Triangle Strategy - Review After 100%

all right [Music] what's going on everybody mortum here this time bringing you my review after 100 for triangle strategy a story heavy trpg that released for the switch back in March however recently saw a release on PC specifically steam which is where I am checking it out at now to get the usual stuff out of the way I review games after 100 all the time to set me apart from other reviewers on YouTube and while that does include the achievements it also includes a lot more though in the case of triangle strategy the achievement list is incredibly thorough but if you're interested in everything else I cover and you're not already subscribed if you go to my Channel first video you'll see is a video explaining all of it but with that out of the way let's actually dive into this thing triangle strategy has a pretty unique style to it of course the sort of HD 2D Graphics I believe it's called that we see on display here and no surprise there really as this is from the same people that worked on Bravely Default as well as octopath traveler which have a very similar graphical style but broadly speaking What triangle strategy really is is a t RPG that meets a narrative game so there's a lot of tactical based combat however it's not really the focus most of the time this game has a very heavy emphasis on the story and a lot of the combat oriented stuff really doesn't open up until you get into subsequent playthroughs which we'll get into in just a moment but first let's talk a story setup not gonna go really into spoilers here however I do want to cover kind of the basics of the plot setup our main character though we will be playing as many of them in the combat sections is Sarah Noah set to be married off to a rival Nations other Noble House really to cement cooperation between the two Nations that kind of thing because we are in the nation of Glenbrook however there are two other nations and all three of these nations were at War 30 years prior to the beginning of the game in a conflict that was centered around resources but our character Sarah Noah due to his father's failing Health takes up his father's mantle and the Lord of a certain area of Glenbrook can you answer to a King that presides over the entire country if you will but as you might imagine the piece that has found the three nations doesn't exactly last long otherwise we wouldn't have much of a story to tell and you have to work away through this conflict while making the best decisions as you can which brings me to the paths through the game there are three main paths through the game however there is an ending that you can only get if you take specific actions throughout the story which is considered the true ending you'll hear it referred to as the golden route sometimes however if all you had to do was make those decisions it would probably be pretty easy but rather the game at least on the first playthrough requires these decisions to be made through voting every time there's a major choice to be made you and the closest companions in your retinue will all vote on it and you'll have to persuade these characters to vote your way which works off of the conviction system the conviction system is largely hidden on your first playthrough however on subsequent playthroughs A New Game Plus the game will actually tell you what's what but on your first run you're not going to know anything about what's going on based on how you talk to people and actions you perform you'll accumulate points in three different convictions morality utility and Liberty and your ability to persuade the companions that you have is down to your actual morality score as well as picking the appropriate options but again all of that is hidden from you on your first playthrough which means that first playthrough you might get saddled with a choice or two it's not really up to you because you get voted against which can be a bit of a bummer when it happens though this is a thing that new game plus pretty much completely alleviates because at that point your values in each of those scores is so high that you can basically persuade anyone to do what you want in terms of the vote however the first playthrough is a very tightly controlled experience through this system and it goes even a little farther than that because it actually bleeds into the progression systems as well there are a ton of optional characters throughout the game that you'll only get if you certain conviction thresholds or pick specific paths through the game so in order to recruit every character possible you're going to have to go through all of the different Paths of the game and by the time you do that your scores should be more than high enough to get the rest of the companions but again not something you'll be able to do on your first run however even then each and every one of those characters has a few different upgrade routes promotions as well as their weapons and these require materials that the game very tightly controls on your first playthrough so you'll only be able to promote and strengthen a handful of units which brings me to one of my first major points for this game that we'll talk about a little bit later but all of this kind of combines into a system that doesn't really feel like it opens up properly especially on the combat side of things until you've played through the game at least once which I think could be a little off-putting for a lot of people who are only going to play through a game the one time but from there let's talk about progression a little bit as I mentioned there are promotions and weapons promotions are basically pretty simple every character has two promotions they can even actually get to a veteran and Elite version of whatever their class is this requires them to be a certain level as well as have the appropriate metal which allows them to be promoted these promotions come with base increases to their stance making them more effective but it also grants them more tactical points or TP and these are the resource that are used to power their abilities and managing them is a decent part of combat if you expect to actually use your abilities regularly and when they get promoted they have more of them we also have weapons this is of course going to give us things like more damage that type of stuff but you use materials to increase these things like Stone Timber that type of stuff you also need special materials to upgrade your weapon tier which will then allow you to pick up passive things to further increase your character's stats and then last but not least in addition to all of this stuff there is a vendor which you'll be buying a lot of your materials from especially your promotion upgrade materials called the sundry shop the sundry shop also sells what are called quietuses which is is a weird word but these are effects you can use in combat as the player