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.

Par où commencer.. J'adore Benedict.

Plus sérieusement, Triangle strategy est mon tout premier tactical rpg et quel claque !
Des personnages attachants et touchants, des ost de dingue, un gameplay super efficace et puis un pixel art au petit oignons. Je l'ai découvert quasiment en même temps que mon oncle, et c'est notre jeu, nos personnages, nos histoires, chacun de notre côté, qui nous a transporté. Si bien raconter du début à la fin, c'était captivant.

En parlant de fin, 4 fin sont possible, dont une "vraie" fin.
J'ai tellement adorer ce jeu que après l'avoir finis, j'ai relancé le jeu avec ma sauvegarde pour que refaire le jeu une nouvelle fois. Il est désormais à 100% et je ne regrette en aucun cas le temps passer dessus (environ 70h).

Mine de rien, beaucoup de dialogue dans le jeu, il faut bien compter 20h à 25h de dialogue lol, mais ça ne m'a vraiment pas déranger, au contraire.

Je pourrais parler longtemps de ce jeu, de cette merveille.

Top 3 personnages :
Benedict
Anna
Serenor

I like how after some very poor firsts impressions story wise, the game manages to become a rather interesting tale of societal change in a world at the verge of colapse. And like one could say the world this story takes place in is dull, yeah, like many other games and tv series and whatnot it’s clearly aiming to replicate a certain gameofthronesy vibe without fully committing to the task, or are simply lacking the talent necessary to create a vibrant and believable universe. It’s just too hard, even if you have the talent, it takes too much time to do it right.

Nevertheless, Triangle Strategy succeeds in using these lackluster elements the best anyone could. There are three factions at war, each one seemingly representing an idea that’s also expressed as such mechanically; freedom, morality and pragmatism, but I would say there are clear parallelisms with real world empires. You have the expansionist “freedom” seeking militarists that are developing weapons of mass destructions (the US), the “well meaning” but archaic nation open to invasions for the naivete of its leaders (Japan), and the conservative “egalitarians” that have the monopoly of a key resource they obtain by enslaving a minority (Germany). This is of course highly subjective, but I insist that this es heavily implied by the text. You sure notice my use of quotations marks, and that’s because that’s just a facade. In reality they are just seeking power and profit, they have a world vision that they pursue out of interest, because that’s what in their mind gives them the best chance at standing at the top of the pyramid once the last arrow is shot. They are all wrong, in the end, of course. Ruling over a pile of corpses should not be considered a victory.

The process in which the main characters realize this and interprets what they see is quite interesting too. They are constantly fighting other people’s wars, always stabbed in the back and forced to make tough decisions for a better tomorrow that never arrives. You can sense how every choice they make takes them closer to a breaking point that, depending of how you played your cards, eventually leads them to perpetually participate in this games of thrones or to destroy or escape this cycle.

Again, the story is quite thin in some places, and it’s put there with not a lot of care or elegance, but it tries very interesting things at nearly every moment. I love how each member of your main team is extremely well characterized to a degree that you could know what they are going to say to any event before they do it. If you try to reason with the extremely pragmatic realist who basically lives for the perdurance of his kingdom and tell him that you all should go out of your way to rescue a friend and to do that for honor, he will instantly disagree with you. For him, that’s irrelevant, and while you could convince him by telling him different things, he just doesn’t care about honor and friendship. They are all just great characters.

Anyway, the story explores the shortcomings of these visions, and how all of them lead to cyclic violence and how this violence is suffered the most by the common folk. And while it could be a lot more poignant, it is definitely acute of the problems that plague both the game universe and ours.

In terms of its presentation I found it a bit boring, frankly. There’s much better pixel art done by smaller teams, and the HD2D or whatever it is called doesn’t quite shine here as much as it did in Live a Live, for example. The music it’s not that great either. The character designs are excellent though.

