Cold Steel IV: Mechanically brilliant, but failed to take risks with the characters.

Disclaimer: If you didn't read my review of Cold Steel III, I recommend you do before proceeding, because a lot of my feedback is contrasting experiences between these two. Just FYI.

What I Liked

Magic is beautifully...magically...OVERPOWERED. I was loving actually using it this time. In none of the previous games did I have any reason to use magic, but here? Wow. Especially with one of Rean's Orders that just lets you abuse it at will. Tio Plato in particular with this Order on took one boss' HP clean off by 50% with one Freeze spell. That's how it should be.

Difficulty is very near perfect balanced - the only times I had challenge presented were the bosses, and they presented boss-level challenges. To the point above about magic: I couldn't do that on EVERY boss, some of them were too fast, some had AT Delay, some abused Vanish, some abused Deathblow, etc., thus forcing me to switch strategies to keep up. This was the first of the four where I had to use all support characters to win the battle. How it should be - regular enemies present little challenge, bosses are hard but not impossible.

They fixed the number of quests required to get a good assessment! No more of this nonsense of hundreds of scattered quests just to earn a B; now, it's a very reasonable number of no more than 7-8 quests for an S. How it should be.

Additionally, the quests don't ever feel like padding or a waste of time; they're interspersed perfectly with the flow of the game and feel like part of the built universe.

AND...

You can FINALLY get your harem!

(Although Duvalie and Shirley are missing. Oh, and Vivi.)

What I Didn't Like

Unfortunately, it still suffers from the "too many characters" syndrome. People like Jusis and Machias went completely untouched even when the game forced their addition to the team (I did have to switch to Machias at one point after a strong attack, but never again).

Then, despite having too many characters, many of the best aren't mainstays. Renne (who's so strong she took out a boss by herself), Joshua (orders), Tio as I mentioned before, and Estelle in particular. Celine's Order is also a balancer that leveled the playing field but she's not a permanent addition, either.

I get what they were trying to do to avoid character fatigue and it fit the flow of the story, but I would have rather had them break the game up into sections of groups of characters instead (that's how it started, but they dropped it about 1/3rd the way in for some reason).

Too many points where you simply couldn't explore. I know why, but it's annoying. If this is supposed to be the "swan song", then open it up. Let me actually go back to Nord Highlands and see how it's changed, for example.

I had rented this because I simply wasn't sure. It's a good game. I'll likely buy it on PC so I can throw some mods at it to truly enjoy it to the fullest.