Cold Steel 3 ultimately gave us way, way more questions than it did answers. One question that seemed comparatively minor, but could turn out to be extremely important, is a certain detail regarding the Divine Knights – some of them, anyway. According to Kondo, the big man himself, it wasn’t a throwaway thing – it’s foreshadowing for something down the line. But what does it mean?

So basically, three of the Divine Knights (Argreion, Zector and Ordine) appeared to be transparent in their first appearances, almost as though they were ghosts. Ordine in particular stands out, because unlike the other two he’s actually been around for previous games, yet he never showed any sign of this ‘transparency’ before now. So what the hell happened?

Actually, it should be pretty obvious what happened, and it also matches up with the other two Knights. At the end of Cold Steel 2, Ordine was heavily wounded by the Vermillion Apocalypse, and the last we saw of him, he appeared to be out of commission, with his Awakener ‘dead’ as as result of the injury. This is exactly what happened to both Argreion and Zector during the previous War Of The Lions (though Zector was flat-out destroyed, at least temporarily).

So that’s a pretty clear connection between the three Knights. But how does this all fit into the transparency issue? Well, let’s quickly go over the backstory of the Erebonia saga:

The ‘Steel’, an unstable fusion of the Earth and Fire Sept-Terrions, has two components, the ‘Great Power’ and the ‘curse’. The curse was sealed away in the higher dimension along with Steel’s body, while the Great Power was split into seven pieces and used to power the seven Divine Knights.

Now let’s consider that the villains all want to reform the Steel, which would mean bringing the Great Power and the curse back together. The Vermillion Apocalypse itself was corrupted by that same curse. Perhaps when those three Knights were attacked by V.A., it injected some of the curse into their bodies? That would mean those Knights now contain both components of Steel – and that could be the reason why they appear ‘transparent’. The transparency itself could be signifying their closer connection to the higher plane – the one where Steel’s body resides.

So this could be foreshadowing the Divine Knights’ role in Steel’s reformation. Perhaps they all need to have both the Great Power and the curse inside of them first? And on a much darker note, is it possible that their Awakeners (or at least, their pilots) need to die in order to complete this process? That was the other similarity between the three ghostly Knights, after all.

It’s worth noting that at the end of Cold Steel 3, when the Great Twilight begins, the three Knights no longer appear transparent. Going off what I previously suggested, could this mean the world itself has become closer to the higher plane?

I guess we’ll find out once Cold Steel 4 is upon us.