Three nations battle for control of the dwindling resources of salt and iron in this HD-2D adventure tactical RPG. Featuring deep gameplay full of choices and consequences, strategically survey the battlefield to gain the upper hand.
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Damn, Square Enix once again.
Triangle Strategy gets off with a really great start, the opening chapters have a gripping narrative and present a varied cast of characters, the first decisions you make change the following chapters quite a bit, but don't betray your expectations of their impact. The final 3 chapters showcase great closure to the narrative and great character arcs, or at least it was in the case of the ending I chose, which was bittersweet, but interesting.
It is somewhere in the middle of the game that this game felt like it was being too ambitious for it's own good, promising always more than it could deliver.
Triangle Strategy (almost) always does an amazing job at presenting puzzling situations to the player, and laying a quality selection of decisions available to you regarding the circumstances. Most of the decisions symbolizing a certain ideal out of the three the game focuses on when it comes to this system, although sometimes I'd debate wether a choice or a dialogue option doesn't really fit a different ideal.
Even then, the decisions are usually cool alternatives and many times there is no right answer, which is how it should be. The characters involved present valid arguments and the game makes use of it's characteristic decision making mechanic, the "scales of conviction".
The real issue I have when it comes to the decisions is how sometimes they fail to trick you into thinking they mattered, cause yes, many of this decisions don't end up having an impact. Many serve only as momentaneus different routes that end up merging after a few chapters, ocasionally even in a way that doesn't feel organic, which is the worse part (specially a certain decision in chapter 11).
Sometimes, the issue regarding the decision comes from the stakes. The game tries to tell you that sometimes one needs make rough choices and places you on the kind of situations where a sacrifice must be made, but always gives you the chance to take the " I want it all" kind of choice and it only just causes you to have a more difficult encounter. The worse part is making a sacrifice for roleplay reasons and then getting gaslighted into thinking you are the worst piece of shit ever. This, is not the norm, but it happened often enough to bother me.
When it comes to it's characters, I think the pool is too big for gameplay reasons, so all character development is almost exclusively focused on the main cast, sadly many members of the main cast recieve very superficial treatment. However, the ones that recieve the game's full attention mostly shine, and do so during the entirety of the game.
The villains are decent, some are weaker than others but both Gustadolph and Avlora were really cool, specially Avlora's development. When it comes to Hyzante some of the Saintly seven I enjoyed Exharme, Idore and Lyla.
I really liked the character development Roland and Benedict recieved in the ending route I followed, and Roland is the best character consistently throughout the whole game and I specially enjoyed him in the final chapters (although as I said, I liked him during the whole game), and Benedict was quite good as well.
The combat was quite good , at least on hard difficulty, specially on certain maps that gave it a certain twist, each character was quite unique and had innovative gameplay ideas, I found it to be quite good for the TRPG standard. The difficulty curve was a bit weird at the start but as you get upgrades and recieve new tools it gets better.
I also cannot finish without mention how beautiful the game looks, the game is absolutely gorgeous, maps , sprites and portraits all look incredibly good. And the OST is amazing, as expected from a Square Enix jrpg.
As I was hinting at the beginning of my review, I believe the end product is a concequence of Square Enix's modus operandi. Favoring certain development teams while misstreating others. The game is very ambitious and delivers on many aspects of the game, and achieves it's promises in both the beguinning and the end, but made some deterring mistakes through the middle that gravely affected my overall experience, specially the ones regarding the false illusion of choice and the feeling of stakes being fake in some very few scenarios. Even felt a little burnt out and some parts felt a bit sloggish. It did nevertheless deliver in both the plot and character departments and provided a good combat experience. I can't help but think that maybe if they weren't so ambitious or spent just a bit more time on certain parts of the game the final product would be twice as good, but who knows, perhaps the few mistakes it made clouded my view and affected my experience more than it should have, which is a shame, because I really felt in love with the first chapters of the game, and the ending managed to satisfy me despite my gripes.
I will 100% replay this, and follow different routes and perhaps my opinion about certain aspects changes when I see how different it really is.
Triangle Strategy gets off with a really great start, the opening chapters have a gripping narrative and present a varied cast of characters, the first decisions you make change the following chapters quite a bit, but don't betray your expectations of their impact. The final 3 chapters showcase great closure to the narrative and great character arcs, or at least it was in the case of the ending I chose, which was bittersweet, but interesting.
It is somewhere in the middle of the game that this game felt like it was being too ambitious for it's own good, promising always more than it could deliver.
