Final Fantasy has crystals. Dune has spice. Triangle Strategy has salt. Moving right along!
Gamescom 2025 brought a surprise shadowdrop for grid-based tactics fans on both Xbox and Playstation seeing the release of Triangle Strategy from Square-Enix, further solidifying their multiplatform commitment barring a handful of odd exceptions.
As your resident HD-2D superfan and occasional JRPG achievement completion sicko, I dropped everything I was doing and decided this would be the next game I tackle. I titled this post a “Review” but it’s really more a collection of thoughts and things I really enjoyed about the game. You don’t need to hear a tactics newb like me attempt to explain what the genre is to those who already know, and if you don’t know…well there are much better folks to learn from! I can count on one hand the number of grid-based tactics games I have played through to completion. Fire Emblem Three Houses on the Switch is probably my favorite. I love the Persona games but Persona 5 Tactica was a game where I went full Shpeshal Nick and skipped all the cutscenes after the first main story boss…it felt bad but was also incredibly freeing.
So in today’s mrhipshot text dump I will just be going over a lot of the stuff I really enjoyed from Triangle Strategy (TS from now on probably). There will be no story spoilers! Just pretty much gameplay, systems and overall thoughts on the experience. The story was very enjoyable for me, it gives a ton of player-choice and that should be experienced firsthand if you ask me. I’m going to rapid-fire my criticisms at you with this game to prove I’m not a shill and cement my credibility (said in jest by the way lol)
Minor Criticisms
I think TS has probably too much dialogue in its opening couple hours and too few battles unless you seek out the repeatable Mock Battles. There are a few weak characters in the English voice cast, Benedict’s voice drives me up a wall for some reason. At times I felt the main character Serenoa also needed a little more somethin’-somethin’ to some of his lines. But there are plenty of standouts, Roland and Frederica of the main cast, and damn near every single villain in TS was fantastic. Even certain side characters such as Hossabara and a few others really surprised me. So it’s not all bad in the English voice cast department! I’ll say I much prefer the localization of something like Unicorn Overlord, where it did flowery, old-timey English in a much more “believable” yet easily understood way for me. But that’s enough of me comparing this game to other games. TS can feel a tad wooden with what I would assume is more a like direct translation, at times lacking a bit more personality than I would’ve preferred. Localization should be appreciated when it’s done well and I understand it’s a tough but very important job.
That’s about where my criticisms end because some of my other complaints could be chalked up to how I played this game in such a short amount of time. So I’ll get to the good stuff now! I’m not really going to go into detail about the battles/combat in TS, I will just say they are a ton of fun, something I always looked forward to, and they remain interesting throughout. Especially in New Game+, something in TS I think is done so well, I gave it its own section here!
Exploration and Conviction
During exploration phases you run around a rectangular map, talk to NPCs, collect items from shining spots on the map, in the environment or inside buildings. A ridiculously simple thing that blew my mind coming from Octopath fandom was I was able to freely spin the camera and zoom in and out in these areas. That, of course, is available in battles where seeing differing terrain and unit placement is needed a lot more than in town but for whatever reason I had just incorrectly assumed the camera would be locked in towns. So spin that camera around and find those collectibles!
The exploration phase is by no means deep, just a fun distraction. Small maps mean you will do everything there is to do in them within 10 minutes or less. If the game didn’t have this, I could see cutscene-battle-cutscene-battle-voting-cutscene etc getting quite old or feeling like it was missing something.
You will come across some NPCs with a green exclamation point and these will contribute to 1 of 3 “Conviction” values your protagonist has. They are Liberty, Morality and Utility. If I had to give my own interpretation of how these choices usually go: Morality is something like “we must do this thing, even if it is hard because it’s right” and some characters in your party may push back on that…because they may align more with the Utility conviction which usually amounts to something like “I know these people backstabbed us but we should accept the help they’re offering now because what else can we do? We must set personal grudges aside” or something like that. Liberty is probably the hardest one for me to guess based on the dialogue choices. I know what it means in real life but in the game I feel like it steers itself towards vengeance…it should be freedom in my opinion but freedom usually pairs very well with Morality so I personally guessed wrong a couple times but it ends up not being a big deal.
These conviction values are probably most easily compared to social stats from Persona. Certain side characters are locked behind hitting a certain threshold of these points. This part of TS was never as stressful as similar mechanics in other games, I had gotten most of the side recruits for these values with only like 2 or 3 exceptions. If you are to prioritize 1 stat via NPC dialogue, go for Morality because you can cheese Utility and Liberty by buying, selling and other methods in game. But this isn’t anything to worry about if you are only doing 1 playthrough and 1 route. Now if you’re planning on going into New Game+…well that leads me to my next point.
New Game+
I really love how NG+ is handled in TS. Without giving too much away, I just really like it in games when on a NG+ run, they take the chains off the player, carry a ton of stuff over and don’t worry as much about what may or may not make sense in the context of the story. For example you keep all of the people you recruited even if you technically haven’t met them yet in your new run. There are a handful of exceptions where maybe a character is a temporary CPU controlled unit for a battle or maybe a character temporarily leaves the group for an important mission. But ALL of your unit’s levels, skills, gear and your own money, conviction points and other currencies carry over into NG+ and it’s great. If you ask me, the goal of NG+ in TS is to see the branching paths you didn’t take in your first run, get your units to max level which is a lot easier than I thought it would be, and if you played your first run recently, I felt fine skipping cutscenes I had already seen if I remembered them well.
Oh and those conviction values I mentioned in the previous section? You are now able to see which dialogue choices will give you a boost to which conviction stat AND how many points you received. So no more guessing or looking up guides! (I was 95% blind my first playthrough anyways). Also in NG+, you are able to view your total values in each stat. NPC choices with the green exclamation seem to always give a beefy 50 points whereas selling or buying a bunch of items may only give 8 points at the lowest intervals unless you are absolutely loaded with cash.
