A tribute to Square's more strategic role playing endeavors

In what feels like forever, Triangle Strategy arrives in hopes to alleviate the Square SRPG fans of forever waiting for anything to come out from the JRPG developer and publisher. Despite technically being developed by a different developer from the Octopath Traveler game, it mostly shares the DNA that Team Asano games have started to come out in recent times with the Live-A-Live and Dragon Quest III remake sharing similarities with the use of different art and the utilization of the HD-2D engine. That said, Triangle Strategy is an obtuse name for a game but I personally think it's actually unique in a sense. So many Japanese role playing games have some generic names especially with long time series just using the same name followed by a numeral but here we have shape and noun or genre as the title of the game and despite how some people protest the name, the fact that people are talking about the name itself is ironically marketing the game for them and it's a good thing because Triangle Strategy really hits it home for me that is a budding SRPG fan at this point with some trips and falls along the way.

The surprising best part about this game is actually the story if you can believe it. The game's advertisement campaign really focuses around the story and the "choices" you make and I'm happy to say that the story is excellent here. It's more grounded than other stories in the genre leaning on political drama but they did a great job building the world up along with the main cast having clear motivations and have reasons for each vote they case during these important "choices". The choices you make in this game are actually pretty tough to make in this game and do impact what you see and who you get to join you and it's rarely a black and white case of doing mega evil thing versus a mega good thing. So the agency you have in these choices are a bit different in that you yourself don't decide but the retainers in your own house that do and how you can convince them in your favor or the choice you actually want depends on how have you've been playing the game up until that point. If you've been playing one style of conviction and then you want to convince the others to vote for a choice that sort of goes against your principles that you upheld until then, it'll be harder to convince them otherwise. Everything here about the world and story keeps you on your toes and you're mostly quickly intrigued into what happens next that gives the feeling of binging a good tv show in a sense. One of the most important parts is obviously the gameplay and the gameplay is pretty great in its own sense. It follows a 3D square grid map of tiles of varying heights in an isometric view following a turn order. The way your team is set up is that each character is unique and has one set class/job throughout the whole game. Now sadly you can't change classes but you can promote the existing ones to improved versions of said classes and with no permadeath, you will always have one of each class/job at least and it promotes not resetting constantly like in other games of the genre. Each character feels mostly really useful and there's some creative jobs/classes here that are really fun to use depending on the map. Now with no permadeath and retaining experience and kudos which are a special currency for playing well on a retry, you might think the game might be easy and lacking a challenge but I'm here to report that this is not the case at all here. The game throws a lot of tanky units at you and hit hard even on normal here and with the way you get very little experience after hitting a certain level in each battle means you will never be extremely overleveled to the point the game becomes a breeze. I feel like this is a good compromise of not wasting the player's time with being able to keep the experience if they're undeleveled at the attempt of completing a level and the challenge itself being just being able to get through the level as it is and with no permadeath, you can truly stick out until the end instead of one mistake essentially means wasting your time. If you don't like retaining experience however, you can always just reload the save anyway. The soundtrack here is great with some standout tracks with the battle themes taking the crown for some of the best tracks here. The epic orchestration really sells you on that this is war and this won't be pretty at all by the end but in the rough drumlines there is also a twinge of hope in the piano keys fluttering during the themes to remind you of your conviction. Characters are mostly great but mostly the really important ones such as Benedict, Frederica and Roland to be specific with me personally thinking Benedict as a whole knocking it out of the park for me as one of if not the best character in this game in my opinion. The visual design for them in general are great and clean here as well.

Despite how much I love this game, there are some obvious flaws in the presentation and things that I feel the game overall lacks that might turn some people off from this game and I wouldn't blame them. The gameplay to cutscene ratio here is sadly a bit more in favor of cutscenes here at least in the beginning as you will probably go the first 3-4 hours of the game and only playing 2-3 battles at most as the game spends this time building up the world and the characters but with that said, the game's ratio gets better as the game progresses and you get trial battles at your encampment that essentially lets you battle whenever you want for money or resources if you need them to give you a break from the story. The writing or how the story is presented might be a bit too cut and dry for some people as it doesn't have any flavor to it often, it's almost literal in a sense with the occasional medieval slang inserted in. The English voice-over is alright for me with Benedict being the best voiced in my opinion but a lot of them sound bored especially the protagonist which I feel lacks the emotion needed for some scenes here, you can technically turn off the voices here and I believe you can change it to Japanese if you insist on it.

