Triangle Strategy is a grid-based strategy RPG, so anyone who’s played a similar game (like Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre, or Final Fantasy Tactics) will probably find themselves right at home. Gameplay takes place on a grid through a series of scenarios, each featuring a victory condition (often defeating all enemies or the boss) and a failure condition (usually losing all your units).
At base, each unit has one move and one action per turn (which can be used in either order). Each unit can perform a basic attack and use items (and special location-based actions, such as pulling a lever to open a gate), but beyond that each character has unique special abilities. Abilities cost a resource called TP, which generate at a rate of 1 per turn. So on a certain level, it’s pretty simple: use your resources and their special abilities to defeat the enemies (or whatever the goal of the scenario is) while avoiding losing your units.
Your characters are the stars of the show, and they grow in a few different ways. First, there’s a traditional RPG experience-based level system. It functions a lot like Fire Emblem: you get experience for doing basically anything and always need 100 experience to level up, but the higher your level (compared to the level of the mission you’re playing) the less experience you get. The level-based experience adjustment is actually massive, meaning if you’re only a few levels behind you’ll probably get a level for just one or two actions, but as soon as you hit the recommended level your experience gains dry up to basically nil. I liked this a lot, since it made it incredibly quick and easy to bring a unit up to par while making sure you didn’t over-level your other characters.
After that, each unit has a class that can be ranked up up to twice. (Early-game units can be ranked up twice, while from mid-game your units will come already ranked up once.) Ranking up increases the unit’s base stats, maximum TP by 1 (it starts at 3 and goes up to 5), and adds additional skills that can be learned by leveling up. Classes are set for each unit, so there’s no unit-specific branching or choice; rather, the choice is in which of your units you rank up.
Lastly, each unit has a unique tree of weapon upgrades. Each upgrade tree features three tiers, with the first unlocked automatically and the latter two requiring items. The first two tiers of upgrades have five options each, while the third tier has one to three (depending on the unit). Most upgrades are simple stat boosts, but others can buff a unit in other ways, such as reducing the TP cost of an ability, boosting the power of a specific skill, or even granting a new passive effect. There are also some upgrades that are “paired,” meaning you can only have one at a time, but once you’ve unlocked one you can switch to the other at no cost, allowing some variability in the same unit from battle to battle. While every unit uses the same item to rank up their class, there are a few different types of materials used to upgrade character weapons. However, each successive upgrade in the same tier of the same character requires more and more materials, so it doesn’t take long to get a few upgrades on each character, but fully upgrading a character takes a ton of resources (and in fact I didn’t fully upgrade a single character over four playthroughs.)
That’s the extent of inherent character growth, but each character can also equip two accessories. Most of which are just pure stat boosts. While there are accessories that provide other effects, most seemed too unreliable. (For instance, one item gives your unit a stat boost when they kill a unit—but I’d rather just have a static strength boost that’s always active (and helps me kill the unit to begin with!) than hope that they land the killing blow on a unit and then have another unit they can immediately attack.) The only non-stat boosting accessory I regularly used was the one that lets the equipped character move first in a battle, since it’s necessary for some strategies (and, like the stat boosts, is consistent).
So customization is not what Triangle Strategy is about. Level-ups and classes are linear, weapon upgrades are limited, and there are only so many accessories. It’s not even like Fire Emblem, where, even though each player has access to the same units, permadeath and randomized level-ups can result in focusing on different characters across different playthroughs, since effectively unlimited experience and gold in Triangle Strategy means any neglected unit can be brought up to snuff at any time.
Rather, Triangle Strategy is about (surprise surprise) strategy. Each unit has a predefined niche. That’s why there’s minimal customization—you’re not meant to mold the characters into the units that you want, but figure out how to use the characters you’ve been given to succeed at the challenges in your way.
I think one of Triangle Strategy’s greatest weaknesses is that gameplay at the beginning feels a bit clunky because your units haven’t been developed yet. You don’t have many units, so you don’t get to strategize on which units to bring in, and then your units don’t have many skills yet, so they don’t feel particularly differentiated. (Even fully-upgraded units don’t have that many skills, especially compared to some RPGs, but it’s still enough.)
Once you get some units and some upgrades, however, the gameplay shines. This isn’t the kind of RPG where you initially can’t do anything but attack while at the end of the game you can combo multiple super-attacks for six figures of damage—the power level is much flatter, but a few minor tweaks is usually all it takes to make a unit feel much smoother.
