Title: Triangle Strategy
Platform: Switch
Genre: Strategy RPG
Language: Japanese
Company: Artdink, Square Enix
Summary: Full backseat mode watching hubby play this one. Some peeps in the FE community got very hype and all about this, but… no it’s nothing to be excited for tbh.
Story: Predictable and honestly only meme-worthy story. I am well aware that salt was considered a luxury commodity in the old days, but this story just takes it to all the worst levels it never needed. Insert racism and covered up relationships between royalty, and you’ve got yourself everything I expected out of this and nothing more.
Characters:
Graphics: What in the world Squenix, can you ever optimize your shit these days? Playing this game on docked, the text is almost cancerous to read because of how thin the lines are, but if you play it handheld, all the sprites look like blurred shit. So much shit!! There’s also massive frame lag during certain moves that just have me lulzing because this is just what the Squenix experience has been for me all lately.
Sound: Overall, a lot of the music didn’t really suit the type of game it was. There’s some fancy elevator music for the happy/casual scenes, and some of the “epic” tunes kindaaaa almost got my mood going, but it never actually did in the end. There are music changes in the middle of stages from one s’ok tune to the next.

The vocalized main theme is SO CURSED in the way they just say the title in Engrish and then the rest in Japanese, and I’ve had it stuck in my head for days in BAD WAYS. GET IT OUT.
Gameplay: Lots of interesting skills and a good handful reminiscent of FEH with things like Pass and Saves.

However most of the maps were pretty ass, just one-way head-on clashing, or being forced into a pit of enemies, and I’m just rolling my eyes at some reviewers praising them.

Hubby eventually tuned down all the way to “Very easy” and the game STILL needed some extra grinding in order to get through, as enemies were upwards to 15 ish levels ahead of others if they weren’t being used consistently. Golden route pretty much requires everyone to be used with how teams are split.

Now if this were something like Three Houses and someone were critiquing the “dull maps/gameplay” while playing the game on Normal or something, I would HAVE THINGS TO SAY because the gameplay is completely different on Maddening (no NG+). But for this Triangle Strategy game in particular, I did not see the appeal in going in on harder difficulties except to flex a time-consuming brainless grind of NG+, when the game on VERY EASY needed additional grinding just to make it through story maps. At least for normal 3H playthrough, you can literally skip through all the monastery padding, not do paralogues, etc and make it through the story maps with decent ease (but then of course you’d lose all the story content from doing those), wheres in Triangle Strategy… it’s just required mindless grinding. The fact that they let you keep all your exp even if you lose a battle just speaks to how much they want you to mindlessly grind.
Replay Value: 6. We did the golden route which is considered true ending, but I have no interest in even seeing the other endings. In the end, I probably only stuck around for the seiyuu cast (Ono Kenshou, Nakamura Yuuichi, and many other familiar names), and had it not been for them, I would’ve just cared that much less for it.

Overall if I had my choice in non-Fire Emblem sRPGs these days, I’d rather go back into the Luminous Arc series than go through more of this. At least Luminous Arc has super cute character designs and some nice jammies, even if I don’t care for the harem-ish stuff lol.

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