Triangle Strategy Review: Three’s a Charm

Triangle Strategy is structured to give you the maximum amount of struggle and conflict, and to never give you an easy way out.

Triangle Strategy
Photo: Nintendo

Artdink’s Triangle Strategy is a deceptively named tactical role-playing game, because while it revolves around the machinations of three continental powers embroiled in a salt-based trade war, it’s nowhere near as flat as a two-dimensional triangle. From the HD-2D art style that practically pops off the screen—and bears more than a few shades of similarity to Octopath Traveler—to its nuanced plot, the game is the epitome of complex.

Even Triangle Strategy’s morality system doesn’t rely on an over-simplified binary of choices between, say, “good” and “bad,” preferring instead a tripartite of Convictions: Liberty, Morality, and Utility. As Serenoa of Wolffort, you’ll constantly find your allegiance shifting between your liege in the verdant Kingdom of Glenbrook, the savvy technological invaders from the chilly Aesfrost, and the religious zealots of the eastern desert nation of Hyzante. In many of the game’s roughly 20 chapters, players will have to make painful choices, less of the friendly “who to ally with” variety and more of the vicious “who to betray.”

It can be difficult in such moments to keep track of the greater good, but that’s by design. Triangle Strategy doesn’t tell you which choice corresponds with which Conviction until the New Game+, and even then each decision that you make has deadly consequences. The game also strikingly doesn’t leave the player entirely in control of these decisions. Instead, it puts them to a vote of the hero’s closest advisors, and while you can try to influence them if your stats are high enough, they provide a level of accountability for your actions. It’s not so easy to sway the honorable shield knight Erador or your kindhearted betrothed Frederica when the consequences—betraying your best friend, enslaving a people—become too inconvenient.

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The complexity and difficulty of these choices spills over into the tactical battles as well. In a departure from the job-based battle system of Final Fantasy Tactics and the fixed classes of your average Fire Emblem game, each of the 20-plus characters in Triangle Strategy plays a specific role on the battlefield. Some of the differences between characters, especially healers, are minor—one’s on horseback, one’s more of an item-based apothecary—but others bring a much-needed burst of variety and surprise to a pretty tried-and-true formula.

Support classes are particularly useful, and hard to choose between. For one, taking the acrobat Piccoletta, who can delay foes with her decoys, means that you might have to leave behind Corentin, who can conjure up icy barriers. And deploying the merchant Lionel, who can infuriate (or buy off) foes, means that there might not be room for the blacksmith Jens and the handy escape routes that he can build with his portable ladders and blockading traps.

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Despite having all of those characters to train, and a limit of how many can fight at once, Triangle Strategy avoids being a grind-heavy game thanks to its Mental Mock Battles. These optional, repeatable challenges are as unique as the characters that you can deploy, and serve to test how well you understand elemental effects on terrain (like reducing the accuracy of units on frozen tiles), properly setting up and defending against follow-up attacks, and efficiently splitting your party up to prevent foes from escaping.

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Triangle Strategy feels entirely intentional, structured to give you the maximum amount of struggle and conflict, and to never give you an easy way out. This is all the more impressive given how many tactical variations there seem to be depending on the allies you’ve unlocked and the foes you’ve made. The fact that the same strategy rarely works across maps attests to the game’s belief that the uneven war depicted therein should keep players on their toes.

Triangle Strategy speaks often about the necessity of following through on one’s convictions, and it’s a pleasure to see the game’s designs all feeding into that same surety. Just as the Mental Mock Battles train units, and by extension players, for the actual fights to come, so, too, do the investigation sequences between battles, where paying attention to details can not only help you unlock new options in conversations but also tactical options in battles later fought on that map. Helping a citizen repair a broken windmill isn’t just a noble thing to do; it means that you’ll be able to use the lift it powers to quickly scale an archer-studded hill. Whether you’re disabling spotlights, discovering traps, or plotting out the course of some errant minecarts, you’ll never feel as if you’re making choices lightly.

That said, while Triangle Strategy is a deadly serious game, it’s also a forgiving one in every area except for the tactics. For instance, should you fail a battle, you’ll still retain all the experience gained. There’s also no permadeath for your fallen heroes, enemies don’t counterattack (save those with a specific skill for it), and reinforcements are uncommon.

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That means that you can be a lot more aggressively playful in your approach to battle and, failing that, choose a lower difficulty so that you can focus exclusively on the well-crafted story. There’s even a sort of cheat menu of once-per-battle, turn-interrupting spells that can resurrect a fallen troop, swap in a reserve, or teleport a unit elsewhere.

That these abilities are purchased with the “kudos” earned from an efficiently fought battle shows yet again how Triangle Strategy always follows through on consequences—even good ones. In the world of this game, even something as casual as a thank you becomes a test of your character, and in the player’s hands, the fruits of such gratitude can become yet another weapon with which to win an exceedingly bloody war by any means.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by Golin.

Score: 
 Developer: Artdink  Publisher: Nintendo  Platform: Switch  Release Date: March 4, 2022  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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