Triangle Strategy

Originally Posted 9/12/23

Brief Overview

Quick Overview

Triangle Strategy is a strategy game in which you follow Serenoa as he navigates a medieval (with some minor fantasy) world with his friends. He's the son of a lord, and you'll take him into battle along with a whole host of different units. There is a lot of story to the game, and you'll make choices along the way that impact the story down the line.

In Depth Review

Triangle Strategy is an extremely well done game. As I said above, if you like strategy games this is an easy recommendation.

One thing I noticed almost immediately is there is a *lot* of story to this game. I have a friend who played the game as well, and he said he'd do push ups and sit ups during cut scenes, because there were just so many and they were longer than you'd expect. At times, the game felt almost more like a Visual Novel with combat sprinkled throughout. That said, it does come together where eventually you really understand the world, and how these characters belong in it. As I mentioned above, this game also has you make decisions throughout the game that will impact the game later on.

I want to focus in a bit on the decision making in this game. I've not seen it anywhere before, but in this game you, the player, do not get to decide what happens. Instead, you have to convince your party members which course of action to take. In the game, you typically have 2-3 options for a given choice. You have 7 companions (I believe) who will vote on what to do. Typically, the vote is tied with one undecided person. You can then go around and talk to each person, and try to convince them to choose whichever path you prefer. How hard it is to convince them depends on whether your convictions line up with theirs. Convictions is a whole other thing in this game, but to sum up basically whenever you do certain actions in game, it contributes to one of three (I believe) conviction scores. Different characters want you to have points in different scores. You can always give it a try though to convince someone, regardless of score. You're usually given 2-3 dialogue options to choose from. Some options, however, are only available if you explored correctly before talking to your party. During decision times, you're usually free to explore the castle or surrounding area and talk with people. This allows you to gather information. If you miss information, you won't have it as an option when convincing your companions. On top of that, some options are only available if you've gone down certain paths. This is one of the ways the game encourages you to replay it, as you keep information between playthroughs (or, so I've been told). There was one decision I remember where I had so little information, I could not steer the game where I wanted it to go. Another thing to consider when convincing people of what to do, is figuring out the argument that character is most likely to be receptive to. Some characters think with their hearts, others with their head. It's up to you to figure out what the best argument to make is to each character.

Because of this system though, it's completely possible that you don't end up going down the path you want to take in the game. Fortunately that only happened once or twice for me. But still, this was a super unique system that I thought was incredibly well done.

One of the other things that struck me about this game is every unit is unique. In the past, I've played games like Fire Emblem and Banner Saga, and in both of those games you can get a whole slew of characters, but often some of their classes overlap. There might be other differences, but usually you can find multiple of a class. Not in Triangle Strategy though. Each character you meet is a different class. This was really refreshing to me because it felt like the team really put in the effort to make each character as unique as possible. Especially too because, after my first play through, I had maybe 15-20 characters total, and typically could only field 10 of them. So there was always a feeling that there were more play styles and units to try at any moment.

Adding to that feeling, there are a couple of other nice features in this game. The first is that each story mission has a recommended level for your units to be at. There are training missions you can do to level up characters to be close to that recommended level. In Triangle Strategy, if a character is more than a level or two behind the recommended level, they immediately level up for each action they take, until they're within that threshold of the recommended level. This ends up being amazing because, for example, on the final mission it was recommended my units be around level 30 if I remember correctly. There was a unit I hadn't used ever before, but I thought would be helpful. She started at level 11 but after 2 or 3 training missions, she was on par with my original units.

Another mechanic I enjoyed with the game (or, at the very least, made it more challenging) is the direction your characters face matters. Backstabs can happen and do more damage. Also, if you have a teammate opposite of where you're attacking, they do a follow up attack. These mechanics also apply to enemies, so positioning becomes something you need to constantly be aware of.

Conclusion

Triangle Strategy is an easy recommendation if you like strategy games. I was surprised with how much content there was, and even more surprising I want to do another play through. Typically once I play a game I'm done with it, however Triangle Strategy has me curious about the other endings. It also has me curious about what information I missed originally. And they make it so easy to do new game plus - you keep your units and items, and they show you the stats for your convictions. Honestly it's an extremely well done game, and if you think you might like it even a little bit I'd highly recommend picking it up.