonia.
  • George is another person who never wears his uniform, instead wearing a yellow jumpsuit that is far more practical when tinkering with orbal equipment. Since he appears to be the only orbal repairman in all of Trista, this may be justified. Similarly, in III, Tita always wears her work outfit rather than her school uniform.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Jusis Albarea is first seen fighting in the Old Schoolhouse casually striking down a half dozen monsters with a single swipe each. Outside of New Game Plus, in actual battle Jusis would not be able to take out those same monsters with standard attacks, and one in particular is very resistant to physical attacks in general and would take at least a dozen hits or arts to bring down.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The battle interface in Cold Steel III is totally different from the one used in every preceding game, in this arc and before, with every button being a distinct command rather than rotating through a wheel to find the command desired. In normal turn base mode this doesn't matter much, but the fact that the S-Break command (which is semi-real time) has been moved from the triangle button (which is now "Use Crafts when it is your turn") to the RB button (which used to be "Swap out party members when it is your turn") is likely to cause a few slip-ups.
• Darker and Edgier: The final act of Cold Steel III is this compared to most of the previous series. While they had some dark moments as well, the mood is usually upbeat compared to how everything falls apart in Cold Steel III's final dungeon, culminating in a truly depressing ending. And fittingly, the opening moments of Cold Steel IV are incredibly bleak as well.
• Darkest Hour: There are usually one of these moments per game.
  • The first one ends with the assassination of Giliath Osborne by the terrorist C, who happens to be Crow, one of Class VII's members. The Noble Alliance take the opportunity by not only reveal their flagship, the Pantagruel, but also reveal their own mechs, the Panzer Soldats, who make mincemeat of the Imperial Army's tanks. When Trista is attacked by a few of these mechs, Class VII is only saved by Rean forging a contract with the Ashen Knight. Despite this, Crow shows up and reveal he has his own Divine Knight and casually slaps aside Rean who is only saved by his friends intervention while he is forced to leave them to theirs fates.
  • The third game ends with the emperor being shot by a curse-manipulated Ash who is framed by the government as a Calvardian spy. Afterwards, as Rean and both Class VII try to prevent Osborne and Ouroboros from unleashing the curse upon the land, the Courageous is blowed with Olivert, Victor and Toval still inside and Millium dies saving Rean from the corrupted holy beast holding the curse. Rean subsequent grief lead to him losing control of his ogre powers and slaying the beast unleashing the curse upon Erebonia and leaving its citizens craving for Calvard's destruction.
  • Finally during the Act 2 of the last game,the Pantagruel is ambushed by the Glorious and various members of Jormungand during negotiations about the Mille Mirage. As Ouroboros brings its 3 Aions alongside Zector and Testa-Rossa, the situation is dire enough for Musse and Aurelia to initiate their final plan which is to allow the most of people to escape, entrust the movement to Cassius and ram the Pantagruel into the Glorious destroying them both. They are thankfully prevented from doing this by the Courageous II's intervention led by Olivert.
• Deathbringer the Adorable: When she moves to Leeves, Jingo decides to bring along an assistant - specifically the guard dog "Cerberus". Cerberus is, in fact, an adorable puppy with a cheery disposition.
• Deconstruction: This series hammers in quite a few of these examples in response to various popular high school JRPG tropes.
  • Two very prominent examples at the end of the first game: First, after Class VII manages to disable a Drakkhen, Scarlet reminds them that she is in an armored machine many times their size and they are not, as her Spiegel effortlessly defeats the party, deflecting any attempt at damaging it in the process. Shortly afterwards, Rean piloting Valimar manages to disable Crow's Ordine... for about ten seconds, at which point Ordine stands up, transforms and Crow asks if a complete amateur like Rean really thought he could beat someone who had three years to learn how to operate a Divine Knight. Then he kicks Rean's ass.
    • In Chapter 3, despite finding and defeating the terrorists trying to start a False Flag Operation, Class VII alone can't prevent war breaking out, it takes someone with much more authority and connections than them to do so.
  • In Cold Steel IV, Arianrhod tries to switch sides...only for Rufus to suddenly appear and stab her in the back for trying to to so. Unless there's no way for outsiders to intervene, there's no way your former team will just let you go over to the enemy side, even more so if you are very high up on their ranks if they have as much as a shred of common sense.
  • After beating the bosses in the Infernal Castle during the climax of Cold Steel II with the exception of Crow and Vita at the very end, all of them state that they were holding back and turn the tide against the protagonists until their adult supporters save them. The protagonists are first-year military students fighting against warriors who have fought for decades. This isn't a Shounen in where the Adults Are Useless. It's a surprise the game even lets you win at all.
  • So Rean and company find a way to stop the Great Twilight (and even survive while destroying Ishmelga for good in the Golden Ending) at the end of Cold Steel IV. Too bad the Erebonian government starting a war wasn't a supernatural event, so it can't be immediately stopped by destroying the curse, nor can it be written off as a side effect of it. On top of that, Rean's epilogue narration discusses how other nations were criticizing Erebonia for housing and triggering the curse too, to say nothing of circumstances surrounding the war itself (particularly their blaming Calvard). And the key figures of the Erebonian government themselves also had a lot to answer for, what with Rufus going to prison, the RMP and Intelligence Division being severed from the government and Claire and Lechter only being allowed to retain watered-down versions of their old positions, and even Olivert and Alfin having to work to regain people's trust.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: All bosses get this, and in the sequel Giant Mooks get this treatment as well.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Done twice. Millium first becomes playable after you defeat her in a fight and in the previous school year, Angelica essentially punched Crow into becoming her friend.
• Delusions of Eloquence: Narses (a minor noble who appears towards the end of Cold Steel II as part of the fishing sidequest) has these and uses "words" such as "impudential," "stylacefully" and "idiosynculiar."
• Demoted to Extra: All of the original Class VII, save for Rean, are no longer on the cover for Cold Steel III. They're instead replaced by the new students of the new academy led by Rean. They instead play a supporting role throughout the game, though by Cold Steel IV both old and new Class VII are more equal in prominence.
• Developers' Desired Date: You can make Rean romance several members of the female cast throughout the games with the optional Bonding Events, but the one that is promoted the most by far is Alisa. The Ship Tease with her and Rean during the main story is far greater than any other female characters, along with her general chemistry and the fact that Everyone Can See It. Even in those optional Bonding events, hers are more directly romantic, and physical, than those of other romance options.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • In Cold Steel IV, the key to getting the Golden Ending is to reload your initial cleared save file, complete the hidden sidequest that gets unlocked, and then replay the fight against Osborne. However, it is possible to clear this sidequest as a Bonus Dungeon beforehand, in which case you can unlock the Golden Ending by skipping straight to the closing cutscene, foregoing the need to replay Osborne's Boss Battle.
  • In certain events where you have to automatically pay mira but don't have enough to spare, the game actually lets you in anyway as it will be deducted out of your mission rewards instead afterwards.
• Did Not Do the Bloody Research: In Cold Steel IV, Jona discovers that the IDF has removed a digital backdoor he was using to hack into their system and, in so doing, refers to them as "Those twats", raising a few eyebrows for the series' UK-based fans.
• Disappointed by the Motive: Everyone in the party is disappointed when Duke Cayenne reveals his real motives at the end of the sequel. His ancestor was the "False Emperor" dethroned by Dreichels in the War of the Lions, whose family now rules. Cayenne started a civil war just to settle a petty family feud that no one else except him cares about anymore.
• Distracted by the Sexy: If you choose the nighttime bonding event with Emma in chapter 3, Rean spends some time studying with her. However, he doesn't get much done because he finds himself distracted by her... large breasts. He finally shakes himself out of it, makes an excuse, and they go back to studying.
  "However, because he suddenly found his mind...otherwise occupied, he wasn't able to retain much of what he learned."
• The Dog Was the Mastermind:
  • Your friendly upperclassman and honorary Class VII member Crow is C, the terrorist leader responsible for most of the events of Cold Steel I. The popular radio idol Misty and the glamorous opera singer Vita are the same person and she's the mastermind who is pulling Crow's strings.
  • The third game then goes ahead and reveals that your helpful orbal mechanic George is a gnome who has been working with the Black Workshop since the very beginning, and his boss turns out to be...Alisa's supposedly-dead father, who has been a close supporter of Osborne for 20 years.
• Domestic Appliance Disaster: Orbal appliances are still new technology to most people in Erebonia, and certainly to Laura, who grew up in the remote Legram. During a bonding event in Cold Steel II, she and Rean explore a store full of these appliances in Roer, but she gets a little too hands-on and ends up seemingly breaking an orbal washing machine and causing near-disaster with other appliances. Fortunately, the damage isn't as bad as it seems, and the owner is willing to be forgiving since they're classmates of Alisa, who is well-regarded in the town.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: The party has made their way through Lohengrin Castle, encountering many strange barriers and orbs and finally finding themselves in a room at the top with a large orb that Emma is sure is the source of the mysterious force that's trapped them in the castle and is generated the monsters and such. Seeing it, Millium summons her large combat mechanism, Airgetlam, to smash it, even though the others warn her not to and they don't know what could happen. Sure enough, when Airgetlam tries to smash it, it's blocked by a barrier and ends up toppling on top of Millium. It's the same sort of barrier that went up when she had tried to smash the main door open, and only after this happens does she remember what happened before. And then the boss monster appears...
• Door of Doom:
  • The enormous door found at the beginning of the fourth level of the old school building, with a strange red design engraved on it and no obvious means of opening it. It's later revealed to contain a 'test' in the form of an enormous suit of Animated Armor with a really big sword. There's an even bigger door on the hidden seventh level and a still-bigger door beyond that which serves as the final trial, before it opens up to reveal Valimar.
  • Another identical door is found in Lohengrin Castle. It's later revealed revealed that much like the Old Schoolhouse, Lohengrin Castle also housed a Divine Knight of its own.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect:
  • Defeat bosses too quickly and you'll miss out on their monster notebook entries, so if you're going for the Trophy for maxing it out, you need to stall a few fights (or make sure to fight them with a good supply of Battle Scope or a party member who has an analyze art or craft).
  • Landing a critical on an enemy automatically triggers a link attack, which is helpful for building your Bravery points to unleash either Rush or Burst. However, if the critical defeats the enemy (or all enemies for a multi-skill), then this won't activate.
• Downer Ending: The ending of Cold Steel III might be one of the darkest Trails endings ever. It ends with the Courageous exploding with Olivert, Victor, and Toval inside it as shown in the animated opening, Millium dying and forging the Sword of Demise made from her soul, Rean giving in to his Superpowered Evil Side and kills the corrupted Divine Beast in his rage, only for its death to engulf all of Erebonia in darkness and cursed with Osborne bringing out his Divine Knight and delivering a Neck Lift to Rean who he snapped out of of his rage easily. And then the text "Finally, the End in Sorrowful Flame Broke Out" appears at the end of the game.
• "Down Here!" Shot: After the prologue of Cold Steel III, Rean arrives in Leeves, where he's to become a new instructor at the Thors Branch Campus. After standing around for a bit, taking and thinking over the sights, he hears a familiar female voice saying his name, but can't place where it's coming from. The camera tilts left and right to show him looking in both directions before panning down to show Towa. This is one of many times the series makes fun of her petite stature.
• Dress-Coded for Your Convenience: When trying to track down non-Class VII members of Thors Academy in the second half of Cold Steel II, the player is aided by the fact that despite a month having passed since Thors fell and the common-born students all being hunted by the rebels, they are all still wearing their school uniforms, even if they're currently living in rebel-held territory.
• Drinking Contest: Setting one up is a sidequest in the penultimate chapter of IV. Aurelia, Sharon and Edel were in a three way tie when the bar cut them off because they were running out of booze.
• Driven to Suicide: A suicide in the past is responsible for Machias' hatred of Nobles and his father starting to work for Osborne.
• Dropping the Bombshell: Sharon revealing that Alisa is a member of the Reinford household during the first game.
• Dual Wielding: At least four of the playable characters dual wield. First is Fie who wields two blade guns as her main weapons. Another is Crow who wields dual pistols which carries on into his Azure Siegfried persona in Cold Steel III. Sara fights using both a sword and an orbal gun.
  • From Cold Steel III are the new playable characters Juna and Kurt. The former dual wields tonfas much like her senpai Lloyd while the latter dual wields two swords instead.
• Dub Pronunciation Change:
  • In the Japanese script, "Schwarzer" was pronounced as if it were German. It was heavily anglicized in the dub, possibly because the German pronunciation of "Schwarzer" is identical to a racial slur used in American Jewish communities.
  • Sara's name was changed from being pronounced like the Japanese name Sara to being pronounced like the English name Sara (the two are etymologically unrelated, and while spelled the same in all romanization systems, are pronounced differently).
