Trinity Cause

Trinity Trigger is a game from another era, which frequently works to its advantage but can also work against it.  The defining characteristic of Trinity Trigger is that it is fundamentally a throwback to the action RPGs of the 1990s. You will feel right at home here if you’ve played games from the Mana series. This is a stylistic decision that also influences the game’s gameplay, aesthetics, and overall atmosphere. Trinity Trigger, in my opinion, succeeds in achieving this objective, and I applaud it. In the meantime, I’m debating whether it wouldn’t be better served by taking more chances to tweak the formula or if I’m asking for too much and the adjustments would dilute the outcome.
The fundamental structure is fairly simple. You swiftly put together your team of three heroes and get into the flow of the game. In towns, you can find side tasks, acquire supplies, and equip yourself safely. There are plenty of creatures and riches on the paths and highways leading to key spots, and there are also dungeons to explore that are packed with more of both as well as traps and bosses. While the scenery and characters are rendered in 3D, the narrative is presented through scripted scenes that feature 2D character graphics. Sometimes the tale is just a few text bubbles that appear on a character model in the game. Nevertheless, the game is jam-packed with fully voiced character exchanges in a fashion akin to a visual novel. Characters that are actively speaking are frequently in full color and in the foreground of the scene, whereas background cast members are only slightly grayed out.
Real-time action is used in the actual fighting mechanics. The design purposefully borrows heavily from early action RPG games from the 1990s. Without a separate transition to the battlefield, enemies roam the area and can be engaged with or avoided at any time. Each character will have a primary weapon with the ability to swap between different weapons at certain points in the game (this is initially relatively limited, but all the cast members continue to acquire new weapon types as the tale progresses).
You press your primary attack button repeatedly to build combinations as usual, but there are a few subtle differences. First off, there is no way to distinguish between fundamental attacks like heavy and light; they all map to the same button. You also have a wheel-shaped stamina bar, with one slice of the wheel being consumed by each strike. A brief break in basic assaults will signal the start of the stamina wheel refill. There are only six slots on the wheel, so before the juice runs out, you can complete around two full combo strings. You still have the option to attack, but your damage will now be significantly (and I mean significantly) reduced. Because of this, you spend a lot of time attacking for brief periods of time before cycling back out to allow your bar recharge.
Dodging comes next in the process. To avoid opponent strikes, you can use a straightforward dodge roll button, which can be pressed repeatedly (apart from animation frames). The majority of adversaries, especially larger elite and boss types, exhibit expansive red zones to signal impending assaults, and they fill to signal when they are about to go off. Avoiding those attacks is typically not too difficult because your dodge roll is quick and consistent. The additional twist is that timing dodges just before to an attack landing will refuel your stamina wheel. This pushes you to be aggressive and study the enemy’s assault timing. Then, just as you might ordinarily retreat to try to rest, you can make a quick dodge to avoid damage, refuel your gauge, and then resume the attack.
Attack chains are the other important element. Each time the attack button is pressed, a different animation and skill are also activated. For instance, the first strike may be an above swipe with flames, the second could be a ground pound with an AoE, and the third could be an overhead stun assault. This is locked in sequence, so to use it, you must make three strikes quickly one after the other. In our earlier hypothetical scenario, the third blow will always be a stunning above. There are restrictions on which skills characters can attach to which attacks in the chain, so you can’t, for instance, assign a third-step attack to the first attack slot. It forces you to consider how frequently you want to attack in terms of the required endurance and the enemy being battled because the second and third assaults in the chain are frequently more powerful and specialized.
The fact that each weapon has its unique attack chains only makes this situation worse. As a result, a sword, an axe, and a bow all have very distinct first attack options. As overlapping weapon options are eventually acquired by characters, you can make various builds for each character and switch them out as needed. Trinity Trigger features a surprising amount of depth regarding its party composition and battle intricacy if you factor in the recharging special abilities that can ignore the stamina wheel and larger team strikes that accumulate throughout numerous engagements.
Monsters have a variety of different battle mechanics. There are the usual assortment of status buffs and debuffs, as well as new attack patterns and animations. The novel-like aspect of this is that bosses have an armor/resistance bar akin to Octopath Traveler that must be consumed before doing “true” damage to the boss’s life total. They are shocked when the bar breaks, giving you a little window of opportunity to attack them. You should switch to the preferred weapons and keep your implements fully equipped for these situations because the bosses are vulnerable to specific weapon kinds that quickly reduce both their armor bar and their health total.
An advantageous combination of action and cognition is the overall outcome of all these mechanics. There are active foes, smooth action, and constant attention while fighting. While you can occasionally mash and bash through the goofballs, most bouts have enough weight to prevent this from happening.
The characters are intriguing, if not particularly profound. Their conversations appear authentic because of the fully voiced sequences, which considerably encourage pleasant feelings for them. There is a lot of high-level conversation about gods, battles in heaven, champions, and other topics; although this gives the larger universe a lot of fascinating backdrop, it has to be more closely tied to getting to know the cast. Nevertheless, I enjoyed seeing Cyan, Elise, and Xantice in their parts together since they are likeable, direct protagonists with cute animal companions.