Triangle Strategy will ask for a bit of your time and the demo will sadly confuse some people about the ratio of cutscene to gameplay here but if you want to jump into SRPGs, this is a great option with changeable difficulty during your playthrough, experience scaling that makes it so you never have to grind nor get over leveled, no permadeath, keeping the experience and kudos after death so you don't completely waste your time in attempts to beat some of the game's hardest and longest battles. All of this wrapped up in one of the most grounded japanese game plot I've experienced in a while. Triangle Strategy is a love letter to fans of Square's old SRPGs and RPGs in general you don't want to miss out on. If you can put up with the lack of gameplay and sometimes dry writing, you truly have something special here.

I will forge my own path and follow my own convictions until I breathe my last. That is the only way I can truly live and enjoy what life I was given.

Triangle Strategy feels like an SRPG made just for me. What I love about this game is the ample amount of backstory and lore of each and respective countries filled with the brim with political intrigue each detailing how the citizen of their respective country was brought up.

The game focuses on what "choices" you would make in the instance and I'm happy that the story is excellent here. It's felt more grounded than other stories in the genre leaning on with it's huge emphasis on it's political drama whilst they build up each and every character motivations through their convictions and thoughts.

Gameplay felt really well done and you really need to think on the "strategic" element on the game. It's challenging and will provide you with that satisfaction of completing each map (At least to me when I finish the game on hard). Every map felt different each with it's own special elevation and gimmick to be able to help you in your battles. Every character in this felt like an individual and can be useful too which I really love. I know that there were some hoping to be more customizable, and I do wish for that too to a certain extend where there's more weapon skill trees for the player to choose and different job promotion in a skill tree like setting rather than a free-for-all.

However, this in turn make the game feels more well-done at least to my opinion because the game can be balance with the currently available jobs in mind so I don't really mind too much.

To be honest, my only gripe with the game is the story to battle ratio in the beginning where it felt like it's 2/3 story to battle ratio. However towards the middle there were certainly cases where the story bits were definitely reduced down. Needless to say, I'm one for the story bits, as it was really entertaining and it brought to the player eyes to make it more interesting as you can feel connected with each of the main cast.

There are more I would love to say about the game, but I'm not that good with articulating my thoughts that well. However, I will leave it with this. Triangle Strategy is honestly a very enjoyable experience as long as you love your political drama and have interest in it's characters and the world it has build upon. I genuinely had a great time with the game, and I hope most of you do too

The story starts out really good and seems like its gonna be a wild ride, but it sorta fizzles out near the end. I don't know if this has to do with choices or not though.

In fact, the choice making mechanics are probably the best part of this game. Choosing the direction Serenoa and your army heads is actually pretty satisfying.

But... I don't get the praise for the gameplay either. It works, its functional, and some maps surprised me. I can't think of a single thing this game does that Fire Emblem doesn't do better though, in terms of making the strategy gameplay fun.

Also holy hell this game feels grindy. I'm constantly underleveled for fights. Thankfully you can retreat and obtain EXP, but the only way to keep your units up to date seems to be doing this, or fighting on optional training maps. Lowering the difficulty to easy at least made me feel like I could just play the story missions and still feel challenged. Haven't tried very easy yet though. You can change the difficulty at any time if you get sick of grinding like I did. The gameplay isn't fun enough to warrant it.

To summarize. Lots of interesting ideas, some fun maps, war crimes go brrr, but it seems to ultimately fail on the execution. I can't see myself replaying to get the other endings. I'll just look them up when I feel like it.

Edit: Benedict's English voice is oddly calming to listen to. Can this man narrate an audiobook?

Rhombus Tactics is probably the most fun I've had with a SRPG. The combat is fast, the systems around positioning and exploiting enemies are fun to engage with, and the exploration bits outside of battle make the world feel much more engaging than a lot of games in the genre. I think it looks quite nice too once you toggle some visual settings, really nails the lost PS1 game vibe with its chunky sprites and diorama-esque environments.

