YMMV / The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie

• Anti-Climax Boss: Not that Ishmelga of the End was any easier than the other bosses (other than having an Always Accurate Attack which means dodge tanking isn't viable and the fact that Rean, Crow, and Rufus aren't available), but after having to deal with Zoa Gilstein's ability to cheat by just ignoring the rules of Divine Knight combat, the Final Boss of the main game doesn't seem to stack up as much. Justified since at this point Zoa Gilstein has been unhooked from Elysium.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Many players praise the fight between Rean's party and C's party in Chapter 2 as the game unexpectedly switches perspectives and goes from fighting as Rean's team to fighting as C's team. The fact that it happens twice in the game is just icing on the cake.
  • The battle against Demon McBurn in Chapter 3 of Lloyd's route is a noted fan-favorite. Getting to fight against Ouroboros' strongest Enforcer with a party consisting of characters from all 3 previous arcs^note Tita and Agate for Liberl, Lloyd, Tio, and Wazy for Crossbell, and Alisa and Sharon for Erebonia, set to "Heavy Violent Match," makes for what many consider to be the highlight of the route.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • While Nightmare and Abyss difficulties can be beaten with proper preparation, quartz setups, and physical attacks are viable, Abyss difficulty with the Level +100 modifier to enemies is a different story where enemy stats are so bloated, physical attacks may as well not exist (a regular level 250 Mook can at least have 500,000 hit points for example and move a few turns before your fastest character can even have their first turn unless a player uses a field attack or stuns the enemy before approaching them). Many players recommend to get either Vita or Olivert's link level to 6 to gain the Arts Support 4 link ability to double the damage of arts, have the art caster link up to either character, and nuke the field. Meanwhile, one character will have to act as an evasion tank with the Aegis Master Quartz equipped to soak up the damage and act as bait for the enemies, and finally, Gaius uses his S-Craft to delay the boss as bosses will always take multiple turns due to their insane speed stat (that can reach up to 700 while your characters can get 350 at most).
  • Gaius is considered to be the best character of the game due to his S-Craft, Howling Heavens, which inflicts Absolute Delay to all enemies in the field; that means delaying enemies will always work. He's very absurd that he can even solo the post-game content with the Abyss difficulty with the +100 levels to enemies modifier (though he can't solo the Final Boss as the final boss has three phases) with the proper equipment.
• Ending Fatigue: Reaching the end of this game can take quite a long time before the game is over. After watching a long cutscene, players are thrust on the fight against Ishmelga Rean with Lloyd and Rean required for the fight. Then it switches to the Soldat fight where players have to fight Zoa Gilstein for a total of four times, with Ishmelga Rean dealing a Curb-Stomp Battle on the first three phases after the player depletes his HP to a certain point. It's then followed by a long cutscene and then the player has to fight the Final Boss of the game that requires Lloyd to be in the party but takes out Rean, Rufus, and Crow. And just when the player thinks its over, the player has to traverse through the final dungeon again with Lloyd, Lapis, Swin, Nadia, and Zeit to save Rufus' life while he enacts his Zero-Approval Gambit and then the game is finally over. Thankfully, the last part has no enemies so players can still take their time (even though the plot dictates that they must hurry as the whole place is about to get vaporized by a laser beam).
• Fan Nickname:
  • Rean Alter: Named after the normal ending Rean to differentiate from the true ending Rean. The game itself differentiates them by calling the former Ishmelga Rean.
  • The Reborn Imperial Liberation Front is sometimes called the Picnic Squad by fans thanks to Jingo describing the group as a grown up man going on a picnic with a bunch of kids. Nadia ends up calling the group the "Imperial Picnicking Front" after this since as far as Rufus is concerned, the ILF name has fulfilled its purpose at the end of Chapter 2.
• Game-Breaker: See its section here.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Upon the release of the game in Japanese, players encountered a bug that would force players to reload a save file due to the game not progressing further. In Chapter 3, there is a section in the game where players must switch between Lloyd and C's route to progress through their dungeons. However, if at any point the player decides to switch to either Rean's route or go to the True Reverie Corridor, then the bug occurs. The developers have acknowledged the bug and fixed it in the 1.02 patch.