Another nice feature of NG+ in this game is you can just view a Paths Travelled section in the menu that shows you any routes you have taken in your previous runs and where you are currently in a flow chart. So if you are into achievements, you want to travel every path and get every ending. Also importantly, the battles REALLY shine in NG+ because story levels all scale correctly to where you’re leveled at (I assume so, I did try to do plenty but I didn’t grind) so the challenge remains there but now you have a much larger selection of units with more abilities and finding different team compositions was always a blast for me.
Politics?? in my vidya game?!?!
Something I was regularly impressed by in TS was the fact that a lot of the choices or paths didn’t have a clearly right or wrong answer. For a fantasy world, it seemed fairly realistic how helping out one faction might anger another faction. Solving one problem usually led to a couple more. This is a game about politics but it’s handled in such an interesting and believable way. I had ideas of what I wanted to do on my first run but I was surprised by certain character’s decisions and I had to adjust on the fly like the main character.
There is a true ending of sorts but from what little I had seen before playing, I had gathered that it’s probably best saved for a later run on NG+ for a few reasons I won’t get into. I’ll also say that the other endings are perfectly satisfying in a way that still allows characters to have their own arc and everyone deals with the consequences of the Path we have chosen. My general idea for my first canon run was to try to do the right thing on most occasions but knowing I would fail and compromise if I really had to. Standard stuff really but it led to some tragic decisions that kept me thinking. I really wanted to see how much I could help this world and I was saddened to know it was possible but I just couldn’t get it done. It made me all the more determined to see it through on later playthroughs.
The Journey to 1000G…9G at a time (Achievement thoughts)
Since I have completed every HD-2D game on Xbox already, I really had no choice in the matter. Everything I said in the previous sections does a very nice job of feeding into each other. The fact that NG+ removes a ton of the mystery of what you need to do for some of the achievements/objectives was such a relief. It helped me with planning the routes for the different Paths and just made the hunt for the new and different content that much easier.
This achievement list asks a ton of the player but stuff like getting every character to the max level of 50 and gaining their final weapon skill, along with using them a certain number of times to see those character’s side stories added tons of mini-goals for me to pursue on my multiple runs through the game. Plus this will force you to use any characters you neglected and you’re bound to learn new synergies between your squad. There are a few “do X type of damage 50 times” to an enemy, whether that’s fall damage by knocking them off a ledge, shocking them while in water, or affecting the terrain in a way like setting the ground ablaze or freezing it. Again, just more mini-goals you can pursue during battles that kept me from just steamrolling through 3 additional playthroughs.
Oh and if you are nervous about what I said about “getting everyone to max level”, it’s one of the easiest games to max your party out. Characters gain experience from performing most actions, using a skill, using an item, stabbing an enemy and most everything else like that will grant you exp. Also I found characters gained 1 level per action up until about level 47 or 48 where it took a few more actions. So my strategy was to just have characters burn a recovery item or some other type of item if they were too weak to survive the battles. They gain 1 level, repeat until they can safely join the fray.
If I had to give surface level tips for achievements or those going for the 1000G, there is a fantastic Steam guide with a flowchart for missables and it lays out the different routes. A talk to all cats achievement was removed for the Xbox/PS version (along with a few others) but you still need to talk to them all because you get a note (one of the collectibles) for talking to all 10…also make sure to use a guide that lists 10 cats, not 9.
If you want to minimize your number of playthroughs then DON’T get the true/golden ending on your first run. There are 10 save slots in TS and I recommend saving before every branching decision and then saving on a different slot as you continue. Standard JRPG stuff.
Triangle Strategy took me 85 hours to get all 100 achievements. I did skip cutscenes and fast-forwarded when it was content I had already seen because much of it was fresh in my mind. Oh…and for those who are bothered by this, every achievement is 9G besides the “get all other achievements” achievement which is 109G. But if that really bugs you, just stop every 10 achievements and you’ll end on a normal number. Or just complete it!
Final Thoughts
Triangle Strategy is a fantastic turn-based, grid-based tactics game with incredibly fun battles, a stellar soundtrack, and a well-realized scenario that pushed me to do all I could for this fantasy land as I attempted to navigate a surprisingly complex political landscape with factions that always had their own interests come before anything else. It wasn’t just a simple “everyone, follow the JRPG protagonist because he is a special boy” type of story. This game is an easy recommendation to anyone who likes tactics games and fans of HD-2D games who might be interested in checking out a different genre. If I had to give it a score, I’m feeling like it is an 8.5 but just know I am truly a JRPG/HD-2D/Square-Enix sicko and Octopath Traveler is my favorite series for a variety of reasons.
I’m always looking forward to more Square-Enix games coming to Xbox. Final Fantasy Tactics is out at the end of the month and I will be checking that out day one after Triangle Strategy showed me a ton of what there is to love about tactics games. Dragon Quest 1 & 2 should release a bit later in the year and while I’m not an enormous DQ fan, I enjoyed my time with DQ3 HD and I will be seeing that through to the end. Another Xbox Play Anywhere game by the way (so is Triangle Strategy, I don’t think I mentioned that). Octopath Traveler 0 at the end of the year is now my most anticipated release and it looks to be another incredible time. I really hope the Live A Live HD-2D remake is the next game that comes to Xbox! Lend me your energy in willing it into existence for this year’s Tokyo Game Show. Maybe it’s too soon for that but we can dream, right?
If you read all this, I hope you learned something! I can answer any questions you might have. I left a ton of stuff out, believe it or not, I just wanted to write about what I really enjoyed about the game which was most of it thankfully!