The big flaw of Pentagon Procedure for me is the story. It takes up probably half of the runtime, and while there are some interesting characters and scenarios it kinda falls apart in the back half. I think the reason the story doesn't quite work for me is partially due to the branching paths. There were a few points where it only seemed like they were giving you an option of what to do because that's a selling point on the back of the box and not because it benefited the narrative or characters in any way.

Un buen SRPG en el que su mayor fortaleza (realmente las rutas son bastante diferentes y sientes que las decisiones importan) es también su mayor debilidad (sientes todo el rato que te pierdes cosas).

Por lo demás, es una historia con los pies sorprendentemente en la tierra que funciona muy bien. En lo jugable apuesta por sencillez y variedad. Mecánicamente no tiene la profundidad de otros juegos del género pero compensa que cada personaje sea realmente único y muy distinto a los demás.

Muy recomendable para fans del género o simplemente gente que quiere algo con saborcillo a Juego de Tronos.

Overall, a pretty solid SRPG! The visuals and soundtrack are obviously incredible, and the maps and boss fights are actually pretty cool this time around. I don't know if I prefer this or Fire Emblem gameplay wise but it's overall not a bad attempt.

What dragged this game down was the story, pacing, and voice acting. The Voice Acting is whatever for most characters, I can tell that some of the actors are doing a good job, but there are a select few that are just not doing a good job. And that may be a biproduct of the quality of the story. Because the story is INCREDIBLY boring throughout. None of the dialogue or characters or ESPECIALLY the writing is good enough to demand as much time dedicated to it as it asks. Because there are many instances where you can go decently long stretches without gameplay, and the stuff OTHER than the gameplay is just super boring.

It's not endless, but It definitely feels that way at times. But I think that besides the story and just about everything surrounding it, the game is great! It's just that the game needed a story overhaul to really make me say that it's as great as everyone says it is.

I'm not good at reviews so I don't know how if this will be shit but here I go.

It had been a while since a strategy game got me interested ever since I played FE3H, but I looked at this game and since it looked so pretty I gave the demo a try.
First impressions were nice, characters were simple but had their charm (of course since I couldn't see them as a whole because demo), the art style looked very good and the gameplay was fun, being simple to understand but fairly challenging.
I got the full game as a gift, and it was one of the best gifts I've had.
After the first 1/4 of the route I was on, bosses got quite challenging and made me actually think what to do instead of just charging at them, which I appreciate.
The story was good, and the decisions you have to make feel quite impactful. Near the end of the route my favorite character abandoned me and I got sad :(
The only complaint I got is that I don't like how you sometimes gotta grind, otherwise the enemies will likely stomp you.
Other than that, I feel like this is an amazing game, I can't wait to finish the other 3 routes.

An interesting SRPG that has a surprisingly in depth battle system. The interplay between the magic system (and the oil item) and the abilities to move enemy units around leads to some really cool moments. Lighting oil on fire and then trapping an enemy on that tile to take repeated fire damage. Or putting a trap on top of a ladder to send a boss falling all the way back to the bottom. I really like that wind can spread fire, ice can put out fire, fire can make ice into puddles, and lighting can spread across water/iron. However, there did seem to be systems that were tacked on that, to me, never felt like they made sense what they really added.

The story was alright, honestly impressed that it was a tale of intrigue without some supervillian character wanting to end the world which is so often the case. There's a pretty okay love story in there too. However, it is just way too damn chatty and the game really feels like it wants you to play it multiple times and I am just not going to do that.

Overall, a fun game that does some things pretty well, but I don't foresee it having any long term staying power.

This is an SRPG made for me. TS on Hard has some issues, the UX isn't as good as FE, unit balance isn't perfect though it's better than most games, there can be some awkward parts where the game doesn't quite react to a choice well or reconverges in a little too quickly there's some element of grinding up newcomers with mock battles though you can't really over level in the game. There's some lacking polish with how music can cut off strangely in scene transitions. The depth of field doesn't look great, there are some technical performance issues. It's easy to make all these critiques but it falls away in face of chapters like 7, 9, and 17 where the desperation is genuine. Where the narrative and gameplay are both fleshed out to an extent where you never really stop thinking about the consequences and variety of options in combat, many of which remain relevant throughout the game. It is among those games that beggars consistent imagination and reflection. I've no qualms calling games that reach that level of completeness and cohesion as masterpieces.

