

You’re always welcome to try out all the units and upgrade them as you please based on your own experiences and how you’d like to make the game play out.

Whatever your choice, character levels, class, and weapon upgrades all carry over after beating the game and unlocking New Game+. Even if you were to use Roland the Cavalryman in each battle, you might choose to promote someone else whose unlocked skills will help you put them to better use, or you may choose to promote Roland to give him a boost to a large number of his stats. One consideration in promotion is how much the character is used-as class promotion comes with an increase in certain stats-or if they deem the unit’s promoted class-exclusive skills are worth promoting them for. Nothing is so permanent that players are afraid to make irreversible “mistakes,” further welcoming experimentation. Once one of these nodes is unlocked, players can also swap freely between them, resulting in an upgrade system that allows freedom of player expression and creativity while still benefiting from strategic thinking and thorough understanding of the gameplay. Sleep is generally more potent but less likely to succeed, so it’s a reasonably balanced trade-off. For instance, players can opt to give Hughette, a hawk-riding archer, a longer-lasting blind or a longer-lasting sleep. Some nodes are part of a pair, and you can only have one or the other active at a time, forcing players to choose how they want their unit to play. Each node in the weapon’s “skill tree” costs coin and some number of materials to unlock, granting stats or special skills when activated. Each character’s weapon is entirely unique, just like their class. Meaningful customization and player expression come instead from weapon upgrades and class promotions. No general class pool means characters don’t step on each other’s toes and players don’t have to worry about who is best in which role instead, they can focus on mastering each character’s unique applications. Any alignments between them, such as shared weapon types, are minimal. The units themselves build upon this concept, with each unit distinct from one another. It’s an intuitive system that is easily built upon to offer increased depth without feeling overwhelming. Not moving or not attacking can also increase your speed, adding further strategy to the basic game mechanics. You may need to move your character to deliver a finishing blow, but you’d then have to wait for another turn to pick up their loot if they drop any-and an enemy may pick it up themselves before you get to move again.

This combines nicely with characters moving once per turn, before or even after attacking. Enemies may also drop loot once defeated, adding extra objectives to the map as you go along. In Triangle Strategy, characters move in the order of their speed, with various ways to increase your speed or delay opponents’ turns. It’s also flexible enough to grant players meaningful ways of making their tribulations easier if they so choose, ensuring the game remains respectably challenging no matter how one chooses to approach it. The resulting experience is rigid enough in structure to encourage strategic play in the face of challenging situations. Although this, combined with their mechanics, lends the SRPG genre its narrower audience, Triangle Strategy aims for accessibility without sacrificing challenge. Strategy RPGs find themselves in a tricky area they require a certain level of difficulty, lest there be no need for strategy.
