Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

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Triangle Strategy

Platform: Nintendo Switch (now also on PC)

Two playthroughs finished; 82 hours total playtime

Triangle Strategy is a result of a collaboration between developer Artdink and ascendant Square-Enix producer Tomoya Asano, whose creative insignia appears most prominently in the deeply bizarre names his projects carry, also including Bravely Default, Octopath Traveler, and Various Daylife (these are all real names, I swear to god). Like Octopath before it, Triangle Strategy makes prominent use of S-E's much vaunted "HD-2D" art-style, which combines pixel art with 3D environments, complex shading, and other modern visual effects to create a unique visual fusion of old and new. The end result is, in the case of this title, something that looks like an evolution of the visual style adopted in many JRPGs on the PS1.

Actually, in many respects, Triangle Strategy feels like a PS1 game that had been lost to time until now, and I mean this as both light criticism and heavy praise. New games like this simply aren't made any more. It's not just the visual style, but the writing and game design itself. Fans of Japanese RPGs, if they're old enough, will remember a time when characters weren't primarily high school students, fanservice was rare and tastefully implemented, humor was more subtle, character designs were detailed and avoided adopting a generic 'anime' look, and one didn't have to suffer obnoxious and frequently misogynistic tropes in order to get to the good parts of a game's story. In this respect, Triangle Strategy is a throwback to the 90s in the very best sense, treating its extensive cast of characters with deep respect as it weaves a story dense with twists and political intrigue.

I mentioned that all of Asano's game titles are bizarre, but they all tie back to integral aspects of the games as well. Which brings us to Triangle Strategy. Trios of things (or trianglular relations) actually feature prominently in the game. The most obvious is its setting. The continent of Norzelia is split between three civilizations: The Duchy of Aesfrost, a mountainous, bitterly cold land in the northernmost portion of Norzelia, which trades in iron mined from its mountain caves and prides itself on being a meritocracy where anyone can ascend the social ladder and better their station in life, regardless of race, creed, or sex; The Holy State of Hyzante, located in a sprawling desert to Norzelia's East, a theocracy which thrives on the export of salt harvested from the only know salt lake in existence, said to have been a gift from the Goddess of Salt; and the Kingdom of Glenbrook, located in the Western part of Norzelia, a land of verdant, unspoiled natural beauty and longstanding feudal tradition where the game's protagonist, Serenoa Wolffort, hails from.

When the game begins, only a few decades have passed since the end of the Saltiron War, a vicious conflict over key resources which enveloped the entire continent, and the political balance of Norzelia is only beginning to truly recover. A transcontinental consortium is established to fairly manage the distribution of salt and iron across the land, and, at the beginning of the game, we learn that Serenoa, heir to one of the three high houses of Glenbrook, is to be married to Frederica Aesfrost, which is as explicit a symbol as any of the friendship between the two civilizations. This fragile balance of peace is shattered, however, when, days before the marriage is to happen, Aesfrost launches a brutal and unprovoked invasion on the capital city of Glenbrook. Serenoa and Frederica escape the capital with the crown prince, Roland Glenbrook, in tow, and are left with the rest of House Wolffort to manage a situation that threatens to plunge the continent back into the fires of war once again.

Triangle Strategy is a tactical RPG in the vein of other Square-Enix classics like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics, although it distinguishes itself from other games in the genre by reducing the degree of customization and character building available to the player. There's almost none, in fact, outside of being able to equip different accessories, which don't really alter how you approach battles. This might be alarming to people who like to spend a lot of time customizing a party of untouchable death machines, but that would conflict with the very hand-crafted nature of the game, which is all about providing balanced battles that force the player to heavily consider which units they're going to deploy and how to command them. You know... tactics. To this end, the characters you'll unlock throughout the game are all effectively their own unique classes, with most of them playing wildly differently from one-another.

This sort of approach is only meaningful if the maps you play on encourage tactical thinking, though, and this, thankfully, represents one of Triangle Strategy's greatest design triumphs. The map design throughout is some of the best I've seen in the genre, with many featuring their own unique gimmicks that change the flow of battle, and almost all of them are designed in such a way as to force the player to reckon with multiple fronts at once, guard chokepoints, and maintain a constant awareness of the capabilities of the enemy. Almost no flat maps with units puked out at random, as is unfortunately common in series like Fire Emblem and Disgaea. This, combined with balanced character builds and tight combat mechanics that emphasize the importance of positioning and resource management, leads to Triangle Strategy being one of the most splendidly satisfying TRPGs I've ever played on a pure gameplay level.

I'm talking up the gameplay, and rightly so, but one of the distinguishing (some would say 'alienating') characteristics of Triangle Strategy is the premium it places on storytelling, worldbuilding, and other generally literary characteristics. This aspect of the game is at its most brazen at the very start, where the game immerses players in the setting and begins detailing its elaborate nest of character relationships and political intrigue. This is done primarily via cutscenes and dialogues. While most of them are quite short (and most of the non-plot relevant ones are actually optional), the game does sort of bury you in words at the beginning.