Triangle Strategy is a breath of fresh air in the current market of games, and an amazing return to form for the Tactics RPG genre. After putting around 50 hours into Octopath Traveler, I was a little weary of what this team would offer when they first announced Project Triangle Strategy. I will admit though, when I saw that they were pivoting from the grindy JRPG sphere into Tactics, that piqued my interest greatly as FE:3H is one of my favorite games of all time. The initial advertising and trailers pinpointed a new focus into story, something Octopath lacked greatly. With the spotlight on story and a navigation into a new genre for the team, I put in an order for Triangle Strategy without having played any of the demos and going in mostly blind.

What I got out of the experience was an absolutely gorgeous and well crafted strategic experience. The presentation of this game is top tier in every aspect. The 2D-HD pixel art is incredible especially when paired with the elegantly designed backgrounds. Every navigatable zone felt different from the rest in terms of art, every side character discernable from the others, every cutscene full of life. I was genuinely impressed with how nostalgic of an experience this felt like for an era of games I never got to play, solely due to the phenomenal execution of the art direction. Castles felt regal and realistic, despite their 2D limitations, making me wonder what a Chrono Trigger or FFVI would look like in this style if redone by this team.

Gameplay was also very well done for this game, however is unforgiving if you play lazy! I went in on normal, as I do with most games, and found myself having to play a LOT smarter than I did with FE:3H or any other tactics game I've played as of the past few years. Enemies constantly seek synergy attacks and will crit whenever given the opportunity, bosses hit like a truck, and you are penalized by the opposition for grouping on top of each other. Missions are also set up to make you think each time, with only a few main story (and mock battle) missions making the objective to clear out all enemies. Often there is a gimmick attached that begs the player to adhere to a certain playstyle in accomplishing objectives. Sometimes these could be a little aggrivating, but over all I felt were a great refresh in creating a non monotonous experience. Each character in your fairly large party feels unique, something that goes MILES further than you might imagine. Creating a carefully crafted party throughout the game is rewarding, as playstyles for using certain party members carry different results in varying ways. Some of my friends used a build that relied on Anna (the assassin) getting as many attacks as possible, whereas I relied mostly on ranged mages and archers to get my melee characters into combat safely. I loved this aspect, as even FE:3H felt like I had my Mages and Physicals that all were prescribed to "do damage." In Triangle Strategy, each character compliments the others with something they bring to the table. My tank Erador was great for grabbing aggro and taking the brunt of damage, my archer Rudolph was great for setting traps and playing the midrange, and my mage Frederica was perfect for taking out heavy armor. I enjoy games that emplore the player to use their full arsenal.

Now previously I mentioned that this game had a heavier focus on story in comparison to the team's previous effort with Octopath, and it does. The game is loooong, and there are a TON of cutscenes with story relevant dialogue and discourse amongst the three kingdoms of the game's land. This might be a lot for some people, however I found it to be a great way to add life and fluff to a game rather than making it a battle between the good guys and the bad guys. Politics and economics take the forefront of Triangle Strategy's story, but neither are talked in a way that is necessarily offputting or grating. This serves as a double edged sword however, as the brevity that the game's narrative speaks with on any possible themes doesn't go much further than telling the story as it is. The political infighting of the Glenbrook houses and their neighboring kindgoms is... simply that. For some people that is alright, and for me it was just that, simply alright. The story being not AMAZING is one of the major things that prevents this game from getting 4.5 stars. I still do think the story was enjoyable, and the narrative was quite good, but I think "good" is how I would describe it, not "great." All in all that's alright, because the story was just enough to go along with the fun mechanics of the gameplay and perfect art/music direction.

Triangle Strategy is a genuinely enjoyable experience and a great return to form for the Tactics RPG genre. Anyone who is a fan of the old school tactics games should consider checking out the demo. I had a great time playing this game.

