Topic: Triangle Strategy

Started the demo this morning on my Lite, but I might be starting it over on the bigger unit to see how it fares when docked. Not pleased enough with the image quality to want to stick to purely handheld mode with this game.

But yeah, I way prefer starting from the beginning with this one. And without the bogus timer like in Octopath's final demo, as I recall. This and DQXI S both have really generous demos, by the look of it.

Heh, I didn't really need any demo to be pretty well sold, @JaxonH .... But I did say in my feedback on the original one that it'd be better to have the demo for the start of the game & I'm guessing plenty of other people must have said the same

@JaxonH So the progress does carry over to the real game? Just confirming. I was ignoring the demo since it is out soon anyway, but if it carries over, I might as well play it.

@komodo182
Yup.

Beginning of the game up through chapter 3. Full progress transfer. Basically, no reason not to start now. With such a meaty demo and save transfers, it's kinda like the game released early.

@JaxonH Love it

In the middle of chapter 2 now. I have to say, the way it's structured makes it feel like the perfect portable game. Very Fire Emblem, except you don't have to be terrified about enemies randomly critting and killing your units.

I thought this would look better on the smaller Switch Lite screen, but, so far, it's better on bigger screens. It's more enjoyable on Switch OG than Lite, and even better still when docked. And it actually wasn't painful to look at on our 4KTV, either. This must be particularly attractive on a Switch OLED.

So I've still got a big chunk of demo to go, but I pretty much bounced off the first demo right away due to the difficulty and that just isn't the case this time.

I do find battles a little slow, I wish characters did more damage, but I guess we'll need to see if that is a conscious design decision or whether you can eventually be over levelled as hell.

I can also see the potential for later missions to really artificially ramp up the difficulty by cheesing the combo/backstab thing, but for now I am glad they have added little bits of seasoning but mostly left the combat traditional.

I am also interested to see how much the dialogue/moral choice thing actually impacts, it said it'll shape characters and the companions you can use, but I guess we won't know how meaningful that is until we have the full game.

I also will say that I appreciate the stylised visuals, without necessarily liking them myself. I like the big effects for attacks and the way they use the camera, but that whole 2.5 HD thing or whatever they call it just isn't very visually pleasing to me. I kind of wish in battles we had a more detailed view, similar to things like XCOM or Fire Emblem, but eh this is fine. Looks nice on a handheld.

@Ralizah
It looks excellent on the OLED. I haven't noticed anything subpar about it in handheld, though. I'm playing on the TV less and less nowadays since OLED dropped. But ya, it's awesome. Games like this were born for portable play

@JaxonH Visuals looked a little muddy on my Lite, for some reason. I think sometimes the visual effects on the screen blur the image a little too much for me. Or maybe it's the resolution when undocked. Either way, playing on a bigger screen only seems to benefit it.

Not a big deal either way. The aesthetic is still tremendous.

@Pizzamorg I will say, it takes a lot of getting used to not having character portraits like you would in just about any other modern JRPG in this vein.

The choices are interesting, but I've not really been able to mentally connect most of my choices to the alignments thus far.

So I've now cleared the demo, took me about two and a bit hours and I am fairly eh on it.

Firstly, it is worth mentioning this is probably one of the few Switch games that looks better docked than it does handheld, even if I'm not a huge fan of the whole 2.5 HD thing. Just seems really muddy and blurry in handheld by comparison, even on the SWOLED.

But yeah, as a game... I dunno. Seems like there will be more depth as you go along with the game mentioning you can like melt snow, to create polls of water, to then electrocute enemies and stuff. Very Divinity. You don't get to do any of this in the demo but it seems very cool.

I also think the voting idea and persuading characters through arguments, giving you a reason to talk to everyone is a cool idea but there is a LOT of dialogue. Like the majority of this demo was just me clicking (and eventually just flat skipping) huge swathes of text. I guess if you enjoy the story, then this isn't a problem. But for me, I could have done with way more battles or way more choices, so I was actually actively participating rather than just reading text. Maybe this'll be less of an issue further in, but I actually thought the demo was kinda boring, overall.

I think part of the issue is presentation, there are no like character portraits, or cut scenes, or action cams or anything. Like at one point these two characters have like this duel and my God, it might be the most boring presentation of a duel I've ever seen. Again, if you vibe with this whole visual thing, then maybe this won't be an issue but it just made the whole thing super dull at points for me.