Thankfully, this narrative-heavy approach at the start pays dividends as the game progresses, as mid and especially late game chapters can focus entirely on the gripping moral dilemmas the game faces the player with. Early promotion of the game focused especially heavily on the branching nature of the game's storyline, which forces the player to make what at times feel like impossible decisions in order to survive the predations of more powerful forces within Norzelia. This becomes evident early on when an invading force led by Aesfrost's intimidating General Avlora surrounds House Wolffort's demense and demands the surrender of Prince Roland into their custody. Turning him over to Aesfrost seems like an obviously bad idea at first, but it quickly becomes evident that defending your demense from the invading army will be nigh impossible without activating fire traps that'll destroy much of the land Wolffort's peasants rely on for housing and basic survival. Later dilemmas will face players with sometimes far crueler options, testing how far they will overstep basic moral boundaries in order to survive and rebuild in order to take back Glenbrook. Triangle Strategy is at its very best when the player is lost in the painful calculus imposed by these narrative turning points.

How the game handles its branching narrative will be a bit disappointing to some, unfortunately. While choices do make concrete changes to how the story progresses, and the game itself features multiple endings, your choices generally only factor into unlocking alternate chapters that lead to unique battles and story beats. But these always tend to collapse back into the game's primary narrative thread, making them feel less crucial on subsequent playthroughs.

There is actually an exception to this: while most of the endings in this game are determined by a choice made prior to the game's final major divergence point, all of which are various degrees of bittersweet, there is actually a true ending that leads to the game's best and most complete ending, and the player will have to make very specific choices throughout the story in order to unlock it. Unfortunately, while the conditions to unlock it make sense in retrospect, I have no idea how someone would figure out how to access the true ending without any sort of reference to an online guide.

I do want to speak briefly about how the player actually goes about making choices in this game, since the system the game utilizes seems utterly unique compared to anything else I've previously played. Players don't actually technically make any choices themselves on how to progress the story. Instead, different main characters will all initially adopt certain viewpoints about what choices should be made in a situation, and the player will need to have discussions with people of dissenting viewpoints to sway them to their viewpoint. This is generally accomplished by sharing information gleaned from discussions with NPCs that can help to shed new light on specific situations. Once you feel like you've swayed the right characters to your preferred choice, a sequence will play out where the characters actually cast votes for which choice to adopt by dropping tokens into the Scales of Conviction.

While I could see some people becoming annoyed with this method of directing the flow of the narrative, I really enjoyed the layers it added to the game, and how it emphasizes the folly of making decisions unilaterally in a game filled with competing ideologies and personalities.

Triangle Strategy also features a Shin Megami Tensei-esque alignment system. As your character has discussions and makes moral choices throughout, points will be added to invisible meters that influence their emergent philosophy. The ideological axis of this game is Utility, Morality, and Liberty. These meters both influence how much sway you have in conversations during story branching events and affect the order in which the game's wide swath of unlockable characters will join your army. In theory, this will lead to players having often very different experiences on their first playthrough.

Thankfully, one of the many nice quality of life features the player can enjoy in New Game Plus runs is seeing how many points they have in each ideological category, and how many points they need in order to unlock other new characters. The game will also tell the player which conversation choices add points to which category, allowing them to effectively unlock content that eluded them on their first run.

Actually, this game's implementation of its NG+ mode is impressive and thoughtful overall. Setting aside the many new characters the player will unlock as they continue to build up alignment points, new optional battles will also unlock, and making different choices will lead to new battles and story sequences throughout. In many respects, much of my NG+ run felt as 'new' as my initial playthrough of the game.

The focus on replayability is also helped by the reasonable length of the game. In an era of 100+ hour JRPG epics, a single run of Triangle Strategy can be completed in 30 - 40 hours. Potentially less if the player focuses mainly on main story cutscenes and doesn't spend a lot of time messing around with optional battles in order to grind for material to upgrade character skill trees. This makes it much more attractive to play through the game multiple times in order to discover new story content.

Triangle Strategy's visual presentation is ostensibly its biggest draw, but it's one of the few aspects of the release I haven't found myself to be fully enamored with. Triangle Strategy's low-ish resolution and reliance on modern visual effects (such as an aggressive depth-of-field effect) lead to the image often feeling a bit... soft. On my Switch OLED, this gives the game a bit of a painterly look, and the slightly higher pixel density almost allows the game to look sharp on the Switch Lite, but overall it often just looks a bit messy. This isn't helped by the chunky sprite work for the characters, which borders on being blurry on the big screen.

To add insult to injury, this very thoroughly retro-looking game chugs big time whenever a lot of visual effects are popping off at once and the screen is filled with units. So smaller levels perform well, but some of the bigger, grander battles will often look quite choppy at points. That Square-Enix couldn't wring better performance out of a device that is able to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Monster Hunter Rise without skipping a beat is... disappointing, to say the least.

The game is also almost fully voice-acted, but the quality of the voice acting itself is mixed. Some of the voice actors turn in incredibly good work, whereas others can sound a bit wooden overall.

All that being said, these complaints mostly stick out to me in retrospect.

I'm far less mixed on the game's amazing soundtrack. Seasoned composer Akira Senju, whose work anime fans might recognize from Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, brings this war epic to life with a powerful score that really helps to heighten the level of drama throughout. I'll just go ahead and post a few tracks to highlight some of the standout pieces in this game.

Triangle Strategy was a massive surprise for me. What looked like a B-tier budget game for the Switch in a genre I have mixed feelings about turned out to be one of the best games I've played this year, or any year. Despite a small army of nitpicks I've managed to amass, I can't deny that this game utterly gripped me throughout with its story and fantastic gameplay. I'm quite picky about my tactics games, but Triangle Strategy frequently managed to meet or exceed my expectations on a variety of fronts. This was an experience I didn't know I needed, but I appreciate what it added to my life, especially in the wake of Nintendo's frustrating decision to indefinitely delay their release of the upcoming Advance Wars 1 & 2 remakes.