I am a relatively new fire emblem fan and this was a cool mix up to the other ones I've played. In my opinion the biggest difference and double-edged sword of this game is the unlimited amount of exp. It allows the game to be more accessible and prevents softlocks, but also can allow you to keep banging your head against the wall until it breaks. It also makes the difficulty levels not mater very much, mostly determining how much grinding you have to do. I like the classes in the game as well as the focus on positioning a lot more than fire emblem. I also like the exp rubber banding system where underleveled units will always gain a level until they're back on par. In terms of story, I like how thing progress and escalate. I like how you have to make hard political decisions where there is no good answer. When it comes to politics, the game feels a bit heavy-handed, especially with the roselle racism and slavery. The capitalist meritocracy and the communist theocracy are also pretty overt and exaggerated. I also wish choices had more of a lasting impact other than the last one. New game plus is pretty interesting where you just play the game again, but its as if you just kept continued playing the previous playthough. New game plus plus is also fun, with everything max level, though it is a bit easier than the others. I wish the golden route didn't require you to grind up all of the units. The game continued to grow on me as I played it.

Overall, fun, engaging, and a fair challenge. I like it a lot.

Triangle Strategy is a super solid tactics game that does a lot of interesting stuff -- the tactics maintained my interest throughout. Unfortunately I found the narrative to be intolerable in the extreme, making the overall experience a struggle to get through.

It looks great. This HD-2d style works every time for me and the character portraits are striking and well done.

The strategy layer of Triangle Strategy is really fun. It leans heavily into position, flanking, and height advantages, which gives it a distinct feel from other strategy games. Units get free attacks when working together and preventing your units from being surrounded becomes one of your chief concerns.
Character builds are static (Anna will always be an assassin, Erador will always be a tank), so you are picking from archetypes you would like to have along for any given mission. This works well and each character has a specialty supported by 3-4 unique abilities that make them all play differently and interact in interesting ways together. I really enjoyed leveling up characters and finding out what their new abilities would be as the game progressed.

The narrative almost kills this game for me, unfortunately. It is a very generic political/war story that wears its Game of Thrones influence unabashedly on its sleeve. The problem here is that all of the political situations, narrative events, and decisions the characters make are unmotivated or just don't make sense. It is as though there was just a grab bag of fantasy politics events and they are strung together at random, with people making arbitrary decisions to carry them to the next random event.
The political structures don't make sense. The character and country motivations don't make sense. The basis for power of the countries doesn't make sense. The specific character actions don't make sense.
I don't think I have read a political narrative in this style that was more ineptly written.

The choice system in the game tries to make the nonsensical narrative feel more interesting, but it doesn't succeed for me. Major choices are made by the major characters voting and you can gather information throughout the game in order to influence their votes. This sounds interesting, but it boils down to a longer version of picking options from a menu. There is never a decision you cannot just influence in whatever way you choose.
The negative here is that even if you were content to skip all the story for the excellent tactics, this system forces a lot of "exploration" and choice making gameplay that drags everything down and forces you to engage in the politics.

This is all on top of the style of storytelling being extremely laborious, with many unnecessary cutscenes and high level recaps by the narrator that simply repeat what you just witnessed in a character scene. It would be tedious to get through even if the story had anything to offer.

The tactics layer is so solid and is doing a lot of cool things without just copying Final Fantasy Tactics or Ogre Battle. It is a shame that the narrative is so utterly abysmal. I cannot recommend this game unless you are a massive fan of the genre.

After 25 years, this is as close as I've seen to a worthy Final Fantasy Tactics successor. Feels like something halfway between that game and a Fire Emblem. Every character is unique and there are multiple paths through the story, a Game of Thrones-like web of alliances and betrayals. Slightly surprised by how soon it all ended (thirty, thirty-five hours?) especially after the grindfest that was Octopath Traveler. Likely makes up for that "brevity" on replays, what with all the branching story paths, but I'm content to put this down for now. I expected great things and wasn't disappointed at all. What a gem!

The Pitch: A Strategy RPG in the spirit and style of Final Fantasy Tactics, set in a continent divided by war over sparse resources. Make decisions that drive the course of through persuasion of your allies.

The three systems the game highlights are Battle, Exploration, and Voting, so it is through the lens of these systems and the overall story that I have chosen to evaluate the game.

## Battle
The nuts and bolts of the grid-based tactics battle system are all very familiar. Characters take individual turns based on a speed stat, a choice I prefer to the alternative of each side of the battle taking a turn all at once. A variety of advanced abilities for each character are available at the cost TP, accumulated each turn. Battlefields with large variations in elevation place a strong emphasis on positioning and area control. Objectives are mostly straightforward, defeat the all enemies, defeat the general, with occasional small twists like time limits or not allowing certain characters to be defeated. Most of the variety comes from the characters available to use and in their diverse sets of abilities.

