read in any order

In the end they all got in the fucking robot.
Dislike anything mentioned? You will still enjoy the experience.
Into visual novels? They made a game just for you.
If the TV series Firefly was a video game.
This story slaps.
The RTS parts are fun, but not diverse enough in contrast to the way the rest plays out.
You will like the art style.
Incredible to combine so many ideas at once and it works out.

The second playthrough fell a bit flat, but the game remains great nontheless.
Triangle Strategy features an intricate story that can be played and enjoyed multiple times, as intended in the games' design. Decisions have consequences and shape the turn of events and players can see up to four different endings yada yada this has been done many times and what's actually setting this game apart: the story is pretty good on a subsequent try and if you enjoy political mysteries this game's gonna be a field trip. It's not the most complicated thing, but many twists can be foreseen just the right amount of time and a few will surprise you like red circles on a clickbait thumbnail.

Story-wise I cannot regret playing this again, but the gameplay elements were not balanced at all. So you really feel like the person responsible for common sense in game design did not show up for work at a certain point. Places visited before will not contain new items, and battles yield the same loot that they did beforehand. So you need high-tier materials and a lot of money and the game gives you three bananas. Leveling up in the second playthrough is more of a nuisance. There are plenty of characters to recruit and even more are playable in later playthroughs, but you cannot equip and pull up their stats fast enough and the game becomes a grind festivity. This is such an oversight in an overall well developed game.
As for positive elements of gameplay the developers outdid themselves on the flow of battles. Even though they can be long, it never feels boring to play them out. Difficulty can be changed anytime and whenever you lose a battle you don't lose the EXP gained by the characters. This is massive and I hope this will be the gold standard mechanic in all future games of this genre. Overall it was a nice experience.

At the end of the day all that matters is the experience the player has with this epically crafted story. There are several complaints to be made about the story, sidequests, battle system, character writing or overall balancing. But I'm not here to make them. FF16 plays like a gem nearly the whole time, with the boss fights being the very large cherry on top of a handful of cakes. I laughed, cried and always wanted to see more during my playthrough.
It has some rough edges and builds a beautiful foundation nontheless. It is not for everybody, but oh hell did it click with me.
Rushing into New Game+ never felt so easy. Just to experience it all over again.

How are game systems like these still a thing nowadays?
They had beautiful visuals, an engaging story and interesting characters to fill their world with. It turned out incredibly bland, boring and actually the game actively pulls every fun out of the experience the further you're in.

It starts out great until you actually have to do something to progress the story. Movement is very slow and every city & dungeon has chests planted all over them with items you don't need 95% of the time. Every side quest in the first hours is a fetch quest combined with a tougher encounter. My passion to play this game skyrocketed when the trailers came out and decreased every hour of my playthrough.
The following points hold this game back tremendously:

〇 The story heavily revolves around the mechanic to change the time period to the past or the future. You can also do this in combat. The design of enemies and most bosses actually discourages the player to use this mechanic. How do you develop this mechanic and then make every bossfight harder when used is beyond me. And then an NPC who is always with you can jump to either times in most cities. First of all this is executed so slowly and secondly it has a max range of about 3m. So you probably sigh harder every time you have to use it.
〇 The enemies in this game are weak to either physical or magical attacks and that is all you need to know about how to approach every encounter. They get more boring the further you go and have no variability. The combat also lacks any momentum to motivate the player about the time travel skill, as it's just faster and more effective to perform standard moves.
〇 Also random encounters as a concept is bad.
〇 To trigger mandatory or optional events the player has to follow the very specific route to do that. Dialogue, collecting items, jumping to another time etc. So if you want to do any quests in this game it has to follow a -> b -> c and cannot be done any other way. There is no real freedom to anything and no playthrough is a meaningful experience. It could have been a visual novel with no combat, though.
〇 The max party size is three and there are more playable characters beyond that. Everyone not in combat doesn't receive EXP and at a certain time a character has to leave the party for a little while and when he comes back he is the same level as before.
〇 There is no way to see all of your items. If equipment cannot be held on to by any character then you don't know it exists. Also equipment is poorly balanced, because you get access to very powerful parts about 1/3 into the story and afterwards you just stomp over every encounter.
〇 It's way too long and dragged out with a carbon copy of quests and cities beyond the first hours. I was eight hours in and realized there was about 24 more to go. At this point I already lost all motivation to continue.
〇 Achievements block each other out so you cannot master this game in one playthough. This isn't that bad, but noteworthy because why should you play this game twice.

This is a great recommendation for everyone who always wanted to try a city building strategy game, but was too deterred by their complexity or did not want to spend so much time getting behind the mechanics. It takes virtually no time to understand Terra Nil and how to get around. Usual playtime will be 5-8 hours and it is very much worth it for everyone who looks to get into a cozy game that has a low difficulty scale.
I enjoyed my time very much so far and got to 100% quickly. Even compared to other strategy games, there is nothing like it and I look forward to any updates in the future.