For instance, let’s take Jens, your camp’s blacksmith and one of the first optional characters you can recruit. Depending on the level you get him, he may only have two abilities: the ability to place a trap which launches an enemy the specified direction when sprung, and the ability to build a ladder on an adjacent wall, each costing 2 TP.
Jens’ niche is immediately obvious: he excels on maps with verticality, since he can use his traps to push enemies off ledges, dealing fall damage and forcing them to waste turns climbing back up, and use ladders to allow your party to shortcut cliff faces. But at the same time he’s a bit clunky. You only gain 1 TP per turn, meaning his abilities can only be used every other turn (on average). However, you want to place a bunch of traps quickly, since they’re mainly useful for preventing enemies from getting to you; they don’t do much once the enemies are in your face. (The AI won’t refuse to step foot on traps, but they will also avoid the traps if possible. So if you put a trap on a chokepoint the AI will step on it, but if an enemy is next to you and you simply stake a step back and put a trap on the space between you, the enemy will likely walk around the trap.) So Jens doesn’t have much to do on turns when he can’t set up a trap (or ladder), or once the enemies arrive at your doorstep. He can attack, but he doesn’t deal much damage, and his kit is about keeping enemies away, so you don’t want to be walking up to them, or use items, but using consumables for the sake of doing something isn’t particularly appealing.
However, after leveling up a bit, Jens unlocks a new ability: a net he can fire at range to delay one enemy’s turn, which costs 1 TP. This is great! It gives Jens something he can do when he can’t place a trap and when the enemies haven’t reached your forces yet, and is always useable since it only costs 1 TP. Of course, each TP you spend firing the net is a TP that can’t be used to place a trap—but once you’ve unlocked Jens’ second tier of weapon upgrades, you can reduce the cost of Jens’ trap ability to 1 TP. Suddenly he’s a real unit! Both his traps and net cost 1 TP each, meaning you can always use them on any given turn. Now Jens can spend his first few turns setting up traps, and then transition to delaying enemies and replacing traps (along with attacking and using items, if needed). So with these two small tweaks Jens becomes a much more effective unit that’s more fun to use, and he’s not a unique case.
There are a lot of different maps and mission types, and crafting your team of upgraded units is a lot of fun. It’s just that you don’t get a good glimpse at fun near the beginning, when your team is essentially predetermined because you have so few units, and the units you do have are mediocre.
Initially I played on normal difficulty, which seemed a bit too straightforward. Move your enemies just outside of the enemy range, wait for the enemy to enter your range, wail on them, repeat. It didn’t require much thought. So after a few missions I bumped up the difficulty to hard, which flipped everything on its head. In normal difficulty, my units were about equal strength with the enemy units (maybe even a bit stronger). But on hard difficulty, it takes on average four hits to kill an enemy, while your units die in about two hits. Suddenly positioning your units so that you can focus down enemies while making sure they can’t focus you became much more important. Checking enemy abilities and weaknesses was vital.
Hard mode always felt like an uphill battle—my units were always numerically just shy of being able to comfortably dispose of the enemies. But that difficulty just leads to satisfaction when you win. My first few maps in hard mode took me a bunch of tries, but once I got the knack of hard mode balance I was generally able to clear the maps on my first try (but with thought and strategy). That’s where the tight balance and specialized units come into play: winning on hard mode requires bringing the right strategy to the battle, and the payoff for doing so is victory.
Of course, you have one more trump card up your sleeve: Quietus. (That was a pun because in the Japanese version they’re literally just called “trump cards.”) These are special powers you can activate during the battle, such as guaranteeing all your attacks for the turn hit and crit, healing one of your units, or forcing one enemy unit to skip their next turn. You only have a limited number of “Quietus points” per battle (and stronger Quietus require more points), so they can’t be mindlessly spammed. They almost feel like cheating, since the enemy doesn’t have access to them, but the enemies have so much better stats in hard mode that I think it’s still fair. Additionally, you can only use Quietus at the beginning of your unit’s turn, not in the middle. Quietus provide another layer of strategy depth. The more Quietus points you have, the more room you have to use them as a “get out of jail free” card if things go south. But sometimes things to awry early in the mission, and then you’re faced with a choice: do you accept the fumble, which could compound and lead to failure but saves you more Quietus, or burn the Quietus and lose your safety net? There were also some missions where my strategy required burning a bunch of Quietus at the start—and victory was all the sweeter, since it means my strategy of aggressively using Quietus was correct.