Aside from the eight main characters, a dozen or so more are recruited throughout the story and upon hitting some unspecified number of points in a certain conviction (scores tracked throughout the game based on dialogue and other choices). Among the characters I unlocked in my single play through, there was a solid amount of variety in what they each brought to a battle. There is flexibility in which characters you use, with only two or three of the main characters ever being strictly required in a battle. Optional, repeatable "Mental Mock Battles" and fast experience-gain for under-leveled characters make it easy to bring a character up to the appropriate level to use at any point.

Character progression consists of advancing their weapon level (which unlocks stat boosts, ability modifications, and eventually a "super" move) and "promotions" which offer modest stat boosts and access to more abilities upon leveling. The items required for these advancements are somewhat limited and exist as the main limitation on how many characters you can use.

This variety of characters and relative simplicity of progression struck a great balance. I had my favorites, but I also felt empowered to swap them in and out depending on what the battle at hand called for. My only real complaint on this front was that character advancement was slightly more opaque than necessary, with extremely limited details of abilities or weapon tiers yet to be unlocked. A preview of what is to come probably could have been offered without spoiling the sense of discovery as new abilities were unlocked.

The standout feature of the battle system, for me, is the simple fact that in failing a battle, either through defeat conditions or forfeit, experience and kudos (special currency) points accumulated during the battle are retained. At first, this may seem to merely be a way to mitigate difficulty, ensuring that each attempt at a battle will be slightly easier than the previous one. While that is certainly true, the predominant effect for me was that I would persist in my attempt at a particular mission even after the battle seemed to turn against me. In other tactics games, when something goes wrong in a battle it is often tempting to simply quit in restart, to avoid wasting time playing from a losing position (or losing a unit in the case of games with character death).

In Triangle Strategy, what occurred for more often is that I would press on, since any time spent continuing to try would at least net me some more experience and bonus currency. As it turns out, persisting would often lead to a narrow victory, one that required more ingenuity and actual tactical thinking than battles I won more handily. Even when I failed to win, I never felt as though my time was wasted.

The overall effect was a battle system that felt much more engaging and expressive than those that are more punishing. I never fell into tedium of a plodding, over-cautious style that I would often find myself employing in games like Fire Emblem. I could experiment with different units and strategies and often be rewarded with a crunchy, knockdown, drag out fight down to the last handful of units in a battle.

## Exploration
The exploration "system", if it could be called that, was easily the most disappointing part of the game for me. Left to wander a location, usually that of an upcoming battle, talking to NPCs and searching for items or, heaven-forbid, clues to the story or upcoming decision point.

While the visuals of these locations were often stunning, their detail and frequent shininess undercut what felt like the most important objective of these sections: finding items. Items found during exploration were frequently rare, powerful, and in some cases critical to upgrading weapons. Represented by an occasional twinkle on the ground these items were exceedingly easy to miss among the background, especially those that included their own sparkles or particle effects. Each exploration phase would eventually turn into a frantic scouring of every inch of the location, relying more on the on-screen "Examine" prompt to appear than the infrequent and easy-to-miss sparkle indicator for an item.

Even once all the items had (hopefully) been found, there was at least one instance where critical dialogue was hidden behind talking to NPCs in a particular sequence. Having missed this particular exchange and its resulting clue, I actually got a comical, premature "ending" when I ended the exploration phase too early.

These segments quickly became quite a chore, which is a shame because the environments and even some of the character development on display in these vignettes deserved more appreciation. Thankfully, none of them end up taking too much time and they are almost always immediately followed by a much more engaging battle.

## The Scales of Conviction
In many ways, the headline feature of Triangle Strategy is the "Scales of Conviction", along with the branching story and the conviction system that accompanies them. These ultimately end up being a bit of a mixed-bag, struggling most where they intersect with the story itself and all of its idiosyncrasies.

The conviction system tracks the player-character's commitment to three "convictions": Liberty, Utility, and Morality; an odd soup of overlapping ideas which never really take on a distinct identity throughout the game. The vagueness of these, along with the fact they are tracked invisibly (outside of frequently being notified that "Seranoa's Convictions have been strengthened") actually works to the benefit of the system, as it frees you to mostly ignore it and make decisions free of the burden of knowing it's going to give you points in the "wrong" conviction.