While I don’t like to separate the game’s components in a review, it’s just the way it came out. The combat is robust and surprisingly beginner friendly. There are enough characters to make fun team compositions, even if those characters themselves aren’t that customizable, and the maps, an often overlooked element in strategy rpgs, are perhaps some of the best I’ve seen. There are a lot and they feel tailor made, and they DO affect how you fight, from tiny arenas that basically force a frontal attack, to convoluted mines with platforms and trains. They are just balanced and it is clear a lot of effort when into designing these encounters.

I wish I come back later and edit this in a more organized way, or to make it all coalesce into a single statement about a game that I loved despite its shortcomings, but as of right now, this will do. I don’t think there’s many better games in the genre.

This game is severely overrated. The story is bland, mediocre, SLOW...

Whoever designed the UI and the systems built around it whenever you're out of combat should be fired. Everything is slow for the sake of being slow.

The way the story and narrative is presented is also slow because potato. Why on earth is there a narrator that narrates what I've literally just seen 15 seconds ago? Why does the plot need to be this slow? The plot is simple as FUCK, there is no depth, there is no need for so much unnatural buildup.

I've never been a fan of combat in these kind of games but I'd say that this is one of the few ones that I actually felt good playing. That is until I hit a fight where I was underleveled and forced me to grind, and then the same thing happened next battle and this went on and on and on.

Overall not a bad experience, music and art makes up for how bad the narrative is, but still nowhere near anything past a 6 or 7 out of 10.

It was a pretty decent game overall. I enjoyed my time with it, but I don't think it will be one of those titles that sticks around in my head for very long.

On the gameplay side, Triangle Strategy was a mixed bag. I enjoyed it a lot early on when I played on hard. Fights were challenging enough that I had to think seriously about my actions without feeling like they were unfair or requiring an absurdly specific strategy. But as the game went on, the gameplay failed to keep pace. Units will level up and their stats will improve, but the way you use them in battle rarely changes. New abilities are rare and more often than not aren't different enough to meaningfully change your strategies. Most unit growth will revolve around making existing moves deal more damage (necessary given how much enemy health pools increase).

Most new moves will instead come with the addition of new deployable units who join your party at various points in the story or when certain conditions are met. But since you can't deploy many units in a single battle and unused units will fall behind thanks to their lower level and lack of upgrades, you have to go out of your way to incorporate these new units into your strategies. Some of them are powerful enough to be worth it... but others are either very situational or just not very good.

By around the halfway mark, I turned my difficulty down to normal and kept it that way for the rest of the game. Enemies just kept getting more and more health until it would take 4-5 of my units to kill one of theirs, while their attacks could kill me in 1-2 hits. And the levels felt more and more restrictive as if there was a specific strategy I was supposed to take in order to avoid guaranteed defeat. Normal difficulty was still fine, but it was still a shame that I had to back off from the challenge because of the awkward difficulty spike around the halfway mark.

As for the story, Triangle Strategy struck a good balance between simplicity and depth. While it is a fantasy world, the game doesn't dwell much on all the big worldbuilding and history. While there are bits and pieces about how the world got to its current state, its not treated a big focus with lore compendiums and infodumps that I've seen a lot of other games waste time on. Rather than concerning itself with history, the conflict in Triangle Strategy revolves more around its characters and their ideals. The game's two main villains represent the extreme forms of each ideal with either total Freedom or total Equality, while the cast of 'good guys' all find themselves somewhere in between but still wanting a way to harmonize the two. Its pretty simple, but I do think the character writing and plot were done well and gave the ideological conflict a fair bit of narrative weight. I wouldn't call the writing masterful by any stretch, but it did its job of giving some sense of purpose behind each character's actions and some impetus for the me to continue playing.

Triangle Strategy is far from the best tactical JRPG I've played, but its not a bad bet either. Its good enough to be worth giving it a shot, but you're not missing out on anything amazing if you decide to spend your time on something else instead.

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.