  • When discussing events in the Sky trilogy, the pronunciations of "Liberl" and "Arseille" have been changed. In the Japanese script, "Liberl" is pronounced as if it were German as li-bear'l and "Arseille" is pronounced as if it were French, as ar-say. The English dub anglicizes them to li-burr'l and ar-sell, respectively.
  • Ordine is Italian for "order" and is pronounced as such in the Japanese script. The English dub makes the final -e silent.
  • The word "Gigant" in Millium's S-Craft Gigant Breaker is German for "giant" and pronounced as such in the Japanese script; the English script anglicizes it to sound like the English word "giant" with an extra g inserted in the middle.
  • In the Japanese script, many names containing "se" such as "Arseid", "Claussell", and "Reise" are pronounced voiced, as /ze/^note all are written with the katakana ゼ. The English dub uses an unvoiced /s/ for them instead.
  • In the Japanese script, many names containing "or" such as "Reinford" or "Arnor" are pronounced with a distinct "or" sound. The English dub pronounces them as "er" instead.
  • The name of Lamare province is French for "the pool", and it's pronounced as such in the Japanese script, like the name "Lamar". The English dub pronounces the "mare" part as the name of a female horse.
  • In the Japanese script, Loewe is pronounced "lay-vay". When McBurn mentions Loewe to Duvalie, the English dub goes with "loo-vay" instead. Neither one is accurate to the proper German pronunciation of the name, though justified in this case as the German ö sound doesn't exist in either English or Japanese.
  • In the Japanese script, Claiomh Solais is pronounced something like "Clau Solas". The English dub changes it to "Clahm Solay-is". Neither one is accurate to the proper Irish pronunciaton, which is roughly "Cleave Solish".
• Due to the Dead: When Class VII runs into Duvalie and Shirley in the ruins of Hamel in III, the two Ouroboros agents are paying their respects at the grave of Joshua's sister Karin Astray. They then postpone the inevitable fight until after Class VII has also paid their respects, and move the duel to the outskirts of the ruins so that the grave won't be damaged.
• Dustbin School: The third game is set at the branch campus of the prestigious Thors Military Academy. The principal greets the new students by describing the school as a trash bin, and telling them that they, and the instructors, are there to keep them away from the main campus.
• Dwindling Party:
  • Happens over the course of the final chapter in Cold Steel III, after gaining all of Class VII, new and old for the final dungeon of Chapter 4. First Ash, Millium, and Altina leave before it's even begun (Ash because he's comatose, and Millium and Altina because Osborne recalled them back as part of the Intelligence Division). Then every floor in the final dungeon has to you leave 3 people behind, first Laura, Emma and Gaius against Arianrhod the Steel Maiden and McBurn the Blazing Demon, Alisa, Fie, and Sara against Rutger Claussell, Sharon, Shirley, and Azure Siegfried, and Elliot, Machias, and Jusis against the Ironbloods, until only Rean, Juna, Kurt, and Musse are left for the first part of the final boss, then the latter 3 get their Soldats disabled, leaving Rean alone to finish it off.
  • Actually happens to Ouroboros by the end of Cold Steel IV. Their ranks are whittled down heavily after Arianrhod is killed, Sharon, Vita and the Stahlritter defect to the heroes, and numerous members like Renne, Loewe, and McBurn straight up desert. By the end of Cold Steel IV, the only active Ouroboros members that are in Erebonia during the Cold Steel arc are Campanella, Mariabell, Shirley, and the newly recruited Cedric. However, the Grandmaster isn't concerned since this doesn't affect her overall plans.
• Dysfunction Junction: Class VII doesn't have it as bad as the Trails in the Sky cast, but they definitely have some issues. Amongst their number are Rean, who suffers from a lack of self-confidence, has a lot of issues regarding the fact that he's adopted, and he has a Superpowered Evil Side that he cannot fully control; Alisa, the heiress to the Reinford family whose family broke up after the untimely death of her father and who is trying fruitlessly to distance herself from her workaholic mother; Machias, the son of the Imperial governor whose bitter hatred of nobles came from the fact that some of them drove his cousin - an older sister figure to him - to suicide over her relationship with one of their own; Emma, a Hexen clan witch whose job is to guide Rean from behind the scenes and who has to hide her true nature (at least initially) from her friends; Jusis, bastard son of one of the Four Great Houses, who is basically neglected and scorned by his father; and Fie, an ex-Jaeger whose earliest memories are wandering a battlefield alone and whose surrogate family effectively disbanded after the death of their leader. And that's not even touching on Crow and the baggage he eventually brings to the table.
  • The remaining three get off fairly lightly. Elliot has a dispute going on with his father over his future career (Elliot wants to be a musician like his mother, while his father the general wants his only son to follow in his footsteps), while Laura and Gaius have no major hangups.
  • The new Class VII also have their issues. Juna is from a recently annexed province and hates the Empire for stealing her homeland's autonomy. Kurt was raised with the expectation that he'd be serving as a royal bodyguard when he grew up just like every other Vander for the past 250+ years, only to have his family duty be suddenly taken away for reasons of politics, leaving him without a purpose. Altina has no real knowledge of emotions or what to do with herself outside of mission objectives. Ash is a survivor of Hamel. And Musse is the deliberately sidelined neice of Duke Cayenne, who saw his civil war and its consequences coming a decade ago, and has been planning for how to clean up the resultant mess ever since.

E - H

• Early-Bird Cameo: Most of Class VII appears in the background of the game's earliest cutscenes, well before the player learns that they're Rean's future party-mates. You can see a few of them onboard the train Rean is riding and in the Trista train station.
• Early Game Hell: In the Cold Steel games, if players pick the Nightmare difficulty for their first playthrough, then players have a rough start due to limited resources and lack of powerful equipment, quartz, and Master Quartz available with boss stats inflated throughout the game. As the game progresses on however, more powerful resources are available to the player which then makes the game a lot easier than it was at the beginning of the game.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The True Ending of IV ends the tetralogy on a hopeful note. Rean, with the help of his friends and Argres, manages to separate himself from Ishmelga, the entity behind the Hate Plague dooming Erebonia into belligerence, allowing him to defeat it for good without having to kill himself, as well as make his peace with his father Osborne, who passes on content that their beloved homeland is finally free of its curse; the Divine Knights sacrifice the last of their life force to permanently bring Crow back to life; and Millium is also permanently resurrected through a backup body prepared by Franz (who also dies freed of Ishmelga's influence as Black Alberich, having also made his peace with his daughter Alisa). In addition, Erebonia makes peace with both Liberl and Crossbell, as shown with most of the heroes from all three nations attending the wedding of Olivert and Scherazard, a symbolic step towards bridging Erebonia's class divides. Of course, there are still a few loose ends, such as Prince Cedric, deeming himself beyond redemption for having supported Osborne, choosing to join Ouroboros at Shirley's suggestion, McBurn hinting he has some unfinished business to take care of, and Erebonia's relations with the Calvard Republic remaining a little shaky (thus setting the scene for the next story arc in the franchise), as well as the first onscreen appearance of the Grandmaster of Ouroboros, who states that despite failing to physically obtain the Sept-Terrions of Mirage, Fire and Earth, they have still managed to accomplish enough of their (unspecified) goals to proceed with the next phase of the Phantasmal Blaze Plan, but as far as Class VII is concerned, such loose ends would have to wait for another day.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Cold Steel II actually locks you out of the last two training levels on the training rooms onboard the Courageous if you are playing Easy mode, meaning you can only ever get to Close Combat III, Ranged Combat III and Arts III, denying you of three desirable master quartzes.
• Elaborate University High: Thors Military Academy. The elaborate angle probably can be explained by the fact that Zemuria doesn't really have higher education so Thors and similar schools are as advanced as it gets.
• Eldritch Abomination: Loa Erebonius, the Ashen Power. It's an enormous, misshapen but vaguely humanoid clawed and winged monstrosity with parts of its body flickering in and out of existence. It's also described as being only a fragment of a greater power. In II, it's topped by Loa Luciferia who tells the party that killing him would mean nothing to Class VII. Finally in Cold Steel IV, Ishmelga-Loge tops all of the other series abominations as it is a gigantic monster of epic proportions, requiring three eight-man teams to actually defeat.
• Eldritch Location: The ruins beneath the old schoolhouse change form as you progress through them. Quite a lot of the decorative elements seen in the ruins resemble designs from Phantasma. The entire structure appears to have been created to test anyone who would seek to awaken Valimar and there is an Eldritch Abomination lurking in the lowest level. In 'Cold Steel II, the entire interior at the end of the game transforms into the Reverie Corridor.
• Elemental Powers: Because of the way Orbments work, all characters have two Slots restricted to one of the seven types of Quartz (and for the first time, a Slot restricted to a second element), giving them a natural inclination towards one element or another. Despite this, actual specialization is still largely a matter of player choice.
  • Earth Element: Machias, Towa, Lloyd, Estelle, George, Leonidas (Primary), Gaius, Millium, Juna, and Agate (Secondary)
  • Water Element: Laura, Musse, Elise, Claire, Vita, Tio, Ennea, Victor (Primary), Elliot, Crow, Kurt, Towa, Roselia, Leonidas, and Vita (Secondary)
  • Fire Element: Alisa, Ash, Alfin, Agate, Lechter, Randy, Roselia, Ines (Primary), Rean, Laura, Emma, Sara, Lloyd, and Tita (Secondary)
  • Wind Element: Gaius, Sara, Kurt, Toval, Elie (Primary), Jusis, Fie, Rixia, Joshua, Xeno, Ines, and Victor (Secondary)
  • Time Element: Rean, Crow, Fie, Sharon, Joshua, Duvalie (Primary), Angelica, Elise, Altina, Lechter, Randy, and George (Secondary)
  • Space Element: Elliot, Jusis, Angelica, Juna, Tita and Aurelia(Primary), Alisa, Musse, Claire, Toval, Olivert, Estelle, Renne, Elie, and Duvalie (Secondary)
  • Mirage Element: Emma, Millium, Rixia, Altina, Olivert, Renne, Xeno, Vita (Primary), Machias, Ash, Alfin, Sharon, Vita, Tio, Aurelia, and Ennea (Secondary)
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Although the game doesn't do much to make it obvious, the Vantage Masters card game has an elemental aspect to it. Your main attacking cards are called "Natials" and each Natial has a different element - either Earth, Fire, Water and Heaven. These cards all have numbers that represent their attack power and will normally attack for that amount of damage. However, Earth does more damage to Water but takes heavier damage from Heaven, Fire does more damage to Heaven but takes heavier damage from Water, Water does more damage to Fire but takes heavier damage from Earth and Heaven does more damager to Earth but takes heavier damage from Fire. Each player also gets a "Master" card which has no element and therefore is neither strong nor weak against any element type. Finally, there are also Magic cards, which don't deal direct damage, but instead provide special effects, such as buffing another card's attack, reducing the value it costs to play a card, or dealing a large amount of damage one time. Magic cards don't have elements, but sometimes have effects which can be affected by the elements when applied to particular cards.
• 11th-Hour Ranger: In the True Ending route of Cold Steel IV, everyone who was playable for the five Salt Pale dungeons returns for the True Final Boss fight.
• Enemy Civil War: While it doesn't come to open battle, various members of the rebel army spend a lot of time jockeying for relative position in their organization even while they're busy waging war against the empire.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Rean gets Machias and Jusis to agree to a truce by framing their field exam as a competition with the other half of Class VII, and telling them that their squabbling is the reason Group B performed so poorly last time.
  • Sharon is Enforcer IX of Ouroboros. She teams up with the faculty to fight off the Panzer Soldats sent by the Noble Faction, even though her organization is behind the Nobles and their ultimate goals coincide right now because even if she is an Enforcer, she's also Alisa's Ninja Maid and wants to keep her safe. Whether this cooperation will last once all the stops are pulled out on the Phantasmal Blaze plan is another matter... Spoiler Alert: It doesn't. It REALLY doesn't.
  • In Cold Steel II, the party learns that the Noble Alliance teamed up with the Calvard Republic to take over the watchtower in the Nord Highlands, even though Erebonia and the Republic are notorious for being mortal enemies.
  • When Duke Cayenne forces Prince Cedric to Awaken the Vermillion Knight (which promptly goes out of control), Vita and Crow help Class VII take it down.
• Engagement Challenge: Inverted - one of the optional sidequests in the epilogue of Cold Steel II is to help a lady with a break the engagement challenge.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • When jaegers sent by the rebels to capture Princess Alfin set half of Ymir on fire and start harming civilians, the Azure Abyss apologizes for their conduct, hypnotizes them into going back to base with a report that there's nothing interesting there... and then kidnaps the princess herself using less destructive methods.
