Damm didnt know that deep lore for the CS games. Aint surprised that Crow is popular since hes Randy CS.
Crow is more analogous to Loewe who was the prior really popular Trails antagonist character. Young, handsome, white haired warrior with a cool bladed weapon, sad past, competent, presented as "honorable" compared to the other antagonists you are supposed to hate like Weissman or Cayenne. Presented on the box art and in the OP as the rival to the hero. Gets a mech of his own. Gets some light shipteasing with the hot witch in the earlier CS games. Etc etc.
I hope the combat for Daybreak isnt as shit.
No, the experience remains fundamentally the same. Kuro 1 is an even easier curbstomp than CS3 on the highest difficulty. Kuro 2 at least has slightly more threatening numbers but you don't really have to engage during the fights that much beyond the usual Trails battle plan of positioning a guy close to the boss or spread out trying to bait AoEs so that the whole team doesn't get hit, and alternating between spamming your most efficient craft and using heals or refreshing shields/evasion. They made the character building annoying again with the tedium of trying to stack enough quartz into your elementally locked slots to get the mandatory shard skills. The action combat for trash battles is novel but undercooked.
Have seen that people dont like Daybreak, Personally i havent played it yet but im curious to see what makes it bad. I believe the game takes place in Calvard(basicallly the japan of Trails) so i cant imagine how they will fuck that up. Regardless i intent to play this franchise to the end.
The Kuro series aren't bad games. I would rather play them than whatever Western AAA slop is coming out or the new Ateliers or Dragon Quest and so on. But they just don't enrapture you like with CS. CS had a super appealing fantasy setting and very likeable characters, and several different plotlines to get invested in.
Kuro's main issues are:
the boring setting that the devs clearly have no passion for. The disappointment of being promised Calvard only to get boring modern urban cities with chinese mafias and saudi princes as "traditional culture" instead of actual traditional Calvardian culture towns and lore. The aggravating retconning/historical revisionism with Calvard going from being an antagonistic, expansionist power that was just as responsible for the cold war as Erebonia into being this flanderized paragon of democracy that did nothing wrong. And then after 200 hours you are kinda done with Edith, Langport, etc, but you don't get the mercy of a CS3 that introduces half a dozen brand new towns, and when combined with how boring Kuro's setting is it begins to outstay its welcome pretty quickly.
The main party is overall boring and uncool with the exception of Van and Bergard. The side characters are generally okay except for the faggot bartender and the Chinese mafians that Falcom wants to pretend are ackshually necessary for (white) civilization to function. It is also frustrating that many years have passed since Trails in the Sky, but almost no one has gotten married, and people like Zin are starting to get relatively old which is dissatisfying when you want to see your favorite characters get happy endings.
The main story is forgettable as you fight le evil white mafians, and then there is the micro level writing where it's just really boring on a moment to moment basis until chapter 5. If you think CS3 is boring until chapter 4 then that's Kuro 1 but way worse. Kuro 2's story is a little more entertaining on a moment to moment basis but the overall storyline is still uncaptivating.
Lastly, you have overall fandom apathy. Ao/CS3 was when a lot of people began to give up on the Ouroboros storyline, and then CS4 is when people gave up on the geopolitical/cold war story. And then Kuro doesn't rekindle that, so there just isn't any overarching story or credibility for it to keep people invested. A lot of people just decided that CS4 and Reverie was their stopping point, so sales from CS4 to Kuro 1 halved (100k week 1 Japanese sales to 50k) and haven't recovered (50k week 1 for Kuro 2 and then Kai). And this sentiment is global if you visit chinese forums and use google translate or visit English forums. Activity just fell off a cliff after CS4/Reverie and there is nowhere near as much enthusiasm for the series as there once was during the 2000s. A lot of people jumped ship to FF14 but got burned there too after Endwalker happened. Looks like gachas are the thing that people are looking at now for long term videogame storylines.
