It's worse than any CS game.
how it's even possible?
I covered Kuro pretty thoroughly in my
review of it last year. Not going to rehash that in detail again, but in short: it is yet another 110 hour long game that feels like air. Once again, the story is padded on both the macro and micro level. On the macro level, nothing happens until 70 hours in. Before then you are once again doing the exhausted SC formula of "visit a city, supervillain shows up and wrecks havoc for no reason, you fight, villain gets bored and leaves and you have accomplished jack all, rinse repeat". The story spins its wheels until you return from Longlai. The villains are not interesting or compelling like the ILF. On the micro level, you have the usual repetitive dialogues and long winded speeches and pointless fights and masturbatory posturing/referencing.
The cast was not endearing. The game also introduces a bunch of party members but doesn't do anything with them like what CS did with Class VII. Actually, I think the story would have been improved of most of them weren't permanent party members. The only party member I liked was Bergard, but he doesn't join until 70 hours in. I liked the non-playable side characters more, like Alvis, Dasawni, Dingo, Marielle, etc. If you scrubbed the Arkride crew and focused on the Edith characters then the game would have been a lot more enjoyable. Van/Marielle/Dingo should have been the main trio of the game, not Van/Aaron/Agnes or Van/Elaine/glasses guy whose name I forgot. And it was pretty disappointing you never got to fight alongside Alvis. That being said, the cast was not offensively unlikeable like Crossbell's, who actively detracted from my enjoyment whenever they were onscreen.
The game lacks charm and feels like "been there, done that". The prologue sets up the expectation that it's going to be a gritty noir thriller, but then it turns into a rehash of Tokyo Xanadu and Crossbell as you talk to all of the NPCs in this boring modern urban city. Calvard is not an interesting or well realized setting like Erebonia, which was fantasy Prussia. After 110 hours in Calvard, I couldn't tell you who the military leadership like Craigs and Zechs were, or which armored divisions were based at which installations, the names of any famous native Calvardian warriors or smaller rulers in the country like Victor or Albarea or Vander and so on. Most of the new lore isn't actually Calvardian lore, but actually foreigners. The Ikaruga clan is from the East. Heiyue are a foreign crime syndicate. The two jaeger corps we meet are from the cities to the North or from the Middle-East. Middle-Eastern prince (who is a clone of Olivier). And so on. The country doesn't feel like it has a long history like with Witches or the vampire conflict or the days of the Dark Dragon when the capital was moved to Saint-Arkh or the War of the Lions or the Hundred Days War and so on. And then the ending is also a rehash of Tokyo Xanadu's ending. There just isn't much meat to grab on here. And then we don't get a payoff on the actually interesting stuff we heard about Calvard such as bloody and ambitious as Erebonia or the immigration crisis or the ILF counterparts.
The geography of Calvard is very disappointing. In Cold Steel you could walk along the roads between the towns in Eastern Erebonia and feel like the empire was this realized, huge place. But in Calvard, the only road you can walk along in the one outside of the Verne city which was four chapters in I think? And you can never do that again. You teleport between every city, and by the end you have been to the four corners of Calvard and even a city in the Middle-East. Calvard feels disappointingly small.
Then you have the combat and character building, which is not engaging. I played on nightmare, the highest difficulty that was available. I only ever gameovered once, on the one boss fight that had a mechanic you actually had to respect (the girl with the angel robot). The game never made me have to buckle down and get into the nitty gritty of optimization and teambuilding like playing CS1 on nightmare difficulty did. Overcoming the encounters in that game felt like an accomplishment.
The soundtrack does not have anywhere near as high of a hit rate compared to CS1.
The only positive I'd give to Kuro no Kiseki is the increased visual fidelity, particularly in the S-craft animations. I was a little peeved about the optimization, though. I played with a 3070 ti but got stuttering or screentearing on the S-crafts unless I set the resolution to be pathetically small. I spent a couple hours tinkering with my Nvidia settings and all of the graphics options before giving up. It's a shame however that the devs decided to waste the increased visual fidelity by depicting every city besides Oracion as a boring modern urban city and dress everyone up in modern looking clothing rather than something charming like Erebonia.
The game was fun enough to finish and I will be getting Kuro 2, but I like the visuals and turn based combat and the character personalities are likeable (or at least, inoffensive), and I like some of the music, but I am not enthralled by the Kuro series like I was with Cold Steel.