  • When Duke Albarea razes Celdic, the rest of the rebels, disgusted at what he's done and knowing losing Bareahard is the only way to mitigate the propaganda victory he's handed the Imperial Army, wash their hands of him and tell Class VII that they won't intervene if they try taking him down. Duvalie meanwhile really wanted to gut Duke Albarea right there and then if it wasn't for the fact that she was ordered to be a witness to the fall of Aurochs Fort.
  • When visiting a gravesite in a certain burned-out husk of a town, the old Class VII sees two Enforcers from Ouroboros also paying their respects. It says something that two people who thought nothing of attacking students, some of whom had never seen combat, would know better than to make war in a place already ravaged by it.
  • When even the most Ax-Crazy members of Ouroboros think that blowing up the Courageous from the sky is in poor taste, fans would know that things really went south.
  • Once the Great Twilight takes effect in Cold Steel IV, Rean’s mountainside home of Ymir is declared a neutral non-combat zone. Apparently, some members of the Imperial Defense Force didn’t get the memo, because they decide taking Rean’s parents hostage would be a good idea to draw him out for capture. When they’re soundly beaten by Rean, they mean to call on reinforcements to force the issue, except Major Lechter Arundel, their boss and right hand of the Chancellor, gives them a SEVERE dressing down for even considering something so heinous. This is the same Lechter who stood against Class VII at the end of the last game.
• Everyone Has Standards: Patrick T. Hyarms' classmates are normally just as haughty as he is, but once he starts insulting the non-noble members of Class VII, even they think he's crossed a line.
• Everyone Meets Everyone: The Prologue of Cold Steel (after the flash-forward) is all about how the members of Class VII arrive at Thors on the first day of school and meet one another. This being Thors, their meeting involves literally being dropped into a dungeon and having to cooperate to make it out.
• Everyone Went to School Together: Despite it almost becoming expected, it never seems to fail to surprise the students of Class VII to learn that yet another respected and admired adult they meet attended Thors. Even the current Emperor of Erebonia himself, Eugent III, went to Thors as a young man where he reveals that it's part of tradition for men of the Arnor family to do so.
• Evil Counterpart: All of the "Zauber Soldats" in Cold Steel IV are meant to be counterparts to the existing Panzer Soldat types:
  • Zolge to Drakken, being the most basic model used as the resident Mook machine.
  • Merkia to Spiegel, being an improved version of the Mook machine used primarily by commanders and aces. In a bit of an inversion, "Shining Edge," the union attack used by Spiegel piloted by Patrick, can be seen as the good counterpart to "Fear Strike," the Merkia's finishing move, as the latter appears first.
  • Mordred to Kestrel, being the model with the thinnest armor and greatest mobility. Compared to the previous models, the resemblance is even easier to see; it even uses a rifle that uses the same animation as Musse's orbal carbine, complete with her union attack, "Resonance Shot" being used as the finshing move.
  • Hannibal to Hector, being the slowest model with improved armor and power. And just like before, the resemblance is very uncanny, as it uses a poled-hammer that uses the same animation as Ash's Varia-Axe and Randy's Stun Halberd, complete with their union attack, "Riot Combo," as its finishing move.
  • Leviathan to Goliath, as the largest and most opposing model. Notably, in contrast to all the other models, the 2 are noted to look nothing alike, despite essentially fufilling the same purpose.
• Evil vs. Evil: Chancellor Osborne vs the Imperial Liberation Front. Osborne is every bit the tyrant they claim he is, but they're willing to repeatedly endanger innocent lives (to the point of escalating tensions with both the Nord Highlands and Crossbell) just to get to him. Likewise, the Noble faction that the ILF supports aren't above imposing impossibly high taxes and creating hell for citizens under their reign.
• Evolving Credits
  • In the original Cold Steel, when you first start up the game, it's just Rean and Alisa riding on the train, with more people added on once you go on the field studies. By Chapter 3, the train is now filled with everyone from Class VII until Chapter 5 where Crow and Millium join up and thus are added as well. In chapter 4, they all take their class jackets off because it's summer, which they put back on when summer is over in chapter 6. If you save the game and then reload in the brief period of time in the final chapter between clearing the old schoolhouse and performing the concert, the party will be shown wearing their concert outfits. The view through the windows of the train is the location that Rean's team is currently exploring in the current chapter's field exam. After Crow betrays the party near the end of the game, he disappears from the train.
  • This returns for Cold Steel II with Rean first alone in a snowy field, then with classmates/supporting adults on a balcony and Ymir, then eventually the wide group of classmates and supporters gathered in and around the footbath in Ymir. Later, when Rean is forced aboard the Alliance's flagship airship, the scene depicts Valimar and Ordine on the airship's deck. After that, the opener shifts to the party on the deck of the Courageous. From there, the view of the clouds from the deck varies depending on the time of the day of the story, generally either a blue sky or sunset clouds. During the segment after the party retakes Trista, however, it's a night sky. Then, following that, it's snowing. And when the party enters the final dungeon, Valimar is shown stationed outside it. Then, when you begin the Divertissement section, it shows Lloyd and Rixia from the center down standing outside a certain gate. Finally, following this segment, Class VII is gathered atop the rooftop of Thors on a sunny day. Finishing the game updates this version where everyone is viewed from the front instead of from behind. In it, Crow's silhouette is also featured briefly before fading.
  • This is played with in Cold Steel III with the images replaced with stills of various party members who happen to be relevant to the current part of the story being played through but played straight again in Cold Steel IV. When the game is first booted up, it features Rean all chained up with his eyes closed. When the game stars Juna in Act 1, it features Juna, Kurt, and Altina, and then Ash and finally Musse join in. Following this, after you have completed Act 1 but in Eryn before the start of the Fragment Intermission, it features Renne and KeA, who have briefly joined the party. (This one is very easy to miss.) During the Fragment Intermission, it features Rean's image all chained up again but this time his eyes are open and the image is zoomed in. Immediately following this, it features a pairing of two of the characters from the old Class VII chosen randomly each time you return to the titel screen - either Laura and Fie, Gaius (with his hawk Zeo) and Elliot, Alisa and Emma or Machias and Jusis (with Millium in the background.) After which, it then features old Class VII starting with Rean with Valimar and Crow with Ordine. During the Pantagruel sequence, it changes to Estelle, Lloyd, and Rean with their S-Craft portraits. In the Finale, it has all of new Class VII and Crow on the right side while all of old Class VII are on the left side with Rean in the middle, drawing his tachi. If players get the Golden Ending, the music changes to a happier melody and a photo image of the final image of the game.
• Exact Words: When blatantly noble-hating Machias asks his classmates what their social rank is, Rean says that "there isn't a drop of noble blood in my veins". This is technically true, but glosses over the fact that while Rean is common-born, he's also the adopted son of a Baron, making him low-end nobility despite his lack of pedigree. Also, once Machias learns the full truth, he treats it essentially as if Rean had flat-out lied.
• Expecting Someone Taller: In Cold Steel III, after Rean plays his first opponent at Vantage Masters, a young boy named Zach, he recognizes him as the Ashen Chevalier. Zach then says that he isn't what he expected and his companion Tom comments that he was picturing someone muscular and 3 arges tall.
• Experienced Protagonist: By Cold Steel IV, Estelle, Lloyd, and Rean are very experienced in the way the series works that barely anything the enemy does fazes them, plus they know how to deal with the stuff thrown at them.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
  • Claire is thinking aloud about motives of the terrorists who attacked Reinford's factory, then suddenly realizes that the provincial soldiers haven't arrived, then has this reaction when she concludes that the incident at the factory must have been a distraction. Five seconds later, she's proven correct.
  • At the end of the second game, Vita begins explaining about Ouroboros's ultimate objectives. When she arrives at the point in the conversation where she talks about how Crow helped her advance her plans, she (and the rest of the party) has a sudden realization that Crow has not yet disembarked Ordine. The conversation then comes to an abrupt halt as everyone realizes that Crow is far more seriously wounded than he had initially let on.
• Exposed to the Elements: In Cold Steel II, all the girls in Class VII are wearing outfits that stop above the knees, in a game that takes place during December, and includes multiple visits to a town in the snow-covered mountains, and none of them complain about the cold. Laura and Emma are at least wearing open coats that go down to mid-calf over their skirts, but none of the others have anything below the bottom of their skirts/shorts other than their footgear. Fie is the worst example, wearing an open jacket, a midriff-baring top, and low-hanging short shorts. Rean and Gaius actually have a conversation about it if you view one of their bonding events. He says that he's used to dealing with the cold.
• Extremely Short Timespan:
  • Compared to the first game where it covers six months, most of the second game covers only about a month and a few days. It then has a Time Skip three months later at March where the Epilogue Chapter takes place.
  • Cold Steel III's final chapter all happens in one day compared to the rest of the chapters.
  • Cold Steel IV's entire plot only happens for an entire month between August 1 to September 1. And the start of new Class VII's adventure starts on August 7, a week after new Class VII wakes up which means that Cold Steel IV's on-screen story happens for only three weeks; the shortest story telling in the series.
• The Faceless: In the flashbacks in Cold Steel II and beyond, Dreichels' face is never shown onscreen but players and the cast who see it figure out that it's Dreichels The Lionheart. This is a plot point in Cold Steel IV as Osborne is the reincarnation of Dreichels and it's implied that Dreichels is the spitting image of Osborne, complete with his voice.
• Failed a Spot Check: Downplayed - no one can tell the twins Linde and Vivi apart when one of them (usually Vivi) does her hair up like the other's typical style. However, there is a notable difference between the two - Linde has darker, brownish eyes, while Vivi's are bright yellow.
• Failure Gambit: Overlapping with Let No Crisis Go to Waste. In the first Chapter of the third game, the Imperial Army is tied down and all but forbidden to take action in the Sutherland province(which happens to hold one of the largest Imperial Army bases) despite there being several aggressive monsters, rogue Archaisms, and active members of Ouroboros running rampant in the area, leaving the understaffed Provincial Army to handle it. Rean surmises that this is so the Provincial Army can try their hand and fail, allowing Osborne to further discredit the Provincial Armies and nobility while keeping his own hands clean.
  • The same thing occurs in Ordis mixed with Xanatos Gambit when the Railway Guns are stolen and open fire on the city: If the nobles fail, they lose some of their already dwindling power and one of their major powerbases. If they succeed, they still get rid of a major thorn in their side.
• False Flag Operation: The Imperial Liberation Front pulls one of these by simultaneously attacking bases in Calvard and Erebonia in an attempt to start a war between the two powers while making it look like the other side was involved.
• False Reassurance: During orientation, it becomes clear that Machias hates Nobles. When circumstances lead him to team up with Rean, Elliot and Gaius, he asks them if they're Commoners like himself. The latter two are. Not wanting to antagonize Machias, Rean claims that "I'm like them, I don't have a drop of noble blood in me". This is technically true but conveniently avoids having to answer the actual question, which would require explaining that he is the adopted son of Baron Schwarzer of Ymir.
  • Machias doesn't notice the dodge but Elliot does, though he doesn't say anything about it. Rean at least feels bad about the lie and it does come back to bite him later.
• Faking the Dead
  • You didn't really think the Imperial Liberation Front would be defeated that anti-climactically, did you? Of course not, but making everyone in-universe think that they were dead was all part of The Plan.
  • Towards the end of Cold Steel II, you learn that the Imperial Liberation Front's nemesis, Chancellor Osborne, pulled the same stunt, having actually survived after Crow apparently shot him in the heart.
  • And of course, Alisa's dad, Black Alberich, turns out to be alive and well in Cold Steel III.
• Fanservice: Female characters tend to show a lot of skin, especially in the third and fourth games, swimsuit DLC is widely available, and a Modesty Towel is an unlockable outfit for the girls and the boys in the fourth game.
• Fetch Quest: It wouldn't be a Trails game without lots of these, this time given to you as homework.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: In the epilogue of the second game, it's revealed that all of Class VII - save for Rean - have decided to go their separate ways and will not be returning to Thors for their second year. Alisa, Jusis, and Laura are following in their parents' footsteps, Elliot and Machias are transferring to different schools in Heimdallr, Gaius and Emma are returning to their home territories, Fie is headed off to find the remnants of Zephyr, and Millium and Sara are returning to their previous occupations. You get to play through their final days together as a class and go on one final adventure together. Upon completing the Bonus Dungeon, they declare Class VII officially disbanded. It's every bit the Tearjerker it sounds like.
• Field of Blades: The boss fight for Loa Erebonius and Loa Luciferia in Cold Steel I and Cold Steel II respectively take place in a desolate scenery filled with a lot of swords. Cold Steel IV reveals that the swords represent a graveyard from all of the fallen Awakeners and their Divine Knights.