Triangle Strategy (almost) always does an amazing job at presenting puzzling situations to the player, and laying a quality selection of decisions available to you regarding the circumstances. Most of the decisions symbolizing a certain ideal out of the three the game focuses on when it comes to this system, although sometimes I'd debate wether a choice or a dialogue option doesn't really fit a different ideal.
Even then, the decisions are usually cool alternatives and many times there is no right answer, which is how it should be. The characters involved present valid arguments and the game makes use of it's characteristic decision making mechanic, the "scales of conviction".
The real issue I have when it comes to the decisions is how sometimes they fail to trick you into thinking they mattered, cause yes, many of this decisions don't end up having an impact. Many serve only as momentaneus different routes that end up merging after a few chapters, ocasionally even in a way that doesn't feel organic, which is the worse part (specially a certain decision in chapter 11).
Sometimes, the issue regarding the decision comes from the stakes. The game tries to tell you that sometimes one needs make rough choices and places you on the kind of situations where a sacrifice must be made, but always gives you the chance to take the " I want it all" kind of choice and it only just causes you to have a more difficult encounter. The worse part is making a sacrifice for roleplay reasons and then getting gaslighted into thinking you are the worst piece of shit ever. This, is not the norm, but it happened often enough to bother me.
When it comes to it's characters, I think the pool is too big for gameplay reasons, so all character development is almost exclusively focused on the main cast, sadly many members of the main cast recieve very superficial treatment. However, the ones that recieve the game's full attention mostly shine, and do so during the entirety of the game.
The villains are decent, some are weaker than others but both Gustadolph and Avlora were really cool, specially Avlora's development. When it comes to Hyzante some of the Saintly seven I enjoyed Exharme, Idore and Lyla.
I really liked the character development Roland and Benedict recieved in the ending route I followed, and Roland is the best character consistently throughout the whole game and I specially enjoyed him in the final chapters (although as I said, I liked him during the whole game), and Benedict was quite good as well.
The combat was quite good , at least on hard difficulty, specially on certain maps that gave it a certain twist, each character was quite unique and had innovative gameplay ideas, I found it to be quite good for the TRPG standard. The difficulty curve was a bit weird at the start but as you get upgrades and recieve new tools it gets better.
I also cannot finish without mention how beautiful the game looks, the game is absolutely gorgeous, maps , sprites and portraits all look incredibly good. And the OST is amazing, as expected from a Square Enix jrpg.
As I was hinting at the beginning of my review, I believe the end product is a concequence of Square Enix's modus operandi. Favoring certain development teams while misstreating others. The game is very ambitious and delivers on many aspects of the game, and achieves it's promises in both the beguinning and the end, but made some deterring mistakes through the middle that gravely affected my overall experience, specially the ones regarding the false illusion of choice and the feeling of stakes being fake in some very few scenarios. Even felt a little burnt out and some parts felt a bit sloggish. It did nevertheless deliver in both the plot and character departments and provided a good combat experience. I can't help but think that maybe if they weren't so ambitious or spent just a bit more time on certain parts of the game the final product would be twice as good, but who knows, perhaps the few mistakes it made clouded my view and affected my experience more than it should have, which is a shame, because I really felt in love with the first chapters of the game, and the ending managed to satisfy me despite my gripes.
I will 100% replay this, and follow different routes and perhaps my opinion about certain aspects changes when I see how different it really is.
I never thought a games writing would feel just as good as Path of Radiance to me(minus the dialogue regarding the scales of conviction which is a bit silly). I've completed 3 out of the 4 routes and each one was so fulfilling! I need to go back and complete the true ending before I can safely say how good it is. I quite like how the strategy is in this game but it has that dumb difficulty of hard mode is just "enemies do more damage and you do less damage" which is super lame. Amazing game regardless.
Triangle Strategy exists in this weird place between FFT and Fire Emblem on the character progression and combat side of things. Its greatest weakness is having multiple endings locked behind a full play through of decisions.
Filled with neat mechanics, thrilling spectacle, heartful drama, and wonderful art. However, it's somehow also a drag to play? It's suffocatingly serious, its combat feels slow and clunky, and I also found it hard to commit any kind of investment in its characters. The plot roller-coasters between its three convictions: brilliant, boring, and braindead.
Was kind of surprised how visual novel-y this ended up being. I liked it tho. Kind of gave me 13 sentinel vibes in that way
Nice tactical game, looks beautiful (HD 2D), has a great soundtrack and really likeable characters. The optional character stories were my highlight, the battles were challenging but not unfair. The writing is sometimes very good, sometimes rather mediocre. The main story remains down-to-earth and political, which I thought was cool.