  • Patch 1.03 introduced a nasty one in Rean's third chapter where after fighting the fake Arios at the watch tower, the control switches to Olivier with Schera as his Support Party Member. After his introduction, the player is immediately thrust into a fight against the guards. After fighting them, there's supposed to be a cutscene where Olivert finds a key card for the second floor. For whatever reason, this cutscene doesn't play as the game treats it as just a regular fight. This renders players being stuck forever (though amusingly, players can access areas they're not supposed to access when playing as Olivier only). Thankfully, this has been fixed very quickly in patch 1.04, released a day later.
  • For Asian copies, patch 1.06 has one of the worst bugs introduced where save files could not be loaded. While the save file is not corrupted or anything, players just can't load the save file.
  • A bug in the initial English release broke links completely for characters who weren't playable in Cold Steel IV on all platforms. This means that some characters aren't able to pull off certain abilities like Cover^note Ally blocks an attack for the linked person, Cheer^note Restore a certain amount of HP, or Arts Support^note Increase the damage of the art cast by the art user. to name a few, breaking certain strategies that are used for beating the game at higher difficulties. According to Durante (one of the developers for Reverie’s PC port), this actually came up during the QA session but was not fixed for release. The PC version was eventually fixed, with the PlayStation and Switch versions later following suit.
• Ho Yay:
  • As usual, Rean and Crow have this dynamic. Noticeable with the game letting Crow be at Rean's route twice compared to the rest of Old Class VII, who, barring Jusis, many feel are already Demoted to Extra to begin with (though the game cheats by acknowledging that Crow can be a part of the Extra Slot alongside Jusis, Millium, and Elliot, despite the fact that Crow only joins Rean's route at the last fight of chapter 2). He's also the only Old Class VII member who saves him directly from an enemy compared to the rest. On top of that, when Rean triggers a Rush attack, he doesn't call the men of Old Class VII by name except for Crow. Finally, Crow joins Rean in the latter and Rufus' Final Boss fight against Zoa Gilstein and, just like them, cannot be taken to the Final Boss fight of the main game. And at the end of the game, the two of them converse with the other instead of Rean spending time with any member of his harem (in fact, the scene where the players choose the Love Interest for Rean at the beginning of the game is only brought up twice^note In the Chapter 1, where Rean reminisces about her for a few seconds, and in the Final Chapter, where Jusis apologizes to Normal-End Rean for not letting him see her one last time.).
  • Due to the numerous amounts of interactions the two have compared to their respective harems^note of which players can see maybe a minute or two at most and the rest are relegated to optional side content; Alisa, Rean's Implied Love Interest, gets it the worst, as she's stuck with Lloyd's group until the Final Chapter, and thus barely has any interaction with Rean, Rean and Lloyd grow close in this game, nearly rivaling that of Rean and Crow. The two of them are required party members at least twice in the game. And when the player doesn't have any control of either in the True Reverie Corridor, both hang out with each other. Also worth noting is that at the end of chapter 4, Rean contacts Lloyd instead of Alisa, Machias (who are his close friends from Class VII), Towa, or Randy (who are his coworkers). The fact that both of them are in sync with each other (from confronting the fake Rufus while walking side by side, Lloyd screaming out Rean's name when they get separated [despite the fact that Lloyd can potentially not have the SSS at his side if the player chooses the SSS to go with Rean as part of the 17 characters], and the two of them finishing the other's sentence despite being at different parts of the Retributive Tower) does not help things. Lloyd is even the first person to deduce the other Rean's identity, something Ishmelga Rean lampshades where even he didn't see that coming. Finally, the other Rean's last moment before disappearing into the light is to give Lloyd a fist bump, instead of his friend Jusis who is right beside Lloyd.
• I Knew It!: C being Rufus Albarea. Many players figured it out on release day just by simply analysing the character's voice patterns in Japanese and lining up events don't make sense at first glance. Like how Rufus is laying a beatdown on the SSS in the trailer when he was supposed to be serving jail time. The game even acknowledges this by having The Reveal happen relatively early in the game itself, since it is pretty much a Captain Obvious Reveal that even Rufus lampshades it.
• Memetic Mutation: See here.
• Narm Charm:
  • Mischneider's entire existence in chapter 4 of Rean's route and the SSS side episode. An over the top Mecha Mishy that has too many hilarious moments and the cast wondering if they can even take any of it seriously. Surprisingly enough, its "death" is one of the more remembered scenes in the game.