• Fighting Your Friend: The once-a-month class tests start off as battles against robots but quickly turn into practice duels between members of Class VII, or against Instructor Sara or a team from Class I led by Patrick.
  • Also happens in Cold Steel II when Rean is trying to convince Jusis that he doesn't have to shoulder the pain and guilt of Duke Albarea hiring jaegers to attack Ymir alone.
• Figure It Out Yourself: In Cold Steel III, Rean tells Altina that she has to figure out what school club to join for herself after she asks him to simply assign her one, or else it won't mean anything. Later, if you do her bonding event, he relents somewhat by helping her to do some of the legwork, but tells her that the final decision still has to be hers.
• Final Boss: Cold Steel I actually has two that can qualify. "Loa Erebonius" is fought at the end of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and is effectively the last time you can use the regular combat system. However, after all is said and done the real final boss of the game is "Ordine, the Azure Knight."
  • In a similar fashion, Cold Steel II has "Vermillion Apocalypse"^note "End of Vermillion" in Japan. for the main story, and "Loa Luciferia" for the Epilogue.
  • Cold Steel III has the "Nameless One."
  • Finally, for ''Cold Steel IV, "Ishmelga, the Black Knight," is this for the Normal Ending, whilst the True Ending continues on to the True Final Boss, "Ishmelga-Loge."
• Fire-Forged Friends: Laura and Fie, as well as Jusis and Machias (not that either of them would ever admit it). The senior-students also suggest Angelica and Crow are this, as they did not get along well when they first met.
• Flawed Prototype: Ol-Gadia, the magic armor that Rean and Crow took on to save Elise and for Rean to inadvertently clear the first part of the trial, is the first magic knight golem that influential families built back in the day.
• Flying Seafood Special:
  • Thunder Roaches in the Nord Highlands of all places. Basically floating anglerfishes. One of the quest bosses, Thunder Quaker, is a giant flying loach.
  • The sharkodile in Heimdallr's sewers. They look more like sharks with spiny backs, and they float in the air.
• Food Porn: All of Class VII's Field Studies will have at least one scene where the cast are treated to the local cuisine, with characters often going into lengthy opinions on their meal. And then there's the cooking minigame, where each recipe has four possible outcomes, each with their own description in the item menu.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: The final chapter of Cold Steel III has Campanella using the bell at Stargaze Tower to start waking the beast below Heimdallr. In fact, the final chapter of Cold Steel III is called "For Whom The Bell Tolls" and it definitely has lots of events that end up dooming Erebonia, and possibly the rest of the world.
• Foreign Exchange Student: Despite the purpose of the school being to train future officers, Thors accepts at least a few non-Erebonian students. Gaius is seen as one by most of the other students even though Nord is technically (a distant) part of the Empire. He sees himself as one too. Crow is another pseudo-foreign student, being from a region that had been annexed into the Empire less than a decade before, as is Juna in III.
• Foreshadowing: Lots of course, but specific mention goes to a history lesson with Thomas. When Thomas asks Rean what the name of the band of knights of Lianne Sandlot, the correct answer would be the Eisenritter. The other two choices however, Stahlritter and Gralsritter, are also significant however because the second game reveals that you're going to fight the leader of the Stahlritter, Duvalie, and as for the latter, it's revealed that Thomas is part of the Gralsritter. These terms obviously have been around for quite some time, but the significance of it is another story. And if there was a fourth option, it would probably be Schwarzritter...
  • Any of the luck fortune telling in the first game foreshadows events that happen either later on in the first game or throughout the second game.
  • Likewise, Crow's master quartz is called Cypher. Most players would brush it off on first playthrough. But then, after the reveal and realizing how the name is often associated with The Mole, you'd end up wondering why you didn't see this coming in the first place.
  • The first game's intro shows Vita's familiar briefly turning into what looks suspiciously like a crow - before transitioning to showing C.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Rean and Alisa briefly met each other when the Reinfords took a family vacation to Ymir nearly a decade before the events of the first game. Alisa got lost in the mountains and Rean guided her back to town. They don't recognize each other as the other party in that story until an optional bonding event in the second game.
• For Science!: The head of RIT does research purely for the engineering challenges involved, caring nothing for what his clients might do with the fruits of his labors. This is how the Noble Alliance ended up with weapons systems that allowed them to launch an all-out civil war, and how Valimar got upgraded to be able to stand up to Crow's Divine Knight so that Rean could end the war.
• Frame-Up: After Ash shoots Emperor Eugent, the Ironbloods place the blame on Calvard as a way of advancing Osborne's agenda. From an outsider's perspective, it was even a reasonable accusation: Erebonia had quarrelled with Calvard off and on for generations, including a brief armed conflict a year previous, there had been nearly a hundred Calvardian agents infiltrating the city just a few days prior to the incident, the weapon used was of Calvardian make and clearly designed to be smuggled into secure areas, and the shooter had a mysterious background. Only Class VII's insider knowledge allowed them to realize that Osborne was twisting the incident to his own advantage to promote his personal goals.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: During the Courageous' maiden voyage over Heimdallr in Cold Steel I, one can briefly spot Vita (in her "Misty" disguise) sitting down at the tram station located in Alto street.
• Friendly Enemy: Xeno and Leonidas can be quite friendly to Class VII when they cross paths outside of combat situations. As mercenaries, they've often ended up in situations where the enemy you fight in one war can be the ally you fight alongside in the next, and the guy you drink with at the bar when you're both between wars, so they try not to make the fact that they're on the other side of the current war anything personal.
• Full-Name Basis: Machias and Jusis tend to refer to each other by their full names until they start defrosting.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Jusis gives one of these to Rufus after Rufus murders Lianne. As a twist, it's the younger brother doing it to the older one:
  Jusis: Rufus Albarea... How could you?
• Fun with Acronyms: The new ARCUS model Tactical Orbment. It's an acronym for All-Round Communication and Unison System.
• Foregone Conclusion: Trails to Azure ends with a timeskip and a description of events taking place in neighboring Erebonia. Cold Steel starts months before that point. Thanks to what we saw in Azure we know that by the end of the game Garrelia Fortress will be destroyed, war will be declared with Crossbell and the Empire will fall into a nasty civil war. Guess what happens?
  • Even extends to Cold Steel II to an extent because Azure's ending also told us that Osborne's faction wins, even though Cold Steel ends with the Noble Faction appearing to have an unbeatable upper hand..
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Your horse can randomly despawn in the Nord Highlands in II, this is acknowledged as a bug by the developers and localizers. Granted, the developers were apparently really perplexed by the bug and why it's happening since their workaround was to implement a button to respawn your horse by bringing up the hint screen and then pushing 'A', meaning they couldn't figure out why the horse was despawning and how to prevent it from doing so. Additional reports also mentions that this even happened to some players with the original Playstation 3 and Vita versions of the game. While a workaround has already been implemented, it still confused players who were uninformed of the glitch and the fix beforehand, and a number of players of the PC port still brought it up in the Steam bug report forums when encountering it in-game for the first time.
  • In Cold Steel III, there's a bug in the game where if an enemy attack finishes with them moving from one spot of the map to another with a Dash Attack, there's a chance that the enemy will go "out of bounds" of the battle map. What that means is that the enemy can no longer move but will be constantly skipping their turns while the playable characters can wail on the enemy easily.
• Game Changer: Acknowledged in universe is the introduction of the Panzer Soldat which is capable of curb stomping Erebonia's most advanced tanks, the backbone of the Imperial Army. Toned down a little in Cold Steel II which demonstrates that once they get over the initial shock the conventional tanks and infantry of the Imperial Army manage to hold their own quite well against Soldats.
  • For a meta example, Falcom's president stated in a Dengeki interview shortly after Cold Steel was released that the sequel would be one of these for the franchise.
• Game Mod: There are mods that exist for the PC released games to make the Nightmare difficulty even harder. One shining example includes making the powerful Chrono Burst take away 75% of the caster's HP to prevent spamming the art.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Rean:
    • Rean's ability sense the presence of others can be taken as a referral to how in-game the players are able to know the location of each individual NPC and quest objectives via the map.
    • One of his Fatal Flaws is being too willing to risk his life for others to an unhealthy degree. Fittingly enough, he has Cover as one of his Link abilities.
  • Instructor Sara is Famed In-Story as a Badass Teacher and the youngest ever Bracer to achieve A Rank status. Fittingly, when she joins the party at Garrelia Fortress she's exactly as Purposefully Overpowered as you'd expect. This also applies to Sharon in the second game. Being an Enforcer of Ouroboros, her crafts are Purposefully Overpowered and she's considered the best of three temporary party members (the other two are Toval and Claire).
  • At one point, Machias and Jusis', and later Laura and Fie's, inability to get along leads to the Tactical Link system breaking. Rean and Alisa's dispute doesn't break the Link system because they get over their issues before they end up in the same party. Jusis and Millium's link also doesn't break (despite Jusis' apparent distrust over her) partly because Millium doesn't seem to be aware of the fact, as opposed to what happened with Jusis-Machias and Fie-Laura and Millium joins after Jusis had his major Character Development months prior.
  • Laura admitted at the beginning of the first game to having little experience with combat orbments and is shown to be Hopeless with Tech on several occasions. Considering how Orbments are a case of Magic from Technology, her status as a Magically Inept Fighter should come as no surprise.
  • In Cold Steel III, veterans like Rean, Aurelia, Claire, and the old Class VII have an EXP bonus that the New Class VII don't, allowing them to gain more EXP at the same level and to stay ahead of the newbies. This is zigzagged, since some characters such as Agate and Altina don't have this bonus, despite being more battle-hardened than the new students.
  • Emma frequently states that she uses her powers to suppress McBurn's flames whenever she's in the party fighting him. Her Brave Order Zodiac Force (later upgraded to Luminary Force) absorbs enemy's magical attacks to heal the party's health, making her the perfect counter to McBurn (whose flame attacks are coded as magic damage).
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The story makes a huge deal about how important and battle-changing combat links are but they hardly even make a difference during actual gameplay battles, especially during early and mid game. Though this is actually a bit justified in that the true power of the ARCUS only comes to the fore when they are all able to work in sync. You see a flash of it at the beginning of the game with the first boss, but it doesn't really come into play until you get Burst, which allows everyone to rush all opponents on the field in succession. As Rean sometimes says after winning a battle with it...
  Rean: This is our real power!
  • The story also makes a big deal about how much more powerful Laura and Fie are compare the rest but in gameplay, (barring overpowered skills like Rean's Arc Slash) they aren't too different from any of the other physical-based characters. To ameliorate this, Laura and Fie have their S-Craft without advancing the storyline.
    • Another problem then comes during the battle where you play as Fie and Laura vs Rean and Machias, which is arguably one of the hardest, if not the hardest, battle in the game, especially on the higher difficulties. This can also be justified since both the fight comes after Fie and Laura finished their duel, but to add insult to injury, when the battle ends Machias and Rean are on their knees, and the girls don't even appear to be winded.
  • In New Game Plus, if you carry your levels and equipment, you can easily one-shot most regular enemies throughout a good portion of the game and get out of most boss battles with barely a scratch, even on Nightmare Mode. The characters, however, will still act in the cutscenes as if they had engaged in battles which had pushed them to their limits. Also, if you do enough damage to take down an enemy in any battle where some sort of "event" has to occur, such as the combat link between Jusis/Machias or Laura/Fie breaking, then the game will only allow the enemy's HP to go down to 1 and you can't actually land the killing blow until after the event occurs.
  • NPCs will always react to your field character is if it was Rean, and your field character's reactions are clearly meant to reflect Rean's. This is mostly notable when talking to Dorothee, where your field character Sweatdrops at her Yaoi obsession, even if it's Alfin, who is a fellow Yaoi Fangirl herself.
  • Characters in field studies often recognize that Class VII is from Thors Academy from their uniforms - even if the entire party is equipped with DLC or New Game + skins that bear no resemblance to the school uniforms (pajamas and bathing suits, for example). Another example would be accessories, i.e. in Cold Steel III, a kid named Ken comments regarding Machias "Who's this weird, old glasses guy?" even if you equipped him with the contact lenses accessory and he therefore isn't wearing glasses, or Juna lamenting that she's at the beach while having forgotten to pack a bathing suit - while wearing a swimsuit skin.
  • In New Game Plus, you can carry your link EXP for free, meaning that across multiple playthroughs (or even possibly your second playthrough if you really play a lot) you could have link level 5 between Jusis and Machias / Laura and Fie. Doesn't matter - Jusis and Machias will still behave early-on as if they can't stand the sight of each other and Laura and Fie will still have their tiffs. And their links will still break in the respective storyline battles, even if said link carries the power of link level 5. It's actually impossible to win those fights until after those links break, even though it's possible to get the boss to drop to 0 HP in one turn.
