The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Northern War

In the Year 1205 of the Septian calendar, Lavian Winslet is a girl born and raised in the poorest region of North Ambria, in the northwestern part of the Zemurian continent. To protect her hometown and to prove that she is different from her grandfather, Vlad, who was once revered as a hero but betrayed North Ambria, she joins the largest Jaegers group on the continent, known as the Northern Jaegers. She volunteers as a hunter and carries out her duties. One day, Lavian, immersed in her mission and repeatedly violates the rules, is ordered to form a platoon with Martin S. Robinson, Iseria Frost, and Talion Drake on a reckless secret spy mission to the Erebonia Empire. Together they must get information about the possible existence of the "Hero of the Empire" that threatens North Ambria.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Northern War is based on Nihon Falcom's The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel game series and streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

James Beckett
Rating:

You can go ahead and consider one-half a star of that rating up there to account for my being a Falcom fan, since in most respects The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Northern War is the definition of a 2.5 star anime. It looks like it was made for a budget consisting mostly of pocket change and desperate favors, the script is made up almost entirely out of exposition that will only be fully comprehensible to fans of the video game universe that this anime inhabits, and the parts that aren't nothing but talking are filled with action that is only ever average at best.

And yet, I am a big fan of The Legend of Heroes games, and that really does make this premiere hit a bit different. Granted, I've only played the Trails in the Sky trilogy as of yet (#KloeKrew Represent!), but that still makes for hundreds of hours that I've invested in this giant universe that Falcom had created, which made it a lot easier to fall into this anime's groove, jank and all.

I mean, it wouldn't be a true Trails experience without some jank, right? Besides, watching this episode, with all of the series-appropriate wacky hijinks and musical cues, I could perfectly envision the version of Northern War that presented this whole story in the form of a bunch of flailing 2D sprites and tactical RPG battle grids. I was already at the point in the series that was foreshadowing the annexation of Crossbell pretty heavily, so I'm interested to see what sides of Erbonia this show will explore before I get to the Trails of Cold Steel games myself. Latvian also seems like a heroine with some potential, and she fits right in with the franchise's catalog of stoic, badass soldierly types.

If you take anything away from this preview, it should be that Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Northern War is likely only going to be a good time for fans of the Trails games as a whole. But you know what that means? You simply have that much more reason to play the Trails games! Hell, even if you never watch this anime, still play the Trails games. They're really amazing, I promise!

I'm in an odd place when it comes to this anime. While I've never played any of the games, I hear that they are, by and large, fantastic—especially the Trails of Cold Steel sub-series. I've also heard that this is not a direct adaptation of any of the games, but rather an original side story showing another side of the conflict. While this means that the anime should, in theory, be digestible by both fans and newcomers, in practice, the lack of familiarity with the series does have some downsides.

The central plot is clear enough. We have a poor country that is in decline after a natural disaster and subsequent revolution several decades before. Now a mixture of frigid climate and monster attacks has the country teetering on the edge of another revolution. Enter our heroine, Lavi. She's a descendant of one of the leaders of the revolution and has the potential to become a hero for her struggling nation. All this works well enough. We see the struggles of the people and Lavi's skill firsthand. And her playful relationship with fellow soldiers Ivano and Tak adds a bit of color to her stoic demeanor.

What doesn't work as well is the constant stream of proper nouns we are bombarded with this episode. We're told about so many people, places, and events that it's impossible for a newcomer like me to keep track. I have no way of knowing which things we hear about are relevant to this story and which are call-outs to the games put there just for the fans. It's more than a bit frustrating, and I feel like I will need to spend some serious time on The Legend of Heroes wiki to understand what's happening on a more macro scale.

All that said, I enjoyed this episode. I like our main character and her bumbling-yet-highly-competent squad. I'm interested in the setting and what a second revolution will mean for this struggling country and its people. But most of all, despite being submerged in the sea of proper nouns, it's simply nice to have another entry point into this series. Maybe this anime will finally be what it takes for me to dive in and dedicate a few hundred hours of my life to this world. Regardless, I'll be back for another episode or two at the very least.

I've never played any games in the Trails series, but damn near everything I've heard about them sounds great. I was interested in checking this spinoff anime out to get a firsthand taste of what makes this franchise special to its fans. To an extent, I got that. Even without the context of all the names and places mentioned, this first episode had a lot of charm. The world is intriguing; it has a rich history that ties in organically with the idea of roving monsters across the land. The dialogue has a lot of character that makes moments of exposition go down easy. It's not fully explained, but there is an expansive world outside of this little slice of snowy warfare that I imagine is explored far deeper in the main series. If nothing else, I'm more enthused than ever to try out the games.

But I can't say I'm interested in seeing more of this show. For all the pleasant, charming aspects, there are just as many glaring issues that made watching this episode a chore. The animation is held together with chewing gum, cutting away from movement or action as often as possible and looking positively amateurish when it isn't. The monster fight that serves as our extended cold open looks embarrassingly stiff and weightless, totally incapable of communicating the danger of the beasts or the power of the soldiers fighting them. Non-action scenes fair slightly better, but characters routinely look off-model and rushed even when standing still. Our heroine, Lavi, also doesn't leave much of an impression, with most of this episode being carried by her comedic sidekicks, who manage to feel more like people despite not even having faces.

There's not much of a compelling reason to watch more of this. Whatever interesting or intriguing elements there are are inherited from the games. While I wasn't lost with all the names and lore being dropped, I still felt distinctly out of the loop, and full context for Lavi's character will require at least some knowledge that I'm not sure the show will supplement itself. With the lackluster visuals, that's enough reason for me not to bother with this particular entry anymore.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I have not played the games that this show is based on, and I have to wonder whether or not that makes a difference. It's not so much that this first episode is chock full of lore or characters you're supposed to already know or anything like that; it's more that there needs to be an attempt to create an investment in the story, emotional or otherwise. War stories, in my opinion, need to have high stakes, and this first episode lets us know that this is a war story before jumping right into a guy fomenting revolution. Plotwise, that's not particularly bad; the problem is that after only twenty minutes, I don't have any emotional attachment that would make the idea of a revolution either appealing or horrifying. Yes, this is only the first episode, but it still needs a better emotional hook than we get.

It also doesn't help that our ostensible protagonist, Lavi, is a blank slate. We know that she's from a country town and loved her grandfather, and now she's become the sort of soldier willing to ignore orders to run off and save people. That's great, but it would be nice to know if she had a personality underneath all of that. Instead, she just does things and looks at you blankly with her big green eyes; all of the emotion comes from either the side character grandmother or Lavi's two mob-faced fellow soldiers, who can't even be bothered to take off their helmets when eating, thus marking them out for death in an upcoming episode, probably sooner than later. Even the fight scenes aren't particularly gripping. We have Lavi charging in before anyone else realizes what's happening, other soldiers coming in guns blazing, and then Lavi delivering the finishing blow, all without a single change of expression. It should be exciting. It isn't.

With the lack of good character and creature designs, or at least ones that are significantly different from anything that we've seen in other shows, and a plot line that thus far feels obscured behind knowledge that we perhaps ought to have before starting to watch this, this isn't a satisfying first episode. It's not the worst thing I've seen, but it also drags unnecessarily. It makes me wonder if I'd have been better off if I had played the games first.