you can open up a menu and then click on quietest and then use it and it'll have some bigger effect than normal you can use a certain amount of these per combat as well and these are bigger abilities that can absolutely change the flow of combat though again on a first run you're likely not going to be using it very much now that we've talked about the basic systems I did want to mention though that each character has a relatively limited progression if it sounded like what I was saying was a lot it really isn't it's two promotions which require an item and a basic level up as well as upgrading their weapons all the way up most of this is passive stuff that you'll just kind of do as you play the game a little more and it really just results in more damage being done so it's a relatively simple system as far as progression goes but the resources around it are tightly controlled however in addition to this the characters themselves are also kind of bound to one role you will get a ton of characters there are roughly 30 or so and each one of them has a pretty set role they have set up abilities set promotions that type of stuff so that character is really only going to be able to do the one thing that they were designed to do there is some overlap here like you'll get a couple different kinds of Mages couple different kinds of healers some of them will have a horse some of them will have the ability to use an item twice or be able to attack twice stuff like that so there's a little bit of variation on the individual characters but they all have a set role next up I want to talk about new game plus a little bit before we dive into the overall gameplay Loop and I want to start this with new game plus because this is where the game actually opens up especially in terms of the combat in particular as I've mentioned several times up to this point the focus of the first run of the game is a very tightly controlled experience and there's not a lot of wiggle room due to the way things are structured that being set materials set upgrade items that type of stuff it's very difficult to do that much beyond what the game is going to allow you to do however New Game Plus carries over all your progress makes material is more available you'll be able to gather more characters that can do more stuff for you and there can be a bigger focus on combat as New Game Plus also increases the amount of optional battles you'll be able to take part in which we're about to talk about which brings us to the overall gameplay as I mentioned towards the beginning of the video the game is very very story heavy a first Run's probably going to take you like 25 to 40 hours depending on how quickly you play and most of that is going to be story scenes where you're just reading dialogue and going through it in terms of actual fights you're going to be participating into like maybe a couple dozen provided you aren't doing too many of the optional battles the game is mostly narrative scenes and then this will finally allow you to either explore an area exploration will allow you to go around gather information that can be useful in persuading people during the voting phases the voting phases typically combine a little bit of exploration as well as the persuasion together and you can also find unique stuff during exploration like items that are hidden away that kind of thing you can solve of the occasional tiny puzzle to get something extra and then finally we have the combat phases each chapter of the game usually incorporates at least one instance of all of those things however some chapters are split up into multiple parts that said though while that is a very linear experience the game does provide the option to focus more on combat oriented stuff through mental mock battles while you're out in the world map so not actively in a scene you can bring up the menu and go to your encampment the encampment is where you're going to be accessing your vendors such as the weapon upgrades the regular vendor to buy things like consumables to use during combat as well as the sundry shop which is where you buy a lot of your more specific upgrade materials from but there's also a sort of bar keeper this person will allow you to participate in the mental mock battles which are where you can grind out experience items that type of stuff but even here again the amount of materials you're going to be getting is very very controlled but the mental mock battles are helpful because they're going to keep you you from getting completely stuck and soft locking yourself if there is a position where you just can't progress through the main story you can grind out mental mock battles which have a set level to them to get your characters a bit stronger level them up to where you need them that kind of thing but with the way the game handles experience it's not really possible to get above the level you're supposed to be if that makes sense as the second your characters are equal to or above the level of the enemies you're fighting they get extremely reduced experience and that is pretty much the gameplay Loop now on new game plus we actually get access to harder and harder mental mock battles they do more stuff they're more interesting and you can also dip your way through the various Paths of the story but the mental mock battles are like most of the combat you're going to be participating in if you do more than one run through the story but now let's actually talk about the combat itself the combat is kind of where everything starts to make sense in terms of why they structured the game the way that they did because the combat is a relatively simple turn-based tactical game that's not to say it's bad but it's very run-of-the-mill if you play a lot of these games nothing here is going to surprise you really but it is pretty well done nonetheless though turn-based tactical system it uses a turn order rather than a team system so your character speeds stat and the enemy speed stance will determine who gets to go win in the initiative order basically each character can typically move and then take an action and action can be using a consumable item a regular standard attack with their weapon or activating an ability which requires of course the TP points that we talked about earlier and then you the character can also apply the quietest to the battlefield however there are a few mechanics that do make the combat a little more interesting and this is via the backstab criticals that can happen so if you hit any character in their back they take a critical including your characters so positioning is important and at the end of a character's turn you can decide which way they are facing which can help you prevent into being stabbed in the back yourself but if a character is flanked that is to say a character on each side of yours or the enemies and they get attacked the other character on the opposite side