  • In Cold Steel III, one of the bonding events involves helping Altina to choose a school club for the Thors Branch Campus. If you do the event, then ultimately he is with her as she joins the Swimming Club. That evening, however, when he speaks with her in the town cafe, even if you did the event he will comment "Oh, I heard you picked a club. So you're in the Swimming Club with Leonora, huh," as if this information had come to him secondhand.
  • In Cold Steel III, a big issue in the early part of the game is that Rean is no longer able to freely use his Spirit Unification Super Mode ("ogre power") due to it having gone out of control before during the war in North Ambria. In a New Game Plus, you have free access to it in battle, but for story purposes the other characters will still act as if he isn't using it.
  • During the Vantage Masters match against Rutger in III, it's stated that the premade deck the player can use is a copy of his. However, his actual Master Card is Beast, which the player doesn't get even if they get pick the premade deck. Additionally, he has at least two copies of Geune-Foss, despite the starting screen showing the player has only one, meaning even his non-master loadout is different. Finally, the post-match cutscene shows Rutger had cards that weren't in the premade deck, such as the Vanish card and two copies of a 5 ATK Heaven natial.
  • The anti-frustration feature about cooking in III means that members of the Old Class VII can cook for Rean when they're not even in the same part of the country as him.
• Genre Shift: The Trails games have mixed fantasy and sci-fi from the start but it's still somewhat jarring when the ending of Cold Steel I suddenly introduces Real Robot-style Humongous Mecha and their associated tropes to the setting.
• Get Out!: The girls dismiss Crow's idea of having them in bikinis for the School Festival with that statement.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The game has two in Cold Steel IV alone:
  • The Omegacean enemy, which is a humongous crab enemy with apparently two mouths.
  • The Crabandit, a trial chest boss, which basically grew to to its current size due to pollution.
• Global Airship: The party ends up having access to the Courageous in Cold Steel II at the start of Act II. In Cold Steel IV, the party first uses Gaius's Merkabah 8 throughout all of Act II until it gets damaged at the climax of the chapter by the Aion Type Alpha II. And in Act III, the players get access to the Courageous II, an upgraded model compared to the previous ship as the previous one was destroyed at the climax of Cold Steel III.
• Go-Karting with Bowser:
  • The idea of an A-rank Bracer and an Ouroboros Enforcer living together under one roof, with both perfectly aware of who the other is, sounds almost like the set-up to a piece of in-universe sketch comedy. But it happens and it produces no shortage of amusing moments.
  • A mandatory story event in Cold Steel III has you playing Vantage Masters against Rutger Claussell.
  • During Rean's time aboard the Pantagruel, he starts talking with Bleublanc and ends up having a lengthy, pleasant conversation where Bleublanc regales him with all kinds of stories, including a recounting of the events of Sky SC. It's implied that Rean spends several hours just hanging out with Bleublanc and listening to his stories. Eventually, the absurdity of the situation dawns on Rean and he hangs a lampshade on it in his internal monologue before excusing himself.
    Rean: (Wait, why am I sitting here having a friendly discussion with a wanted criminal?)
• Good Witch Versus Bad Witch: Emma and Vita. This lasts until Vita's Heel–Face Turn in Cold Steel III.
• Graduate from the Story: Somewhat unexpectedly, actually, but at the end of CS2 it's revealed that all of Class VII except Rean has decided to graduate a year early and are cramming their second year's worth of material into a few weeks in order to do so.
• Gratuitous English: The Stinger at the end of the Japanese version of Cold Steel III features the text "Watch the Damn Fairy Tale until it has finished" in English. The English localization cleans it up, changing it to the much more grammatical "To see this wretched fairy tale through to the end."
• Great Escape: In Cold Steel II, this is what Rean and Alfin do when they're at the Pantagruel, the main ship of the Noble Alliance.
• The Great Offscreen War: Numerous mentions are made to the War of the Lions, a major civil war that was fought 250 years before the events of the game and was ended by Emperor Dreichels, the founder of Thors Academy. And then there's the Hundred Days War with Liberl from Erebonia's point of view. And in Cold Steel III, there was also another war that happened between the people of the fire and the people of the earth. As revealed in the Black Records of II and both Roselia and Thomas telling the story, both Arc Rouge and Lost Zem had a Mutual Kill with each other with one body flung at Bryonia Island while the other got flung all the way towards Nord with Osgiliath Basin being the center of impact.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Georg Weissman ends up becoming this in the Erebonian arc (he was a straight up Big Bad in the Liberl arc) as a lot of tragedies that had happened to the series can be attributed back to him. In short, he makes Lechter's dad pull off the Hamel Incident with Osborne trying to stop it, only for his house to get raided a few days before said incident which kills off Osborne's wife and nearly kills Rean. Not long afterwards the Hamel Incident itself happens and changes the lives of Joshua, Loewe, and Ash as the former two become Ouroboros Enforcers while the latter ends up carrying a curse in his eye where it keeps telling him to "kill the ones responsible" and is then taken to Raquel. Lechter ends up with the Ironbloods after his father was found guilty to atone for his father's sins, Osborne becomes an expansionist to prepare to kill the curse of Erebonia, and Crossbell is invaded at the end of Cold Steel II. In short, everything in the Cold Steel series and possibly the entire series happens is because Weissman pulls the metaphorical trigger. The Erebonian curse wasn't helping things but he made it a lot worse.
  • Ishmelga in Cold Steel IV. It is revealed that this thing is the root of all the troubles in Erebonia. And oh, the curse you've been hearing about in rumors in the past 3 games? They're actually referring to this thing!
• The Greatest Story Never Told:
  • Class VII's heroic efforts to stop the firing of the railway guns of Garrelia Fortress are never publicly acknowledged, as the ILF's attack on the fortress was classified. And they also become moot when the entire fortress is completely destroyed two months later.
  • There's also the War of the Lions, or rather the part where Divine Knights were used. And in Cold Steel III, when Rean is asked by one of his students as to whether Rean fought against Lianne Sandlot, Rean refuses to release the information to his class that he did fight against the Lance Maiden (who now calls herself the Steel Maiden) himself. Nor does he release the information that Dreichels used to be Valimar's Awakener.
  • The truth behind Chancellor Osborne's goals, namely that he caused a world war to create the conditions in which a shattered, insane Sept-Terrion could be reassembled so that it could be killed once and for all, ending the curse it had spread over Erebonia for centuries is never told to the public, mainly because nobody would believe it.
• Green Hill Zone: The Nord Highlands is a huge, sprawling field so large that you need a horse to traverse through it. It's the very first area in the entire arc you visit that is more open-ended than the other areas before it and since (which are just straight pathways with branching paths), and there are a lot of nooks which contain treasure chests for those who seek to explore the field.
• Guest-Star Party Member: An entire quest ends up becoming this in Cold Steel III as Rean has to call up quite a lot of characters that aren't part of Class VII. With the exception of Sara who is permanent, Rean calls up Claire, Sharon, Agate, Tita, Olivert, and Tio, with Lechter taking charge as he's the one who requested this. And yes, all of them are in the party at the same time (though players can only have 4 in the field, 2 in support, and the rest as reserve).
• Guide Dang It!: Some of the books have extremely strict windows to obtain them. While often checking the book store as soon as possible each chapter and being sure to talk to every NPC will net you many of them, Chapter 4 pulls the zinger of having two issues of the Imperial Chronicle available at two different points in the chapter, when thus far you've had no reason to check back by book stores after you bought up their inventory.
• Harder Than Hard: Nightmare difficulty is intended to be this if you choose it from the start. If you choose it on New Game Plus, however, you can carry all your levels and equipment, etc., from the first playthrough, which effectively makes it ridiculously easy throughout most of the game right up until around the end when your levels become comparable to those of the enemies again.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Emma and Machias both subvert this, particularly Emma who won a scholarship to Thors by acing a national exam, despite not having the advantages the Nobles get (access to extra tutoring, more leisure time and so on) and she manages to be the top performer on the Midterm Exam. Machias, who is equally dedicated but for different reasons, scores second on the entrance exam and ties Emma for first on the midterms.
• Hate at First Sight: Given Erebonia's extremely strong class differences, it was practically inevitable that this should happen to Machias and Jusis when they met. One is the son of a champion of the faction that wants to overturn the current Noble-led political order, the other is a son of one of the Four Families and brother of the champion of the faction trying to maintain the status-quo.
• Hate Plague: One of the effects of the Curse.
• Hate Sink:
  • Cold Steel III generated a lot of hate towards quite a lot of characters, and not necessarily the ones players were expecting. Special mention goes to George Nome/Copper Georg, Cedric, Black Alberich, and of course Chancellor Osborne. However, with the exception of Black Alberich, Cold Steel IV does manage to subvert the Hate Sink status of these characters to varying degrees.
  • The "Provincial Army Officer" in the first game. You actually encounter three of them (two from the same Province), but they all share the same model, voice actor, and personality. They basically play the part of a whiny Obstructive Bureaucrat that will do everything in their power to get in Class VII's way and perform extremely questionable actions to uphold their ruling noble's will.
  • Duke Cayenne and Duke Alberea are this to some players in II for kidnapping Princess Alfin, torching Celdic, and attempting to torch Ymir, among many other atrocities.
• Haunted Castle: Lohengrin Castle is popularly believed to be haunted by the ghost of Lianne Sandlot, who died under mysterious circumstances shortly after the end of the Lion War. When Class VII visits it, it is indeed apparently haunted by ghosts and animated suits of armor and weaponry. Not by Lianne though, which would have been difficult since she's not actually dead.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Lose the final battle of the first game and it's game over, of course. Win the final battle, against Crow and his Ordine and he just gets back up, informs Rean that he's been operating a Divine Knight for three years, compared with Rean who just started, and crushes him good, forcing the ending of the game in which Rean has to unwillingly abandon his classmates and flee in order to live.
• Heal It with Water: All single-target healing arts are of the water element. Multi-target healing arts are air element, and the ultimate "revive/heal everyone and grant regeneration" spell is space element.
• Heir Club for Men: Downplayed but present in Erebonia. Unlike Liberl, the royal family and much of the noble class believe in a society where men typically inherit their lands and titles from their fathers. As a result, despite being the second eldest, Princess Alfin is passed up for her younger brother, Cedric, for the rite of succession. (Olivert's position as the son of the Emperor's mistress means any scenario where he'd be Emperor would likely involve a succession crisis.) It's not especially prominent, however; by III, the single most powerful noble in Erebonia besides the royal family is Mildine, who the player knows as Musse, and there are various other noblewomen who either hold a high rank in the political sphere, such as some of the noblewomen in Ordis, or in the military, most prominently with Generel Aurelia Le Guin. Even when a man inherits their family's legacy, the women are often expected to perform some other task that gives them some degree of power, such as Vincent Florald achieving his family's fief while his sister, Ferris, is put in charge of the family-owned trading business.
• Henotheistic Society: Zig-zagged. While the people of Zemuria worship the goddess Aidios as their sole deity, the nomads of the Nord Highlands (which includes Gaius Worzel) worship the winds instead, but they also integrate some of Aidios' teachings into their beliefs as well, creating a cross-belief system in which the two faiths can co-exist. As a result, the nomads don't prefer one belief over the other.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • Everyone assigned to Group B for the Field Exams gets to be the hero of a story the player only hears about after the fact. They always seem to get sent to locations the player has heard about in previous games (Parm and Saint-Arkh) or which are probably going to be important later (Byronia Island).
  • Toval, a Bracer who does a lot of off-screen string-pulling to bail Class VII out of trouble several times, at Sara's request. And one of the main characters in 'Carnelia' is based on him. Actually, most major non-villainous characters outside Class VII fall into this.
  • Inverted with Bleublanc, who's a major antagonist in earlier games but doesn't play a big role in Cold Steel, making him a villain of another story. He is however, the primary antagonist of the audio drama "Returning Home" and is back in Cold Steel II as Ouroboros' Enforcer No. X.
  • And from a more literal use of this trope, Rean is this in the Divertissement Chapter.
  • In a low-key example, many of the other students at Thors Military Academy have their own lives and story arcs that you get glimpses of if you talk to them during Free Days.
• Hidden Depths: He doesn't get much of a chance to show them off in Cold Steel but Patrick clearly does have some redeeming qualities buried beneath his jerkassery.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Micht's shop is the same one described in the Carnelia novels, just located in Trista instead of Heimdallr. Disguised as a curio shop, it's really a front for his business of selling information to Bracers and the like.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: In Cold Steel IV, if you talk with Ashleigh during the Eventide segment, she comments that asking her to rent out Mishelam for a send-off party instead of the usual payment is "No ^woolskin off my ^Pomback."
• Home by Christmas:
  • The surprise attack the rebels launch at the end of the first game gives them such an advantage that at the beginning of the second (which starts about a month later), they're certain the war will be over in another month or so. It is, but they aren't the ones who won.
