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.

My first metroidvania.

I have never been a fan of platformers and I still think this is not really my kind of game, regardless of that I have been able to enjoy it.

It is hard to believe that this game is 30 years old, the ambience is unbelievably well achieved thanks to the visuals which make each area iconic and is supported by an outstanding sound design.

The level design is remarkable, but I will say I didn't enjoy when the game forces you to backtrack. Arriving at an area that you have already explored earlier with a newly revealed shortcut and having to go all the way there just by backtracking are two completely different things. Super Metroid sometimes manages to make interesting shortcuts with it's upgrade system, but forgets to do so in some scenarios, forcing you to go all the way back where you came from (not just a few rooms away) a copious amount of times.

Some rooms where platforming was needed seemed to drag for too long, specially when provided with some foes and proyectiles along the way for increased anxiety.

The movement was smoother than I expected overall, but I struggled with the jump, specially with wall-jumping and using the space suit roll jump.

Despite all that, the exploration of new zones always feels fresh, and the upgrade system not only provides with a sense of progression of Samus's power level but also providing a variety of tools to delve deeper into each area and progress towards the next one.

Many of the upgrades seemed very advanced for the time where this game came out, for example , the grappling hook feels surprisingly smooth. By the end of the game Samus's arsenal has changed so much that it almost feels like another game, also making dealing with enemies much easier and satisfactory. I had one huge issue with the arsenal tho, and it's swapping between weapons, which felt incredibly clunky probably because the console lacked enough buttons or maybe because I played this with an Xbox controller.

I have also tried practicing some techniques like bomb jumping and wall jumping, although they were useful to me in a small number of situations as I'm not any kind of speedrunner, I can begin to see and appreciate how this game influenced the world of speedrunning and how the developers took care in making it possible.

My favorite part of the game were the first few zones, I feel this is where I enjoyed the exploration and ambience the most, every area felt unique and I really like the abandoned and hostile planet it helped to picture, I enjoyed the wrecked ship as well. The ending was pretty cool and the areas were visually impressive but having to backtrack and getting stuck not knowing how to progress kind of worsened my overall experience (I probably should be more patient with this kind of games, can't help it tho it's my first metroidvania). I have the feeling that I will appreciate this game much more when I come back to it in the future after tackling some other games of the same genre. With my platforming skills honed and the patience required to tackle the genre ( I was looking foward to other titles that I mean to play in the following days, which stressed me to finish this one faster).

Overall this game surprised me and helped understand how ahead of it's time it truly was, I will surely come back to it in the future.