2022 Games of the Year: Triangle Strategy

Triangle Strategy is a game I'm feeling very mixed about.  I went into it wanting to love and but ran into a bunch of roadblocks along the way.

At its core, it is actually a really solid tactics game.  This is one of the best tactical combat and tactical character progression systems that we've gotten from Square Enix in a long time.  Every time I found myself in a battle I was having a great time and truly enjoying the systems at play.

Unfortunately, there are so many other things around the battles that don't work as well.  

The biggest of which is the way the story is delivered.  For every 20 minutes of fun tactical combat it feels like there's 40+ minutes of slow story delivery.  Characters talk and you have no direct control or interaction for long periods of time during it.  It's not even like old school RPGs where it's a true cutscene that feels like a reward.  Instead, this is more like taking most of the control away from the player but still making them manually button through every possible character dialog.

The ratio is just simply off.  This is a game in need of a good copyeditor to chop down the story segments.  It feels like the important information could have been delivered in half or even a third of the time it actually takes.

That sense of having an annoying wall thrown up in front of me every time I wanted to just get to the next battle is what led me to put the game down.  I ended up putting in about 12 hours and, based on the chapter count, I was about half way through the game.  But I just couldn't put up with the plodding dialog segments anymore.

The worst part is... the tactical battle system is so good.

Now I guess I need to figure out where to slot this into the list... I guess it'll have to go here:

1. Elden Ring
2. FFXIV Endwalker
3. Horizon Forbidden West
4. Pokémon Legends: Arceus
5. Halo Infinite
6. Vampire Survivors
7. Triangle Strategy
8. Nobody Saves the World
9. Unpacking
10. Total War: Warhammer 3
11. Tunic

I'm slotting it in behind Vampire Survivors and ahead of Nobody Saves the World.  Somewhere mid-list feels about right since the story delivery would be near the bottom of the list but the tactical combat would be high on the list.  On balance, it can live in the middle-ish of the list for now.

Honestly, I hope to see more tactical strategy games like this from Square Enix.  I just hope they learn from this one and tighten up the aspects of the game that are lacking.