  • At the start of the fourth game, the government announces that the planned war against Calvard will be over by the end of the year. It's over much sooner than that - the Emperor recovers sufficiently to order the Imperial Army to stand down and withdraw two days in.
• Hopeless Boss Fight
  • You can't beat Sara in Chapter 2^note Even if your party is strong enough to knock her HP down to zero in New Game + mode, as soon as her HP hits zero, she unleashes a one-hit KO attack that immediately incapacitates your party, you can't beat C in Chapter 4 and you definitely can't beat Victor in Chapter 5. Then, because the game wouldn't be complete without one more you can't beat Scarlet's Spiegel while on foot. All of these are justified by the plot.
  • Fairly early on in Cold Steel II, you're tossed into a boss battle with two members of Fie's former jaeger corps, Zephyr. Both have around 90,000 HP and Fie says before the battle that the party has about a "20% chance" of victory. You're allowed to whittle around a quarter of that before both use their S-Crafts. The battle ends automatically a few turns later and it's revealed that they were holding back. Later on, a fight against Jusis' brother Rufus is so hopeless that on the first playthrough the only way to survive the first art is to use a Master Quartz with auto-reflect or auto-revive capabilities. And if he ever drops below 50% health (which has to be done if you want to max out AP over the course of the game), he'll spam S-Crafts until the party drops.
    • There's another hopeless fight in between those two where you fight Duvalie and McBurn. To get the bonus AP, you have to defeat Duvalie. Duvalie herself isn't too terribly hard to beat if you do everything possible to max out your damage output and blow 200 CP S-Crafts, but McBurn will effortlessly wipe you out in no time.
• Hope Spot: In Cold Steel III, the Courageous manages to make a Big Damn Heroes moment with Toval, Olivert, and Victor inside the ship and help out. But before they can land the ship, Alberich pulls out a detonator and detonates the Courageous in the air.
  • Most of the 4th act is this really. Ouroboros seems to have been driven off, Cedric and the Thors Primary seem to have made their peace with the Branch school and there's a big ceremony where both students join hands, there's a big festival and all kinds of happy fun times and bonding events, and everything seems to be going fine. General Craig even tells Rean that as far as he knows Osborne is really a good guy deep down because he knew him as a young man and he really was a loving father and family man before his house was attacked. There's a big party where all the characters dance and everything seems great. Then Ash shoots the Emperor and Osborne uses it as an excuse to declare war with Calvard, before revealing that he and Ouroboros were in league, Cedric is still just as nasty as before and it was all part of their plan.
• Hot Springs Episode: A number of events in Cold Steel IV happen where the cast takes a bath at the hot springs at Elin. Later on, they also have events that happen at the Courageous II ship since Olivert had specified the engineers to build one for the ship. It's also revealed in Cold Steel IV that Rean is a fanatic for hot springs in general (due to Ymir being a hot spring town).
• How We Got Here: Most of the first game is a flashback before the events of the Garrelia Fortress. Ditto with Cold Steel III with the Juno Naval Fortress.
• HP to One: The final boss of Cold Steel II, Loa Luciferia, has a move that can do this to everyone in the active battle party.
• Humongous Mecha: A series tradition. There are returning archaisms like the export-model Tri-Attacker and enhanced versions of previous machines such as the Zephyranthes (a refined Liore Gun-EZ). Then you have two new types of machines. The centerpiece of the games are the Divine Knights, machines from Erebonia's distant past. Rean is chosen as the Awakener of Valimar the Ashen Knight at the end of Cold Steel while Crow is the Awakener of Ordine the Azure Knight. There are also the Panzer Soldat manufactured by Reinford's Fifth Division with help from Ouroboros, which are implied to be based on the Divine Knights using Ordine as a model. The biggest ones however are both Arc Rouge and Lost Zem. Lost Zem's remains are at Nord Highlands while Arc Rouge's remains are at Bryonia Island. Both are so big, a Divine Knight's size is a toothpick compared to them.
  • Cold Steel III reveals successor models to Azure's three Aions, whilst Cold Steel IV introduces the "Zauber Soldats," which can be described as the Black Workshop's attempt at taking the inner workings of Magic Knights and combining them with Panzer Soldat technology.
• Hypocrite: Downplayed when the ILF sides with the Noble faction to defeat the Reformist faction, due to the latter faction's expansionist policies. While the Noble faction aren't obsessed as the Reformists with gaining new territory, they are still willing to annex other lands if it suits their purposes. In this case, the ILF can be seen as picking what they consider to be the lesser of the two evils.

I - M

• I Have Your Wife: Duke Albarea tries to use the family of his political and/or military opponents as hostages on multiple occasions.
• Idea Bulb: An anime-style idea bulb will sometimes appear over a character's head when they get an idea, such as in Chapter 4 when Emma excuses her talking with her cat, Celine, as talking with a friend on her ARCUS unit. It also sometimes shows up when Rean answers a question in class.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Linde and Vivi are virtually indistinguishable aside from the fact that they have different hairstyles. The two occasionally adopt the same style in order to mess with people, like when Vivi takes advantage of this to pull a prank on Rean.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Cold Steel II, with Class VII leaving their VIP, Crown Prince Cedric, unattended and went towards Crow who has his heart pierced. Why nobody decided to carry him when they all went to Crow is anyone's guess. If it wasn't for Rufus' timely appearance, who knows what Duke Cayenne would have done with the crown prince. To make it worse, the whole reason Crow had gotten wounded in the first place was because two boss fight previous, everyone had been so busy talking to Crow that they failed to notice Cayenne taking Cedric and using him to revive Testa-Rossa, triggering another round of boss fights. Though by Cold Steel III, fans wished Class VII held the Idiot Ball a lot longer.
  • Cold Steel IV gives another one for Class VII where they didn't have an escape plan when they decided to break Rean out of the Black Workshop in case their mission was gonna fail (it wasn't, otherwise the plot wouldn't progress and Rean wouldn't be able to take up the protagonist mantle) or if they get cornered by the bad guys (which did happen). Rean, who just woke up from his berserk self, still tired from barely any sleep, all chained up, and probably malnourished, had to come up with an Indy Ploy to get out of there by signalling Gaius and Emma.
  • The Curse of Erebonia acts as this for the entire series and much of the setting's backstory, making various characters significantly dumber while they're under its effect. Occasionally this makes the heroes' job a bit easier.
• Idle Animation: With the huge roster of characters, listing specific idle animations for all characters would liklely take all day To name just a couple examples, Rean will cross his hands, pumping them, and say "Okay!" while Fie will rub one of her eyes and mumble "Sleepy." Also, all of the characters will blink at regular intervals.
• If You Can Read This: In Cold Steel III, the text on Crow's supposed grave is the same warning that appears on William Shakespeare's grave - "Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones." Angelica makes a comment about going to Gehenna if she's wrong about what's in there before digging it up.
• I'm Standing Right Here: In Cold Steel IV, the party compliments Tita on the power of her Orbal Gear, but notes that she didn't have to stick with them, that she could have stuck with Agate and helped him and her other friends from Liberl. She tells them that she's a branch campus student first and foremost and she explained all of this to Agate the night before. Ash suggests that something else may have happened between her and Agate afterwards, but she replies that he just gave a little smile and patted her on the head. Altina says that as far as head-pats go, it was probably more innocent that the ones that Rean gives out, Musse saying that she might be right, but that Rean doesn't realize the implications of what he's doing half the time. Kurt comments that he hopes he doesn't end up like that and Rean thinks to himself "I'm RIGHT here, you guys..."
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: In Cold Steel IV, Rean can encounter Tatiana joining Musse and Maya for her first tea ceremony, which Musse suggests Tatiana pair with conversation about "the fascinating books you've been reading. Those beautiful stories about passionate men." When she asks if Rean would care to join them, he replies that it sounds fun, but he has to go polish his tachi.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Elliot uses a variation on the Provincial Army when investigating a theft at the Celdic markets. Two merchants had their stalls robbed, Heinz who sold accessories and Marco who sold produce. Elliot asks the army if they had any leads on where Marco's stole bracelets were. The army corrects him that it was actually Heinz who had bracelets stolen... but if they were telling the truth about not having investigated, there's no way they could've know that...
• In Medias Res: Cold Steel begins on 8/31/1204 as Class VII, Sara and Neithardt fight terrorists attacking Garrelia Fortress. The next five Chapters are spent explaining how they got there.
• Inconsistent Spelling:
  • With the game remastered with higher quality visuals when released on Steam, this issue becomes much more pronounced as previously low-resolution textures are now replaced with high-resolution ones and their text are far more legible than before. A lot of these were fixed with a huge unannounced patch that was released on October 11, 2017.
    • In Chapter 6, one of the signposts on the highway actually spells Ymir, Rean's hometown, as Yumir, and the same mistake appears on the map of the train lines - the line from Roer to Ymir is the Yumir branch line. In the same chapter, the signboard for Roer airport spells the town's name as Rour.^note It also states that it leads to the Arraival and Departure halls.
    • In Cold Steel II, every reference to the town is translated as Ymir, while the branch line alone is translated as Yumir Branch Line. Cold Steel III then makes the confusion complete, by spelling it as Yumir everywhere.
    • In the final chapter, the mallet used for the Mishy Panic minigame actually has Michy Panic written on it. The background in the room also spells Mishy with a c, as does all the posters around campus. The texture patch later fixes the posters and the background of the room.
  • In the digital DLC soundtrack sampler for the Steam version of Cold Steel IV, the track "Hidden Village Eryn" (theme for Eryn Village) is titled "Hidden Village Elin."
  • The logos on the tennis outfits in Cold Steel III read "Stregar" even though the company is referred to as "Strega" in all dialogue.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Lots of them (and extra lots if you include things the audience didn't explicitly know but could guess with high accuracy based on past games), including Alisa revealing what the 'R' in her last name is short for to the entire group and Emma revealing to Rean just how she's able to do some of the stunts she's performed over the course of the game. Some of these are limited to Bond Events while others occur during the normal plot.
  • Towards the beginning of Cold Steel IV, Juna Crawford learns that Giliath Osborne is Rean Schwarzer's father. The player already learned this along with Rean himself and the rest of the old Class VII towards the end of Cold Steel II. Altina Orion already knows from having been Rean's partner for over a year, while Kurt Vander guessed as much from knowledge he had gleaned from other Vanders and his use of the "Unclouded Eye" technique which Rean taught him. Thus, the news is only a shock to Juna, who upon learning just what burden Rean is carrying, becomes even more fired up to go rescue him from the Empire's captivity.
• Instant Expert:
  • Played straight and then almost immediately subverted. While being chosen by a Divine Knight grants an Awakener the knowledge of how to operate one, that doesn't mean you'll know how to operate it well, as Crow points out that his three year head start gives him an overwhelming advantage over Rean (including the knowledge of how to use Ordine's Super Mode), just before he kicks Rean's ass.
  • Played straight with Instructor Neithardt in the sequel, who's able to pilot a Spiegel very effectively despite having no experience with one before. His test fight against Rean is one of the tougher mech battles up to that point, to boot.
• The Internet Is for Porn: In Cold Steel III, Randy is disappointed by the Erebonian Empire's orbal network. It's so boring - if he were in Crossbell, he "could bring up some swimsuit babes just like that."
• Interrupting Meme: III's Running Gag where Rean gets interrupted from summoning Valimar or using his Spirit Unification has become this among fans.
• Invisible Backup Band: Inverted. During the concert, the final song has five singers, three guitarists, a drummer and a keyboarder. All the music comes from one voice and a keyboard, with the guitars, percussion, or backup singers participating at all.
• Irony: Cold Steel IV reveals that the general location of the Black Workshop was through a route that Class VII passed by to get to Alster. Had they went to the other route, they would have found the entrance to the Black Workshop.◊ Getting in however is a different story.
• I Surrender, Suckers: C drops his blade and appears to surrender after you fight him for the second time. Rean realizes very quickly that it's a ploy but C only needed that second's distraction to arrange his escape.
  • Weaponized (again) by Gilbert in Cold Steel IV, where he tries to surrender except its a ploy for him to hand you a grenade. Except he accidentally drops it, damaging you and him in the process.
• I Think You Broke Her: Millium delivered this line when Elliot changed into his Drill Sergeant mode, stating nobody was allowed to get out of the old school building until their concert rehearsal was finished (Though Emma's reaction has more to do with the revealing concert dress she's going to have to wear while singing in front of the whole school in a few days than the rehearsal schedule).
  Emma: ...Fine... I suppose I'll just have to cast my shame to the wind and go through with it *grumble* *mumbles* It's not like I want to wear an outfit like this, but I might never get the chance to again. So, come on, Emma! Just grin and bear it! *blank stares*
  Rean: E-Emma?