Oh and the whole gear, levelling, smithing system seems super convoluted and throttled in the demo. Maybe it'll all make sense/work better in the full game, but this stuff doesn't seem very fun based on the demo.

I might wait for this to go down in price before picking this up, assuming it reviews well. Probably won't make it a day one unless I am really struggling for games when this releases.

Just played the latest demo. I'm digging this a million percent. Such strong FF Tactics vibes. I LOVE that you can just target spells on the ground and that direction the characters face actually matters. I like how they handle turn order much more than the latest FE games and Disgaea games. I like having things mixed instead of entire teams moving at once. Just my preference, of course.

The art is fantastic, and it does look awesome on the OLED.

My least favorite part is what most of us thought on the last demo: they've gone just a tad overboard on the amount of dialogue in most chapters, though the somewhat frequent choices do help to spice things up.

I'm so stoked for this game. Day one purchase, not looking back lol

I still like the game play but I am a little less invested in the story based on the Frederika/Seranoa setup…it’s a super obvious opening move to the conflict. And now there imo is no reason as to why these two characters should stand together other than survival. So I’m kinda like meh this conflict could go either way. Still day one but the story is likely gonna fall flat for me sadly.

@Ralizah
It’s definitely soft, but the art style hides it, same as Octopath, so I guess I just didn’t notice it much.

I'll admit, I'm kind of digging this. It's excessively verbose, of course, but there seems to be a lot of thought put into the construction of the world and the relationships between various characters. Dialogue and voice acting are pretty good, too. It feels like an interactive fantasy novel so far.

Music is definitely the highlight, though. This OST is fab.

@Ryu_Niiyama
I think the marriage is kind of cool to open things. Do you mean how she's not being married to one of the princes "just in case" relationships turn sour again? I thought that part was pretty heavy handed and obvious, yea.

@Ralizah I agree. It feels like video game meets novel. Reminds me a bit of Golden Sun with the amount of dialogue. I finished the demo and quite enjoyed it. Definitively picking it up. I only played on normal, but it could be a little more difficult for a normal setting. Wasn't any challenge at that setting at all.

@komodo182 Oh, is Golden Sun like this? I've never actually played one of those games.

I'm pretty happy with the difficulty on Normal. Playing carefully, I'm able to keep my people alive, but I can see how the game will punish me if I overextend.

Sounds like the hard difficulty setting will be more your thing.

Even knowing that I don't really have the time to commit to a 50 hours+ SRPG I have been getting very tempted - really enjoyed FFT Advance (never played FFT).

If it is Golden Sun esq. in terms of dialogue that would be a turn off to me though. There was a lot to love about those games (the first in particular) but they all talked. And talked. And talked. If the writing isn't fantastic then I'd really honestly rather be grinding for levels.

It was definitely a turn off for me, the demo isn't that long, maybe like two hours but I think there are like four short encounters in that demo and the rest of it is dialogue. Now the dialogue is fully voiced and generally well performed, which might be a step up from other RPGs which use text and have no voice acting at all. But there is just so much text, you are drowning in it.

The demo presents us with a mostly a generic fantasy story layered over a generic fantasy world, but they seem to have seen it fit to give you a sentences worth of information in many paragraph blocks instead. If you enjoy the characters or the story or whatever then this might be fine, but I just found this so boring.

I wanted the demo to allow me to play around with the systems so I could see what I was getting in for and some of it's systems do seem super interesting, but rather than giving me the time to engage with those, it wasted most of my time bogging me down in this soup of text. This just seems like a real waste.

Now, I have absolutely no idea if this becomes more or a less of a problem as the game progresses, of course. Potentially the game will open out, offer more encounters with less half an hour long toilet breaks, but I can only make my judgement on what I have and this effectively killed my interest in this.

For the record, I play all sorts of RPGs where the dialogue is all text and no voice acting (I am a massive CRPG fan), but they break up the segments of talking by giving you, the player, the chance to pick a dialogue option or whatever else to make it feel like you are actively engaged. Here you get maybe one decision to make and then about a dozen or so conversations that just churn on whether the player is involved or not, leaving you to ask 'hey, when do I get to play?'.

I've already put 4 hours into the demo and I'm not even finished lol

Yea, this is gonna be my new Three Houses haha