The graphics are a bit of a mishmash. On the one hand, there is a ton of exceptionally beautiful hand-drawn artwork in some contexts. The dungeon exteriors, location backdrops, and character portraits are all exquisitely detailed and evocative. Sadly, the real in-game representations of these characters and locations are much more basic. So plain that the characters appear devoid of features, as if they had been lying at the bottom of a river and the detail had been rubbed away by the constant flow of water. The physical motions are energetic, but the crude-looking models start to conjure up thoughts of a free-to-play mobile game rather than just a simple artistic choice.
This sensation of a budget title is exacerbated by the repetition on exhibit. Each area recycles many resources, frequently with minimal changes. The slimes that you battle in the first zone change color to a slightly different tint in the following zones. This also holds true for many of the game’s opponents and setting. The interiors of the dungeons are all the same blocky dungeon interiors in drab grid-like patterns, despite the exterior depictions of them as distinctive god-weapons that you are exploring to unravel ancient mysteries. Each and every boss battle is avoided by a Save Point and an item store. Every weapon shrine appears identical. The world becomes infinitely smaller as a result of the repetition, which is not a good feeling.
Similar blending can be seen in other dungeon and environment design components. Each location has a hidden treasure to locate, which helps nudge you to stray from the path. Even yet, they don’t feel as rewarding for exploration as they did when I was a child sprinting around the walls of Wolfenstein 3D, constantly hitting the same button while I searched for hidden turkey alcoves hidden beneath flags. Until you have access to the weapons that let you break the blocking rock formations, certain passageways are blocked. A huge weapon symbol, such as a picture of an axe or a picture of a bow, is displayed on the rock formations to indicate what is needed, which is weird. It’s obvious what you need to move on, and in practice it’s no different than needing a specific HM in Pokémon to take a different route. But the absurdity of seeing several, identical gray rocks with cartoon axes painted on their sides abruptly forced me to stop playing.
Environmental dangers abound, including spike pits and triggerable traps, which frequently require a combination of careful timing to dodge or switches to deactivate. These make it even more important to keep on the go and responsive, and they are quite difficult when battles break out nearby. The difficulty is that your computer-controlled companions sometimes willfully damage themselves on obvious hazards and don’t always know how to escape these traps as you do.
This raises another issue: this game allows for cooperative play! You will have put together your core trio after the first several hours, at which point co-op play becomes available. It’s now only available to you and your couch-bound friends. But since playing anything with friends is typically preferable to playing alone, I’m sure that has a significant impact on the gaming experience. The amount of use you get out of this depends on whether you can round up some other pals to play or not. Although I can’t testify to the experience, I believe it to be a useful feature that, once more, pays homage to its ’90s forebearers in a nice way.
Some mechanical anomalies proved to be minor obstacles in the continuation of mixed results. The manner that equipment updates operate was the most unexpected. Instead of purchasing new gear, you make and locate gems to be socketed into your weapons and armor. These have a wide range of effects, but most of them are RPG standard fare like higher critical odds, status resistances, percentile bonuses to HP, etc. Because each of your weapons has a distinct slot, you can equip them with various gems, which goes nicely with the attack chain customization that was previously described.
The odd thing, in my opinion, is that you may customize both your weapon and your armor, so when you switch weapons (which you frequently do on the fly), you also change to the set of armor runes that corresponds to that weapon. To put it mildly, this felt… strange. For instance, switching from a sword to a bow and abruptly losing 10% of your maximum health in the middle of a battle seemed really strange. I had to constantly remind myself of this feature, and I may have lost a few fights as a result.
The asking price is another issue where I’m not sure how I feel. At the time of writing, the MSRP is $50. Due to this, it is neither a cheap game nor a AAA title. It also stands out from the growing group of games whose prices have risen above the previous US$60 threshold. It is difficult to determine whether it is worth this much. This is a finished game with no glitches, an intriguing universe, enjoyable action gameplay, and the option of co-op play, which is a pleasant throwback to an earlier era of RPGs. It is stable and complete, in contrast to many other ostensibly AAA games I’ve played recently, and doesn’t have the all-too-common impression that “well, this will probably be a full experience a year or two after launch.” For that, I applaud Trinity Trigger.
Having said that, I ponder whether paying US$50 is sufficient compensation for a game that feels less satisfying than competitors. For the same amount or a few dollars more, you may easily purchase a variety of other deep, rewarding, and rich RPGs. That price proposition becomes more difficult to defend when you take into account sales prices or the abundance of titles offered on different subscription services. The excessive repetition of enemy and environmental assets also does little to give the impression that the game is more expensive. However, Trinity Trigger offers cooperative play, something that many other roleplaying games do not.
Trinity Trigger is a good game with several unique ideas, but it suffers from a monotonous and uninspired presentation. The problems are more evident if you play solo, but I anticipate that when you play with people, many of these flaws will eventually go away. It’s definitely a game to take into account if you’re craving a more retro approach to the ARPG genre. It has plenty of strengths to make it worthwhile of your time, and it would be even better if you could get a friend or two to sit down and play with you.