  Millium: Oh no... I think we broke Emma!
  • Another variant happens on the following day. After rigorous training, Crow suddenly announced the class had to prepare for an encore. An already exhausted Emma gave up and fell down on her knees.
  Millium: Ah! You killed her!
• It's All About Me: A common factor among the Noble Faction
  • Duke Cayenne is obsessed with rehabilitating the reputation of his ancestor who led one of the losing factions in the War of the Lions, to the point where he starts another civil war so that he can win it.
  • Duke Albarea is obsessed with ensuring the ascendancy of Nobles in general and House Albarea in particular. His relationship with Jusis centers entirely around how his second son's conduct reflects on (his perception of) the reputation of the House. He also sees absolutely nothing wrong with doing immoral or outright illegal things to bring about his goals, and even when those actions cause his allies and the rest of his family to abandon him in disgust, he still can't understand that he did anything wrong and rants about how they all betrayed him.
  • General Le Guin wants to be a famous warrior, so she goes to war in the hopes of making a name for herself by defeating the greatest warriors on the other side.
  • McBurn doesn't care about the war one way or the other, all he wants is the opportunity to find and fight someone good enough to force him to go all out.
• It's Always Spring: Despite most of the second game taking place during December, the locations that were visited in both games don't look like they've changed seasons. For example, the flowers in the Thors Academy garden are still in bloom on December 30th.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: Musse's Mille Mirage plan to counter Operation Jormungandr. In essence, she convinces the majority of the continent, including Liberl, Remiferia, and Calvard, as well as allied units from Leman, Ored, and Arteria, plus resistance fighters from within Crossbell and North Ambria to unite with her own Weissland Army - Erebonian defectors gathered from the remnants of the Noble Alliance - under the command of Cassius Bright and fight against the Erebonian army, led by Osborne. The scope and scale of the expected conflict is staggering, consisting of over 2 million soldiers and with combined military and civilian casualties expected to spiral into the millions. Musse herself is so horrified by the potential scope of the damage that there are several points where she seems almost eager to die simply to assuage her guilt.
• Japanese School Club: It's a JRPG with a Military Academy setting, so of course, this is going to come up. Everyone in Class VII eventually joins one. Alisa (Lacrosse), Elliot (Music), Laura (Swimming), Machias (Chess), Jusis (Riding), Emma (Literature), Fie (Gardening) and Gaius (Art). Rean is volunteered into the 'help the Student Council President with her work' club, aka the Sidequest Club. Other clubs include Cooking, Fencing and Occult Studies. When Millium joins Class VII, she technically joins the Cooking Club, though mostly so she can eat the food. The fishing sidequest also more-or-less makes Rean an honorary member of the Fishing Club, which only has one other member anyway.
• Jurisdiction Friction: The regular and provincial armies tend to really resent it when the Railway Military Police use their authority to intervene 'to ensure the safety of the transportation system'. Claire couldn't care less, especially since the provincial forces are involved in the incidents that she's trying to resolve most of the time.
• Just Smile and Nod: In Cold Steel II, when Sara suggests that the final free day is a good day for the students of Class VII to "get some ooh-la-la," the other students mock her as being as "shining counterexample" of this, given the time that she spends alone in her room drinking. Gaius eventually suggests that the polite thing to do would be to just smile and nod, but they continue anyway, Fie suggesting that Sara should just find some cats to snuggle up with if she keeps setting her sights on men like Laura's dad (a famed swordsman known as the Radiant Blademaster.)
• Just Train Wrong: In chapter 4 of the first game, the party excuses themselves from a conversation with Lechter because they need to catch the train that just arrived. One problem: the announced train was a westbound train to Heimdallr, and they were waiting for the eastbound train to Bareahard.
• King Mook: All the Trial Chest bosses in Cold Steel II and Cold Steel IV.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Jusis in Cold Steel III on a White Stallion no less, when he saves Rean and New Class VII when they are surrounded by Jaegers. Even Rean, who usually isn't all that sarcastic, lampshades this trope and makes a joke about it.
• Knowledge Broker: Micht's real profession as revealed in the first game.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: As Cold Steel II is virtually an Immediate Sequel to a game that ended on a Cliffhanger, all of the gigantic twists at the end of the first game are the basic foundation of the plot. In particular Valimar, whose existence alone is a big spoiler for the first game, is all over the opening movie, is one of the first things you see on starting the game proper and is central to an entire game mechanic. Crow and Vita being villains and the Noble Alliance taking over most of Erebonia and starting a civil war are more examples of huge reveals from the first game that are common knowledge in the second. 'Olivier' is really Prince Olivert, which Falcom hasn't even pretended should be a surprise to anyone for years. Beyond that, the plot of the game basically runs on countdowns to events foreshadowed in Azure and major backstory events are very briefly alluded to on the assumption that the player already knows the details and their significance, like the significance of North Ambria and what it means when the three higher elements are activated in a region.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Class VII members get red uniforms, while everyone else is divided by noble/commoner status into white and green respectively. This changes in III, when all main campus students get red uniforms, and the branch campus students (who are the focus characters) wear blue, regardless of what class they're in.
  • In Cold Steel IV, Alberich, using their designated colors, ranks the power of each Divine Knight as follows:
    • Ashen, Azure, and Palatinate (Valimar, Ordine, and Zektor) are at the bottom of the barrel.
    • Vermillion (Testa-Rossa) would normally be on the same level as the above, but retaining some of the Vermillion Apocalypse's power gives it a notable edge.
    • Silver and Gold (Argreion and El-Prado) are a grade above the previous four.
    • Finally, Black (Ishmelga) stands above all others as the strongest.
• Leaked Experience: In II although you can switch in and out party members in a fight (there are 7 people you can bring in one party), you're only required to fight with four. Those who gets left behind in Courageous, however, don't gain one.
  • This also applies to the PC port of the first game. When you win a battle, everyone in your party- including characters in reserve who didn't participate in the fight- will receive experience. Those not in your party, however, do not gain any experience.
• Leaking Can of Evil: The source of Erebonia's curse. The fused Earth/Fire Sept-Terrion of Steel, The Great One, was insane. To contain it, the Witches and Gnomes sealed it in the seven Divine Knights. That proved insufficient, and it created the Dark Dragon. After that much of its remaining power was sealed in the Divine Beast of Earth, but that still wasn't enough to keep the curse from leaking out on occasion and influencing people to make the worst possible decisions at the worst times to induce conflict. Osborne's ultimate plan was to free all the pieces of the Great One and reunite them so that it could be killed once and for all.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: If Millium is in your party when you complete the sixth floor of the old schoolhouse in the first game, she'll complain that, "That can't be the end! That'd make this the worst-designed dungeon ever!" Also, the party in general comments about the wrongness of it being the final floor from go once you see on the elevator panel that it's the last location listed.
  • In II she'll comment "Now that's a final dungeon" when the final dungeon shows up. Funnily enough, it's not the actual final dungeon of the game either.
• The Legend of X: The latest in a long line of the Legend of Heroes: Trails of/in/to/from series.
• Lens Flare: Seems to be a common effect in any area where you can see the sun. It's particularly noticeable in the Nord Highlands.
• Lethal Chef: Played with. Every member of the party has some recipes that they're good at and some that they're terrible at. For example, Jusis can make an incredible herb chowder but can't make edible tomato sandwiches. This is important because there are three unofficial sidequests connected with cooking: Instructor Thomas and one of the upper-class dorm maids are looking for unique dishes (the maid the highest quality examples and Thomas the lowest quality ones), and will pay in items for every five examples provided, and in the last chapter, Margarita (herself an oblivious Lethal Chef) will provide a Master or Rare (if the Master Quartz was received in a previous playthrough) Quartz if you can present her with a notebook that shows all eighty (Twenty recipes times four levels of quality) dishes in it. Similar unofficial sidequests occur in the second game.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Played straight when Crow tosses Rean a sword so he can fight at his best, even asking him to bear with the fact that the Spiegel's sword isn't the equal of Rean's own sword but he doesn't have a Humongous Mecha sized katana available. Then subverted after Rean appears to win, when Crow activates Ordine's Super Mode, which Rean doesn't know how to activate on his own machine.
  • Happens again in Cold Steel II with Angelica and her father Marquis Rogner with their Soldats. They go one-on-one while ordering their followers to not interfere. After a brief battle, Angelica wins and Marquis Rogner takes his loss surprisingly well and agrees to pull the Nortia Provincial Army out of the war.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: In the English dub, Machias will say this word-for-word if you choose him as a partner for cooking and the result is a peculiar dish.
• Limited Wardrobe: The first game in the series to completely justify this is also the one to avert it. The members of Class VII obviously wear the same outfit because it's the uniform of Thors Military Academy. The leap to 3D also allowed Falcom to make alternate costumes so everyone has a few opportunities to change their clothes, more so with DLC casual clothing and New Game Plus bonuses.
• Little Hero, Big War: While Class VII's actions are critical to every campaign they participate in in the war, it's made quite clear that the Imperial Army is doing the lion's share of the fighting. In many cases, the only reason Class VII is free to act is because the Army is pinning down the bulk of the rebel forces somewhere else.
• Living with the Villain: Surprisingly common in Cold Steel:
  • The super-maid Sharon is actually an Ouroboros Enforcer, which theoretically places her in conflict with many of Class VII's allies, like Sara and the Intelligence Division, although this is ultimately a subversion as no conflict ever arises from it. This elevates to Go-Karting with Bowser once everyone realizes who Sharon is.
  • Turns out that the terrorist "C" that Rean spends most of the game hunting down was actually living just across the hall from him.
• Look Behind You:
  • In one of the sidequests which has Rean trying to bust Rex for selling candid photos, he corners him at the Old Schoolhouse. Rex then distracts Rean by asking what Alisa's doing in a swimsuit. Rean soon realizes he fell for the oldest trick in the book!
  • Another one happens at Raquel in Cold Steel III where the informant Rean, Sara, and Angelica were chasing distracts them that there's a "naked hot woman in the corner." Rean turns his head a little bit, Sara just glances at the side claiming that she's not falling for that, and Angelica does a full 180 turn to find the woman, making Rean and Sara have a sweat drop and the informant running away.
• Loophole Abuse: Minors can't bet on horse races. But nothing's stopping certain schools hosting "sweepstakes" where students can "guess" which horse will win and receive prizes for guessing correctly. It's not technically underage gambling... Needless to say, Crow took part in these often.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Getting the bonus 3APs during the fight against Rufus in Cold Steel II. Good luck, if the Random Number God is feeling particularly nasty towards you, it'd let Rufus unleash Clamioh Solarion against you in his first turn by granting him zero arts, leading the battle to be over before it even starts. And oh, the game would potentially also just fail every single unbalance crafts you have. This in turn, means that if you previously failed your battle against Xeno and Leo, battle against Altina and Bleublanc (easy on it's own, but Altina's That One Attack makes completing this battle, which requires you to down both Bleublanc and Altina within 40 moves if you want that bonus AP, really challenging), and your battle against Duvalie and McBurn (another tough one since McBurn can potentially unleash a powerful arts attack on his first move, again ending the battle before it begins, or even continuously delay your party and hack away without giving you somuch of a turn- and you need to burn Duvalie down to size in this battle before McBurn can burn you), even if you got everything right, this is the end of your chance to unlock That One Achievement for this playthrough.
  • In Cold Steel IV getting the max 10AP requirement for reducing Osborne and Arianrhod's HP to a certain threshold at the same time at the end of the Black Workshop can be frustrating at times, especially if the player has no idea that's even possible. Especially since Arianrhod's HP is 1.5x less than Osborne's HP especially this early in the game and players might accidentally damage her before letting Osborne reach the HP threshold since the fight ends after either of their HP crosses the line. While thankfully they're not programmed to use their S-Craft this early in the game, they still have damaging attacks and they're ARCUS linked together, so they can deal even more damage if they manage a link attack (even more if they do a Rush attack). Both also have moves that can debuff your party (though Rean is immune to strength, defense, and speed debuffs for this fight as he has a permanent status buff for this fight only, although he's not in Spirit Unification), and both deal a lot of damage. Not only do you have to deal with Arianrhod's attacks while whittling down Osborne, but you also have to pray to Random Number God that Arianrhod doesn't miss her attack on someone who can counter her at a range where her HP crosses the line till you're ready to unleash a S-Craft to hopefully let both of their HP cross the line.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Subverted in Cold Steel IV. Imperial Governor Carl Regnitz tells the party that a number of people have spoken out about the Erebonian Empire's Operation Jormungandr against Calvard have died in accidents. It certainly sounds like he's talking about this trope, but then he explains that they really did die in accidents... accidents caused by the curse of the Great Twilight, which has been stoking the nation of Erebonia to war and is powerful enough in certain cases to alter fate itself.