will also do a follow-up attack which can be fun and then there are a few Elemental interactions for instance some enemies will throw oil at you or you can get consumable items that will allow you to throw oil you can then set that oil on fire you can make puddles that can then be electrocuted that type of stuff it's relatively simple but it can be fun to mess around with the environment a little bit in this way there are also weather effects that prop up sometimes though that doesn't happen a ton so like I said if you've played a lot of trpgs I don't think the combat will surprise anyone too much but it is nonetheless a pretty fun polished experience however as I've mentioned doesn't really open up until you get to the later playthroughs assuming you get that far however once you do get that far the combat does get pretty easy as at that point you'll have so many options available to you that you can pretty easily outdo the enemy which I imagine is the reason why the experience as a whole is so rigid as you begin the game but that brings us to our steam deck compatibility portion and to the surprise of no one it runs very very well here so for starters the game itself has a great on Deck rating or it's verified on deck which generally speaking means that it will work very well right out of the gate without you really needing to do anything to the game and given the fact that the game started its life on the Nintendo switch I don't think comes as a surprise at all as the format of the hardware is relatively similar and in some ways I actually think the game plays a little bit better on the steam deck because I think these HD 2D Graphics look a little bit better on that smaller screen than they do blown up on my 4k monitor but if you're thinking about playing this game on the steam deck again runs very very well has a verified rating you don't really need to do anything just fire it up and it'll play perfectly for you and it's a really good experience over there now that brings us to our positives negatives and then we'll wrap this thing up so on the positive side of things I thought all the branching story paths were pretty cool you don't see a ton of that in tactical RPGs or srpgs not to say it doesn't exist but you don't see it as often as you would in like a traditional RPG but I enjoyed the story past the story itself was very interesting seeing it from all these different angles was pretty cool which brings me to the next positive and that is that it's a very polished experience you can tell they put a lot of effort into this everything seems to be really accounted for all the various story bits react to the choices you've made up to that point nothing felt out of place it's a very polished version of what this kind of game is which on the whole combined with its relatively easy difficulty compared to mini games in this genre makes it very approachable if you're looking for a story heavy RPG that has a little bit of combat not too much then this is a great game for you as a neutral point but hardly a negative the art style is definitely not going to be for everybody this type of art is very polarizing some people kind of love it other people just hate it I enjoyed it personally it kind of reminded me a lot of the older Final Fantasy games that I would play which I imagine is what they're going for with a sort of modern Twist on it but nonetheless there are absolutely people that will not buy this game simply because of the way it looks so I felt like pointing it out now on the actual negative side of things I have two here really we'll start with the one I didn't really talk about in the review up to this point and that is that the PC controls are kind of bad the game can either use wasd or your mouse however while you can use both of those on screen at the same time the game seems to get very confused when you do this like it doesn't know which one it should be taking input from and it can lead to a lot of clunky interactions with the controls as a result so the PC controls honestly need a little bit of work and I would recommend playing this with a controller if you have one because it does have the support and as someone who plays almost entirely on PC I can tell you that the controls for this game are not good but our other probably bigger negative is that the experience of at the beginning is a little too restricting honestly there's just there's just so many things the game does to kind of keep you walled in that it doesn't really feel like you can do much and the problem here is that while this game clearly is meant to be enjoyed multiple times most people are only going to play through this the one time they're going to remember that it kind of again Walden experience and they're not gonna think fondly of it which is a shame because the game gets much better on subsequent playthroughs when those sort of guard rails fall off which brings me to my conclusion overall I would tell you triangle strategy doesn't really do anything new but it does do what it does very well it is incredibly story heavy and if you're looking for a more combat-oriented game this one's probably not for you and considering that it is full AAA price which is 60 U.S on Steam a recommendation becomes a bit more of a nuanced thing for me so on one hand I think if you plan on playing through this game multiple times and you actually want to see everything the game has to offer then it does manage to to Warrant its 60 price tag I think there's a lot here to enjoy if you're going to play through the game that many times if you don't want to play through the game that many times and you only want to see it the once then I would gear yourself up for a very on the rails experience that is relatively short and because of that I'd catch it on sale if you're not going to play it more than the one time but for me though I did enjoy it for what it was worth I did actually pay for this game so I paid the full 60. and given all the time I spent with it I did enjoy it I feel like I got my money's worth out of it but quite frankly I don't think most people are going to stick around to the later playthroughs where the game really opens up but that's all I've got for you guys certainly hope you enjoyed the review if you did like comment subscribe thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it we are growing every day the growth over the last month has been tremendous about 10 000 subscribers in the span of a month actually but again thank you may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 199,684

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, triangle stategy review, triangle stategy gameplay, triangle stategy pc, triangle stategy steam, triangle strategy tips, triangle strategy, triangle strategy golden route, triangle strategy ost, triangle strategy walkthrough

Id: 3Pk2_FHLVXs

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022