That being said, as you progress in the game and unlock more and more tools, some definitely feel close to breaking the game. In particular, there’s one unit who essentially trivializes any “defeat the boss” mission. Again, it almost feels unfair… but hard mode is so stacked against you, I think you need to take whatever you can get. Obviously, if you think anything is too strong you can just not use it, and part of the fun is finding these exploits.
One final gameplay system I want to cover is “kudos,” which I think is actually really clever. While you have a standard monetary currency used to purchase items and upgrade units, there’s a secondary currency called “kudos” which are used to purchase Quietus upgrades, books, and class upgrade items. Kudos are earned by performing strategic actions in combat, such as attacking an enemy from behind, hitting an enemy with a weakness, or hitting multiple enemies with an AoE move. Essentially, Triangle Strategy teaches you how to play it with positive reinforcement, which I think is brilliant.
The story of Triangle Strategy takes place in the land of Norzelia, which is divided into three countries: Glenbrook, a monarchy that controls most waterways and therefore can capitalize on trade, Aesfrost, a duchy that is the sole source of iron, and Hyzante, a theocracy that is the sole source of salt. We play as Serenoa, heir to House Wolffort, one of the three high houses of Glenbrook. The game begins with the arrival of Frederica Aesfrost, half-sister of the archduke of Aesfrost, who is to be wed to Serenoa in an arranged political marriage. Norzelia is soon thrust into a new conflict, and Serenoa must navigate the political and military turmoil to protect his clan and his people.
Triangle Strategy has a branching story (sort of), and one of the main gameplay gimmicks is that at branching points your party members make the decision for you (sort of). When I say that the game “sort of” has a branching story, it’s because all branches always reconvene, other than at the final branch. While there are choices to be made, none of them really matter because they’ll all end up back at the same place sooner or later.
The decision system requires a bit more elaboration. When House Wolffort encounters a difficult decision, rather than making a unilateral decision, Serenoa allows the party members to vote on the course of action they’ll take. However, you can talk to your party members before they vote and attempt to sway them to a particular course of action.
Trying to convince your party members sounds simple on the surface, and the actual gameplay is simple (you’re just choosing responses from options), but if you lift up the hood there’s a fair amount going on. Triangle Strategy is based around three convictions: morality, freedom, and benefit. (Many elements of Triangle Strategy come in groups of three, get used to it.) I think the first two are relatively self-explanatory; “benefit” is utilitarianism at its best and Machiavellianism at its worst. Throughout the game you’ll be presented with dialogue choices with three options, each of which will add points towards one of the three convictions. When facing a decision branch, each option will be associated with a conviction, and the relative strength of those convictions will make it easier or harder to convert your party members to that side. For instance, if you are at a morality vs freedom choice and your morality score is much higher than your freedom score, it will be easier to convince your party members to vote for the morality option and more difficult to sway them to the freedom option.
I got the option I wanted at each branch without any issue. So that’s why I say your party members “sort of” make the choice for you: it’s true they make the ultimate determination, but you have so much influence on them that there shouldn’t be any trouble making the choice yourself. Essentially you do make the choice directly, just over one hundred text boxes rather than one.
These are interesting ideas caught in the middle of an impossible problem: their implementation feels makes them feel almost pointless, but a stricter implementation would be obviously problematic as well. Well, a branching story that doesn’t return to a central path wouldn’t be “problematic,” but would clearly require exponentially more resources to create. As for your party members choosing the story for you without player input, that wouldn’t feel particularly engaging, and runs the risk of being forced into the same route over multiple playthroughs.
On your initial playthrough the conviction point system is incredibly obtuse. Many actions give you conviction points, but pretty much all of them other than dialogue choices only award a few points at a time; dialogue choices are far and away the primary driver of your conviction balance. The game tells you whenever your convictions change, and that message will probably show up so much you’ll eventually just tune it out. Without knowing what your convictions are, it’s basically pointless. However, once you clear the game you can see both your conviction values and which dialogue choices correspond to which conviction. Additionally, most optional characters are unlocked by hitting certain conviction value thresholds, and you can see these in New Game+ as well.
My initial impression of the branches was not good. The decisions seemed unimportant, and every decision broke down to an initial standing of three for one option, three for the other, and the same person undecided. As it turns out, while every decision begins with an even split, I just happened to go down the series of branches that caused the same person to be undecided each time, and as you proceed in the game the dilemmas you face grow more and more fraught. I eventually warmed up to the mechanic. When convincing your party members, some dialogue options need to be unlocked by obtaining information earlier in the story—but the unlocked dialogue choice isn’t always the correct one. Persuading your party members requires actually listening to their concerns, and thinking about their personality and values. Sometimes you’ll be able to make the same arguments to multiple people, but will need to choose different options for different party members. It’s a nice way of giving the characters depth and agency.