• The Man Behind the Man: Duke Cayenne is supporting the Imperial Liberation Front. In turn, Ouroboros is supporting everyone, as they've been aiding Osborne's Reformist Faction for some time and they're the real power behind the ILF. They also have at least one agent keeping an eye on both Class VII and the Reinford Group and they're providing resources and know-how to Reinford. The ultimate example would undoubtedly be Vita, who seems to be running this part of the Phantasmal Blaze Plan and who helped Crow obtain Ordine.
• Manipulating the Opponent's Deck: In the "Blade" card minigame that you can play against your party members, one of the cards you can use is called "Mirror", which swaps both you and your opponent's decks around to each other. This can be a double-edged sword, however, because while you gain your opponent's deck, they gain yours as well, with the potential of them using whatever cards you had in your previous deck against you and vice versa.
• Marathon Boss: Typically, each Chapter will end with one of these. Chapter 6 is particularly sadistic since you have to fight Vulcan and C back to back. Hope you saved some items and CP.
• Marathon Level: In Cold Steel III, the Sanctuary of the Dark Dragon is a long dungeon that splits all of Class VII, both old and new, into three teams and each section is a long section that has players constantly switching between the three teams and that there are three floors overall, each with a different gimmick. If that wasn't enough, there are also enemies where one can reflect physical attacks infinitely and the other can do the same, only with arts^note Ellliot and Emma are the only ones who are safe to attack these as their normal attacks are magic.. After which, all 3 areas will have a boss fight at the end of their areas and when the three groups converge, they have to fight a boss who has to be damaged in certain phases, with Rean's group being the last. And then there's a Divine Knight battle afterwards with Rean and another member of new Class VII to take down the boss. And if you thought that was over, the final boss of that section is a Duel Boss between Rean and Azure Siegfried (though the battle takes place back beneath the Heimdallr catacombs). All this can take quite a long time to beat, even on a Very Easy difficulty. The final dungeon in comparison, Gral of Erebos, is just a short dungeon with no gimmicks but makes up for it with 3 boss gauntlets with each boss needing 3 specific party members that permanently leave the party after the boss fight is done, the final boss on foot, and two Divine Knight battles.
• Marshmallow Hell: Poor Rean can't catch a break in the prologue. He gets a face full of Alisa's cleavage and gets slapped for it despite what happened being an accident. It takes them three weeks to properly make up. Kurt also gets this in Cold Steel III from Juna, although she forgives him after two weeks worth of waiting to apologize.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Ironbloods are followers of the Blood and Iron Chancellor.
  • Vulcan carries a gatling gun resembling the M61 Vulcan and often uses fire metaphors in his dialogue (Vulcan is the name of the Roman god of fire).
  • Fie is small and highly evasive, has an affinity for wind-elemental quartz, and is generally very faerie-like. Her name resembles Fee, the German word for faerie, and may also have originated out-of-universe as a mid-clipping of Sylphid (which is also her in-universe nickname), a kind of wind faerie.
  • The dog in Legram is named Pero, which is one letter off from perro, the Spanish word for "dog".
  • The four provinces of Erebonia all have names indicating their geographical location:
    • Nortia Province is in the north.
    • Sutherland Province is in the south.
    • Lamare Province is by the ocean. La mare is French for "the pool", and in the Japanese script it's pronounced identical to the Spanish la mar meaning "the sea".
    • Kreuzen Province is adjacent to Crossbell. Kreuzen is German for "crosses".
  • Crows are considered tricksters in many cultures. Not only does Crow Armbrust have an openly tricksterish personality—his Establishing Character Moment involved him using a Shell Game-esque scheme to scam Rean out of 50 mira—but in the end he turns out to have tricked the entire cast and the player all along, as he has been the true identity of their enemy, C, all along.
  • The Lakelord family are all fishing enthusiasts who own a company that makes fishing tackle. They are also nobles, making the "lord" part literal as well.
  • Scarlet is a Fiery Redhead
  • Edel is a noble and captain of the gardening club. Her name is German for "noble", and it calls to mind the edelweiss flower.
  • The Black Records repeatedly refer to Erebonia as a land of darkness. Erebonia's name comes from Erebos, the Greek personification of darkness. The Black Records go on to state that Erebonia's name was derived from Erebos in-universe as well.
  • The guy who gives Rean his fishing equipment in Cold Steel III is named Rod.
  • Of course the girl named Mint has green hair.
  • One of the clerks at the horse racetrack in Heimdallr is named Rodeo.
  • Ash Carbide is a tough, gritty name for a tough, gritty dude.
  • George Nome has a bulbous nose, a rotund physique, and a gift for tinkering with machinery, much like a typical fantasy gnome. It later turns out that he literally is a Gnome, though Gnomes in this series are just a clan of humans and not a separate race.
  • McBurn does indeed have a gift for burning things, yes.
  • Towa Herschel is the granddaughter of an in-universe famous astronomer, and Cold Steel III goes into her interest in astronomy. This references either the Herschel Space Observatory or its namesake, real-life famous astronomer Sir William Herschel.
  • Aurelia is Latin for "the golden one" and she's a Color-Coded Character themed around gold: she has a golden battle aura, her nickname is the Golden Rakshasa^note in-universe, the color of her battle aura is the origin of her nickname, and her Panzer Soldat is painted gold.
  • The bartender at Mishelam is named Tapper.
  • The owner of the antique shop in Saint-Arkh, which has paintings hung up all over its walls, is named Louvre.
  • Musse Egret's last name is a kind of bird, and she has bird-themed Animal Motifs. She has avine body language, some of her crafts including Oiseau Bleu^note French for "blue bird" include bird imagery, and her Panzer Soldat is the Kestrel-β, also a kind of bird.
  • The shoe salesman in Times Department Store is named Trek.
• MegaCorp:
  • The Reinford Group makes almost all of Erebonia's military hardware and almost all orbment-related technology (such as luxury limousines and passenger airliners), aside from goods made by Epstein Foundation or the ZCF and imported. The primary check on their power is the fact that the Sachsen Mines that provide the bulk of their raw material are owned by the royal family rather than the company or the local nobility. Their secret Fifth Division is revealed in the Final Chapter to be a supporter of the Noble Faction and its proxy the Imperial Liberation Front. By implication, it's also likely to be a satellite branch of Workshop Thirteen.
  • The Kleist Company is to the Empire's service and retail industries what Reinford is to machinery. They have the economic power to either buy out or drive out any competitor and get up to some extremely shady business under the influence of the Osborne Government.
• Merchant City: Well, Merchant Town at any rate. Celdic is famous for its open-air market which attacts merchants from across Kreuzen Province and customers from across the Empire.
• Metropolis Level: The capital city of Heimdallr is the largest city in not just Erebonia itself, but the entire Zemurian continent, both in sheer size and population density. Many orbal cars and trams dot its ancient streets at a rapid pace, and because the city is still transitioning from the Orbal Revolution, it still retains its old Medieval feel all over, creating an Anachronism Stew. Some of Class VII's missions take them inside the capital, where there are a lot of shops to visit, locals to interact with, and monsters roaming in the catacombs below to defeat. In Cold Steel II, Heimdallr becomes a war zone in the wake of the Erebonian Civil War, being taken over by the Noble Faction and becoming the location of the Infernal Castle.
• Military Academy: Thors is historically meant to train soldiers, but recently many graduates have worked in civilian fields instead. In fact, the final chapter reveals that a full 60% of Thors graduates do not go into the military after graduation, and roughly a quarter of those who do seek a military career do so in the Provincial Armies rather than the Imperial Army, despite Thors being an Imperial institution. At one point in III it's mentioned that Osborne had just reorganized the Academy for the purpose of encouraging all students to enter some form of government service after graduating, whether it be in the military or not.
• Mildly Military: None of the students at Thors really carry themselves as officers in training. The fact that, on average, three-fifths of their graduates don't actually become officers might have something to do with this. By Cold Steel III, the only ones who are officially part of the military from Thors who show up in-game are Rean, who is already a war veteran, teaching Thors II, Millium who was already from the Intelligence Division, and Alan who joins the 4th Armored Division. Mint and Linde later on join Thors II as a mechanic and nurse respectively.
• Militaries Are Useless:
  • The Provincial Armies believe that their job is to help maintain their overlord's privileges rather than to help fulfill said overlord's responsibilities. As such, they see patrolling to clear monsters from the highways (Which is one of the few reasons why the Great Houses should need private military forces in areas which are in no danger of invasion) as busywork which they pass off to Class VII when they can, and ignore otherwise. The few times they bother to actually do anything, they deliberately make matters worse.
  • In the opening battle of the ILF's major offensive at the end of the first game, the defenders of Trista (Consisting of six teachers, ten students, and a maid) had a better showing for themselves than the entire 1st Armored Division of the Imperial Army.
  • Averted in the second game. Once the surprise of the initial assault wears off and the survivors get a feel for what the enemy's new weapon systems are capable of, the Imperial Army is far from incompetent.
  • The Army goes back to being useless in the third game, mainly because competent generals find themselves hamstrung by their civilian superiors, for reasons of politics and/or incompetence.
• Minigame Zone: The Academy Festival during the final Chapter includes an equestrian obstacle course, a Blade tournament where you can challenge an otherwise unplayable opponent and whack-a-Mishy.
• Moment Killer: Patrick develops a fairly obvious crush on Elise. Rean seems to enjoy ruining any chance Patrick might get to act on that crush.
• Mood Dissonance: Due to the various costumes and attachments that characters can wear during cutscenes, it sometimes makes serious scenes very funny to watch. Even moreso if players bought the DLC attachments where players can wear, for example, a VR headset, a sign that says "Haha", and an Osborne plushie on the left arm of the character. Or even a monster head and a swimsuit costume for the fireworks scene of the chosen girl in Cold Steel IV.
• Mood Whiplash: The heartwarming The Power of Friendship moment of the assembled Thors alumni finally getting through to Alan and breaking him free from the curse near the end of Cold Steel IV is only slightly spoiled by Beryl suddenly and inexplicably appearing in the crowd as well...
  Beryl: Heh. We're only human, after all. It's just part of what makes life so interesting.
  Vivi: (surprised shout) Beryl? When did you get here?!
  Elliot: (quietly) Nice to see you're just as stealthy as ever...
• Multiple Endings: Well, sort of. There will be a special scene with whoever's dance event you saw, just before the end of the game. It doesn't affect the ending in any significant way but it's a nice touch.
  • In a first for the series, Cold Steel IV has two different endings. The first ending has Rean, Crow and Millium sacrifice themselves in order to destroy Ishmelga once and for all. Beating the game once unlocks the requirements needed to view the Golden Ending, where Ishmelga is forced out of Valimar's body before being destroyed, and Everyone Lives.
• Mundane Utility: Alisa's father once took a grain of Zemurian Ore, the rarest and most valuable substance in the world... and used it as an oscillator to make the world's most accurate pocketwatch for his wife.
• Mutual Kill:
  • In the backstory of Erebonia as a whole 1200 years before the Erebonia arc started, both Arc Rouge (the Sept-Terrion of Fire) and Lost Zem (the Sept-Terrion of Earth) defeated each other and their empty shells were flung all the way towards Bryonia Island and Nord Highlands with the resulting left over power becoming the Great One. Realizing this is too powerful in the hands of one person, the two clans decided to split the power of the Great One into the seven Deus Excellion/Divine Knights.
  • The leaders of Zephyr and the Red Constellation, the continent's two most powerful Jaeger Corps ended up taking each other out in a duel that lasted three days. One of them got better.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: The Cryptids in the second game can use certain high-level Arts with no charge time. This mainly serves to make sure they quickly wipe you if you take them on too early.
• Mysterious Backer: The Imperial Liberation Front is said to have one, which keeps it supplied with Mira and resources. It's heavily implied to be Duke Cayenne of the Noble Faction, which is more or less confirmed in the epilogue but ultimately Ouroboros is behind them both, to the surprise of precisely nobody. The archaisms were a bit of a giveaway.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Towa, who is an important secondary character in every game in the series, shares a surname with Nayuta, the main character of the Trails spinoff game The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails.
  • A minor example in Cold Steel III has Juna telling a flirting Musse "Stop it, you!"^note "Anta wa yamei!" on multiple occasions, just like Estelle did with Olivier throughout Trails in the Sky.
  • A seemingly affable science guy revealed to be evil and named Georg. Are we talking Professor Alba or Georg Nome?
  • In Cold Steel II, after being bailed out from an extended boss fight, the party can return to the boss arena, where there is no one is to be seen, yet the party can hear the sounds of fighting somewhere. The same thing happens in Ys Origin when the search party bails out Toal from an extended fight with Zava.

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