Despite missing the first two of the series, Cold Steel 3 is a good start for people who are new to JRPG.

User Rating: 9 | The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III (Extracrricular Edition) NS

The good: A first English localization for Nintendo Switch, music and graphics were top notch, a great lengthy story to enjoy for a long time, English voice acting is professionally handled, great complex battle system.

The bad: No autosave, a lot of prodding, learning gems and quartz can take some time to learn.

Japanese role playing games has a lot going for as its mainly aimed at Japanese gamers. It's unknown about the backstory but now, you play as Rean, who is now an instructor to the new Class 7. You'll be levelling up a few new students to work with. At the same time, you'll reach a point where you have to take down the main enemy who is determined to take over the world so to speak. There's enough likable characters that you'll care for all of them. Including the villains whom you'll have to face in figuring out what their scheme is. But without spoiling everything, the short answer is: the story is great and lengthy, giving you enough reason why you need to level up all your students and yourself.

The battle system is simple enough with enough complexity to keep it from getting boring. Yes you have normal attacks, but there's more to it. Using arts all the way to using mechanical robots like you see through Power Rangers and Transformers in which it's a friendly robots versus enemy robots. Also, you can choose between very easy to very hard, catered for casual and hardcore fans of JRPG.

The graphics and audios were perhaps the best for Nintendo Switch. Not even the minor frame rates is going to ruin a superb game. The best is really the battle system that it highlights the character's star power very well and even the linking helps improve the relationship of all the characters. The voice actors for the English dub is really professional like having Funimation dealing with the major cast of Fairy Tail with care. So there's nothing to worry about. The Japanese voice acting is professional too, if you understand their language. The music is also well orchestrated and it fits with the mood perfectly.

There's plenty of replay value in this game. Like sidequests, making friends and doing customization, if you know how to use gems and quartz to enhance your characters and weapons. The downsides although minor and typical is how lengthy the story can be though the pacing is still good enough that your not just spending hours, battling every monster until you are worn out. And it would help is there's an autosave which will be addressed in the forth part of the story.

It's really a no brainer that if you like anime and enjoy Japanese role playing games, this game would be rightly up your alley. It has almost have everything you wanted, if they can improve this game even further. I highly recommend it but if you miss the first two, you can read the backstory or buy yourself a PlayStation 4 if you're into this style of videogame as this doesn't disappoint one bit. Add this game to your library of games.