the prologue demo for triangle strategy (octopath tactics) is out, progress carries over
impressions forthcoming
I only played the other demo for like 1 whole minute. Felt and looked like shit for that entire minute!
You’re good at being brief so I don’t feel like it’s a big ask to sum up what you like, so: I was truly repelled, why stick around?
2 Likes
there was a mention of an offscreen wife, possibly a Maris type, called “Hughette,” which suggests they are actually learning how to make this nonsense purple prose enjoyable at last
still think my fanfic is better than theirs but I appreciate the challenge
2 Likes
you can upgrade both your weapon and character sprites independently
I was surprised by the fact that you can direct-control walk and talk in little town exploration sections
The rendering is sloppy at times, pixels shimmering and reconfiguring after every dialog box, and the performance chugs at times, not always super snappy, but I like all the info overlays and enemy attack vector lines
the environments are cute and fun, i like the way that it looks it looks good, there are little kitties around, the blank-space outside of the map polygons is like an illustrated map instead of a void
The story is c tier stuff so far.
You can freeze the ground and then melt the frozen ground with fire and that leaves a puddle that causes lightning attacks to affect all wet tiles.
It’s good. Feels more like a new fully rotate-able FFTA3 than a PSX follow up.
5 Likes
There is a Triangle Strategy song.
Incredible. Square just doubled down when they heard @Mikey didn’t like the name of the game.
4 Likes
It’s less dislike and more incredulity that it’s the real name and not just a hastily-edited-in-MS-Paint shitpost
2 Likes
I’m incredulous they wrote a song about it.
4 Likes
yeah the song is fucking hilarious
the dub, however, is not hilarious. can you turn voice acting off?
yeah, you can turn the voices off or switch to Japanese
you can also disable the depth of field and corner vignetting effects
and there’s a fast forward switch for the story scenes
5 Likes
Those are all actually really thoughtful options to provide and I appreciate they did so
3 Likes
I really admire the attempt to introduce so many characters before even the second battle, they’re really committed to this warring houses situation
Now if you could just turn off the bloom.
it’s interesting how, between the decision to achieve skill differentiation through a huge cast of unique units rather than job customization, and making weapons upgradeable rather than replaceable, they’re almost gesturing at suikoden here. it fits the setting, obviously, and the contrast between generic and unique units in matsuno games was never very interesting, nor is this simplified to the degree of shining force or fire emblem.
I also think this team’s strengths at padding out town/exploration sections are much easier to appreciate here – where they ground the storytelling outside of battles, something that Matsuno’s narrative scripting engines always did but later games mostly elided for cost savings – than in bravely default or octopath, where it just felt like padding.
early battles are a little dull (playing on Hard) but I’m pretty confident they can improve, and the dialogue is borderline unreadable at times but is at least much easier to appreciate as them gamely ripping off game of thrones rather than butchering PS1 english aphorisms.
I am pleased
4 Likes
honestly i regret playing the demo
because i just want to play it all more now
1 Like
they expect me to be able to juggle a new fft, pink 3d mario, and souls “oh ho! big!”-now edition all at the same time?
7 Likes
i didn’t realise kirby was next month too
wow
I have now finished this demo
the final battle was very good (technically I think there are 2 possible final battles because one of the first plot branches comes up near the end, this is not a spoiler really) after the first couple were a bit conservative for my tastes. this is very much a tactics ogre joint, defensive positioning is super important, even though permadeath is only per-battle (good).
overall I think that, while even most fans of the genre will probably find it a bit precious in one way or another, this is an extremely good and unique effort, less to gripe about than octopath, and probably the most considered successor to tactics ogre that there has ever been
5 Likes
this game is some corny wack ass shit. they got a character called sorsely ende, the minister of salt. my man is literally salty and butt hurt. every single name in this game is like that NES baseball game with the made up american player names, only instead of american baseball players its pseudo greco-roman medieval fantasy gobbledygook. they are impressively nonsensical. I love hughette bucklar, who wouldn’t. the story is probably some discount shit, hard to tell so far. the music is generic as fuck. the writing is terrible. they got this neat little feature where you can press X whenever someone is talking and it’ll tell you who the fuck they are and what they do, because you’re never gonna know. I fuckin love everything about this game.
the battles are cool. it shows you the attack range of enemies when you’re moving. ok, so I’ve only played one battle. whatever, I’m buying this shit eventually.
11 Likes
This game has literally hours of fucking terrible writing in between every battle but also an enemy guy walked up and suplexed my mounted unit, casually twirling the horse above his head, so it’s actually pretty good
11 Likes
finding it really hard to read the text in portable mode