  • Aurelia, Victor, Matteus, Wallace, and Vandyck deflecting a Wave-Motion Gun sized laser beam. Many fans thought that this was too over the top even for the series in trying to pull off Rule of Cool moments.
• Never Live It Down: Fans will never live down the fact that Lloyd gets dropped after he charges up to attack Rufus with his former S-Craft, Tiger Charge, only for Rufus to barely move from his spot and defeat him in one hit.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: After fans noticed how much Rean and Lloyd interact with each other far more than their respective harems, some fans have given them the couple name "ReaLlo". Mainly due to the fans being amused at two harem protagonists actually sharing so much camera time together.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: C, aka Rufus Alberea. After all his actions in the latter half of the Cold Steel series, players felt that he pretty much deserved that punch to the face and subsequent imprisonment at the end of IV as he is nothing more than a Hate Sink at that point. Him (actually his simulacrum) laying a beatdown on the SSS in the final trailer just dug him deeper. When The Reveal happened in the game proper, opinions on him pretty much flipped over the course of the game's events, especially his Zero-Approval Gambit at the end. It also helps that his route was generally considered the most interesting of the three, due to the other two suffering from a combination of overexposure and recycled plots. In the official Falcom poll, he manages to get third place in the polls, only beaten by both Rean and Crow.
• Salvaged Story: Reverie has earned praise for spinning some of the most divisive aspects of the Cold Steel arc into well-liked plotlines: The great war in Cold Steel 4 lasting only a few hours and causing minimal bloodshed directly motivates a new group of antagonists (who seek to restart it), Rean has to deal with accidentally becoming an icon for said Erebonian extremists, and his martyrdom complex is finally addressed and deconstructed.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Obtaining the Gold Sealing Stones to add characters to the roster at the True Reverie Corridor can be a pain. While the first five random characters can be obtained on specific floors per chapter, obtaining the rest post-game ends up becoming a chore as players have to start from the first level and climb up the dungeon while fighting the special monsters in the hopes of obtaining at least one Gold Sealing Stone. Most of the time, players obtain Silver Sealing Stones that give out items.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Rean from the normal ending timeline showing up in the true ending timeline has been this for the fans as no one expected him to show up. He's also fully corrupted as depicted in the normal ending of Cold Steel IV and now sports a longer hair. However, some savvy players figured he would be involved in some way in the future the moment Cold Steel IV railroads you into having the Normal Ending first before you were able to access the Golden Ending regardless of how you played. Some players didn't expect that plot point would be addressed the very next game.
  • McBurn, of all people, has been spotted...without his right arm!
  • In Reverie, one of the short stories promoting the future Calvard arc features Rean visiting Calvard for a vacation with his family whilst searching for his master, Yun Ka-Fai. While out for a walk at night, Rean is attacked by a bunch of ninja-esque assasssins who use a style that is not unrelated to the Eight Leaves. And while he was winning, a woman by the name of "Princess" comes out to save Kurogane, the leader of the assassins, and tells Rean that Ka-Fai, both her and Rean's master, isn't there. And how does she do this? By busting Rean's tachi^note while he was using Enlightened Spirit Unification, no less, proving that she's on the same level as, if not an actual, Divine Blade herself.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Breeding Innumerable Arms, the dungeon theme for the Reinford Munitions Factory, and Smooth Criminal. Most apparent at 0:00 in Breeding and 1:06 in Smooth Criminal.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • Quite a few fans were unhappy with Rean being a protagonist for the fifth game in a row, mostly because they felt he was being overexposed by that point.
  • Some fans were hoping that the gameplay would actually be a bit harder than the previous Cold Steel games due to how easy it was to break the Erebonia arc even on Nightmare difficulty. When the demo was released, fans found out that there are two mechanics that break the game even further than they should: the return of Zero Craft turns, and the new United Front mechanic which translates to "the entire party attacking the enemy using either regular attacks or arts, or heal the entire party, and restores 2 BP at the cost of one Assault Gauge".
• That One Attack: The Dusken Dancer's S-Craft, Morte Mascherata, cancels any Brave Orders. That's all that needs to be said.
• That One Boss: See here.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Nobody saw the return of Dieter Crois coming, as most fans thought his role was pretty much over after his arrest in Azure, but there he is in the opening movie, alongside Rufus of all people.
  • The return of Ian Grimwood was unexpected for the same reasons as Dieter, and unlike him, Ian was never shown in any promo.

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