NISA Senior Associate Producer Alan Costa on The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III Coming To Nintendo Switch!

Our final interview with NIS America's Senior Associate Producer, Alan Costa, is here! Read on to find out about his thoughts on the third installment in the Trails of Cold Steel series coming to a new home on the Nintendo Switch.

It’s very exciting to see Trails of Cold Steel III return to its roots and release for a portable console, as it originally did on the PS VITA. Was the decision to port it based on fan feedback or was it just always in the pipeline for the game?

The VITA has a huge fanbase, people loved playing Japanese RPGs on it, and we have seen that a lot of the players seem to have migrated from it to the Switch. We thought that there were people who would love to try this game out on a handheld device, so we really wanted to get it out there to these fans as well.

It definitely was a very well received title when it came to PS4, and the Switch is an equally great home for it. How well has the visual fidelity translated?

I personally think it looks really good. The fidelity is really high, we took advantage of everything we could, and obviously, no content has been cut from it at all - it’s all in there, even the DLC content.

As this is the first game in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel series to release for Switch, so what can newcomers who have never played the games of this series expect?

Players can expect the greatest lore-focused JRPG story in the last decade. If you’re a fan of world-building, lore, and deep, complex plots that don’t just fall into “save the world, and that’s it,” then the Trails series is definitely for you. It’s been building up over a number of years now, and every time one of these games comes out, it’s like seeing an old friend. You get to see where they are now, how they have grown, how they have changed. It’s something that fans of Japanese role-playing games can definitely get behind. I feel like the setting is so unique to Japanese RPGs, as you’ve got so many different elements here, such as the different countries at war, hints of magic, some politics, and they are all integrated with one another so well. It feels so believable and so real that anyone I’ve ever seen pick up one of these games has just fallen in love with it as a result!

How does Trails of Cold Steel III differentiate itself from other JRPGs available for Nintendo Switch?

For one thing, it’s got a certain pedigree of being a part of a prestigious series with a great story. I also think it differentiates itself by being turn-based, which calls for a layer of strategy; you are not just choosing to attack, you’re also choosing your positioning, and this is really important throughout the game. You’re also choosing the setup for your courts, which provide your magic abilities - there’s a lot of strategy that can go into that, too, as you build your characters. I think players will really like that.