At least, that's what I did. As far as I can tell, all this really influenced was what side characters joined me and also which of a handful of dialogue choices remained locked to me during persuasion attempts for voting sequences. I never felt like I was at a disadvantage for letting this system fade into the background and it lent a sense of personalization to how the game was responding to my choices. It worked as a nice compliment to the far more visible and far less-subtle impact of the decisions made during voting sequences.

The larger, voting-based choices the player is offered are, for the most part, interesting and at least mildly thought-provoking. Aside from a few cases where one of the choices was obviously terrible (ie. a blatant war crime) I found myself giving each side a level of consideration that I'd rarely given choices in games with more black-and-white morality systems. Another source of engagement is that the player character does not actually choose, but must instead convince enough NPCs to vote for the chosen side. While I never found myself unable to win enough votes for the path I had chosen, the act of speaking with each NPC to hear their perspective had another benefit: by considering their viewpoint and what arguments they would find most compelling, I would inevitably consider the choice I was making more thoughtfully.

It was when the rubber met the road and the decisions made in these sequences were put to action that that things got a little messy. It's one thing to say that amid the politics and intrigue of international conflict that outcomes are unpredictable, that the consequences of your decision may not be easily anticipated. But as was often the case, it felt like each decision had hidden "riders", and that the course of action decided-upon actually contained more details that had not been explicitly discussed by the characters. This was symptomatic of a larger problem in the story, where the decisions made by the characters often felt arbitrary and dramatic in ways that both undercut a sense of agency from the player but also weakened the story overall.

## The Story
The bulk of the game's story is told through cutscenes, which make up a sizable portion of time spent with the game. Broadly, there are three types of cutscenes: critical story cutscenes that must be viewed to advance, optional story cutscenes available during certain chapters of the story, and character cutscenes that introduce or delve into the backstory of a character you can use in battle. All of these scenes are fully voice-acted, which is a nice touch, though the quality of the performances varies pretty dramatically (in English, at least).

Looking just at the critical story cutscenes, I think the story actually advances at a reasonable clip. Pacing is helped by the fact that you can do an optional training battle at virtually any time, so when I sat down to play and realized I didn't feel like watching cutscenes, I could jump right in to grind some levels or experiment with new characters whenever I felt like.

Even with this flexibility, I would still occasionally find myself daunted when I finished a battle to see I had two mandatory scenes, an optional story scene, and six character scenes to view. It felt like a lot to get through even if each individual scene tended to be pretty short; it often led to me just turning the game off and taking a break at some points where some tighter pacing could have kept me engaged.

The story these scenes came together to tell was, much like the English voice acting, uneven at best. I found myself invested in the fate of individual characters and felt that they each had a level of depth and complexity that surpassed those of similar games. But when it came to the choices these characters made, particularly those in power whose actions drove the plot, they often seemed fickle and arbitrary in a way that made the whole story, full of intrigue, schemes, and betrayal, feel hollow and unsatisfying. The choices and entanglements that formed the bulk of the story lacked a foundation in both rationality and emotional authenticity.

Even so, I still found the moment-to-moment writing engaging. I cannot help but wonder if the larger character and plotting issues came from the branching nature of the story requiring certain events to be modular or flexible. At the end of the game, I recalled fondly many story microcosms—specific relationships or situations that were compelling—but with hardly any feeling at all about the macro-level story that had unfolded.

## Bringing it All Together
The battle and character progression systems respected my time, even if they lacked the breadth and depth of a Final Fantasy-type job system. The exploration system is a clear low-point, but easily takes up the least time. The branching story fell flat for me, yet offered me enough genuinely interesting character beats to keep me entertained and invested in the outcomes of battles.

To anyone for whom this game seems at all interesting, I'd wager that it is probably worth your time. Whether it's worth your money at full price is a harder call to make. Catching this game on sale is probably the way to go for most people.

Good
- Beautiful 2DHD artstyle.
- Storyline decision is pretty interesting (and challenging morally).
- Battles are challenging, over-leveled characters will not make it too easy.
- 2nd playthrough on harder difficulty & harder battles.

Meh
- Voice acting (english) is alright.
- Need more random battles (currently replaced with mock battles).
- Upgrades and weapons is lacking.