But as I continued to replay the game, the fact that all roads lead to Rome, er, the main story branch put a damper on my spirits. While the dilemmas were serious and imposing the first time, when I understood exactly how and why each choice would lead to the same ultimate result, the choice lost all meaning. The plot is clever in its construction—there will consistently be references to details and events that occurred, enough so that it feels like the story is tailored to your specific circumstances, when in reality they just ensured that these details occur on every route. It’s a wonderful effect until you peek behind the curtain, which you’re basically forced into doing if you want to 100% the game.
I generally liked the characterization in the game, but it was severely curtailed by self-imposed limits. The issue is that, aside from Serenoa, there are only seven “canon” characters that are guaranteed to be in your team, and these characters are the only ones who are allowed to ever appear in cutscenes. These are the seven characters that vote at branches, and no others. These are the seven characters that appear in story scenes. Each character has two to three optional cutscenes unlocked by bringing them into battle a certain number of times that fleshes upon their story but, aside from the characters that scene is about, only the canon group characters can appear. While all characters will appear in your encampment, it means a large swathe of your characters can never interact with each other! (This is apparently not the first time this team has had this issue.) So while Serenoa and the canon group characters get plenty of development—the story is about them, they’re the people you need to convince at story branches, they show up in all the character-specific scenes—everyone else just gets three cutscenes and that’s it.
That being said, many characters have unique dialogue they can trigger in certain missions, and that really helps keeps the battles feel dynamic. And it isn’t just the “obvious” characters that have dialogue. Sometimes it’ll be a character with no apparent connection to the current story beat, setting, or enemy. Each map gives enough characters unique lines that you’ll probably get a few per mission. This was a small but very nice touch.
One thing I greatly appreciated about the story was that it maintained a consistent scope throughout the entire game. It’s not uncommon for an RPG to start off with you hunting slimes and end with you punching god in the face with the power of friendship. Your in-universe strength in Triangle Strategy stays relatively consistent. The game is about politics, and how the characters’ convictions clash in the face of the problems they face. While there are a few shonen-isms, they’re infrequent and deployed intentionally. Because Triangle Strategy doesn’t feel the need to constantly escalate and one-up itself, the reveals and big, climactic moments are able to feel that much more impactful.
However, a downside of the abundance of plot is the fact that the cutscenes are loooong. I understand that they need to establish the lore, setting, characters, and other nuance in order to make the branch choices work properly, but that doesn't change the fact that the time between battles was sometimes much longer than I wanted.
Triangle Strategy has four endings: one normal ending for each conviction, and then a “golden route” ending. Each story branch has at most four options, so with optimal choices it’s possible to see all unique missions in four playthroughs. The three normal endings are selected through a normal branch choice, while accessing the golden route is a bit more involved—but I won’t go into more detail than that. In addition to the story missions, you can access “mental mock battles” that provide even more challenges. Between the various story battles from branching paths and mental mock-battles, there is a lot of gameplay content in the game.
Triangle Strategy uses the same "HD-2D" art style as Octopath Traveler. That is, characters are 2D pixel sprites n a 3D pixel environment. It looks gorgeous, with expressive sprites reminiscent of the 16-bit era while still maintaining modern polish. Each named character also has a full portrait (which can be accessed along with a brief bio, which updates as the plot evolves), although those felt a bit odd to me... Everyone just looked really stern and evil.
The music is performed by a full symphonic orchestra, perfect for the low-magic medieval fantasy. The music is catching and fitting, with a few leitmotifs mixed in. While not unique to Triangle Strategy, the battle music will change when things start going poorly or when you begin to turn the tide, which really helps with the atmosphere. All cutscenes are also fully voiced, which brings the characters to life.
I don't think Triangle Strategy is a perfect game, and while there are a few rough edges, there are also plenty of small touches that show the care put into the game (such as the evolving bios that I just mentioned, or the way the world map will change to reflect the shifting political borders as the plot develops). In the end, it was exactly what I was looking for: a chill, cozy game that I could pick up and put down whenever I wanted, that required my brain to be on but didn't have any real-time elements, that had no failure condition or way to screw myself over but also couldn't be trivialized, intentionally or accidentally, and that had stakes but didn't devolve into saving the world with friendship.
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