While Record of Agarest War was just like Cross Edge in almost every way, this is another game I had up as this year’s candidate for “game that will have the same kind of reviews as Cross Edge”. Surprisingly enough, it seems like people were a bit more lenient on this one than they were with Cross Edge. Granted, it doesn’t suffer from as many problems as Cross Edge, but it’s still aiming at exactly the same audience.

I was interested in the game partly because of the Disgaea crossovers, but also because the gameplay seemed fairly solid. So I had some fairly good expectations for this.

Read on!

Developer: Idea Factory/Gust
Publisher: NIS America
Date of Release: June 29th 2010
Platforms: Playstation 3

Genre: Turn-based RPG/Dungeon Crawler
Rated T for Teen (surprisingly lots of swearing here)

Presentation
The graphics aren’t too great technically. The character models are just a bit above PS2 quality, they really don’t look great. You do get used to their looks, and graphics are never that important in a game anyways, but they’re sort of flat (not just talking about Etna here) and lack detail. Everyone is sort of plastic-y which is weird. They look more like subpar action figures than characters in a video game. This doesn’t exploit the PS3′s power whatsoever. Though the style is nice, the lack of actual quality in the graphics is a bit lame. And the levels are really repetitive. Other than differently placed rooms and corridors, every Pirate Ship will looks the same, every level of the Yoma King Castle looks the same, every library looks the same, etc. This is really like any other dungeon crawler in that aspect. One thing that is good about the graphics is the big sprites used in conversations, those are very nice looking. But there is one funny element about them. They kept advertising the fact that the big sprites move during those dialogue scenes, like their hair moving in the wind a little bit, or them breathing, and moving their mouths while talking… Why were they trying to make this into a selling point of the game? It’s really not very different than the usual non-moving sprites, and they still just fade-out/fade-in from one pose to another instead of fluidly moving from one pose to another (now that would have been pretty cool). It’s a fun little addition, but it doesn’t add anything to the game.

On the sound-side of thing, the voice work is pretty good, in both languages. In english, not all the dialogues are voiced which sorta sucks, and the translation is a bit different from the japanese version (I at least know enough japanese to see that). While most of the sentences keep the same general meaning as in the japanese version, the translations are often modified to add more comedy (sometimes good, sometimes bad) or pop culture/gaming references (as per NIS America tradition), like an “Over 9000″ joke and other stuff (I did find a Star Ocean 3 reference in there, for example). The rest of the sounds are okay. Some of them are recycled from previous Idea Factory/Gust games, but they’re not bad. The music is… incredibly joyful, almost too much so. While the music isn’t that memorable, it will get stuck in your head because of how happy it is… But you have to get used to that kinda lame j-pop song in the opening, because you’ll be hearing it a LOT in the game, as it plays in the galaxy menu, which you spend a lot of time in.

Story
The game has 2 stories to choose from (basically you choose which group of characters you want to use), though they both take place at the same time, and share multiple events. When you chose one group, the other group will be recurring rival characters through the game. But each of the 2 groups have a different story, despite both stories coming together at the end.

Kanata, the Demon God King, escaped from a ritual that would transform him into the Demon God Gem, which would protect all of the NetherUniverse. Since he leaves during the ceremony, this turns him into the Demon Dog King. Now that he’s free from his duties, he decides to go on adventures on objects floating around the NetherUniverse, and prevent the objects from crashing into the town. Protecting the world his own way, instead of sacrificing his life to do it. He befriends multiple people during his adventures, and clashes with the Valkyrie during that time.

Rizelea is the Valkyrie fighting Kanata through his story. Her story involves trying to get Kanata to become the Demon God Gem, but also finding out why objects are drifting around the NetherUniverse. There’ not much more I can say about her story, but it’s quite interesting, and a completely different view of the events than on Kanata’s story.

Of course, this has various different endings, and there’s a true ending which requires doing various things through your playthrough. I have yet to get the true ending, but the fact that there’s multiple endings does add some replay value, and a full playthrough isn’t that long (especially if you skip dialogues). Overall, the game has a pretty interesting story. The writing isn’t incredible at times, but it’s still pretty enjoyable to go through. Though I guess the big draw is that it features Disgaea and Atelier characters in both stories, and some of them play sort of important parts in the story.

Gameplay
Game flow
The game flow is pretty simple. You go through events, which are generally just dialog, though sometimes they have some battles in them. Some events make dungeons come close to you so you can enter them. The dungeons are basically series of corridors and rooms (NOT randomly generated), with items laying around on the floor and in chests. You can press Square to search the area, which shows you colored lines you can follow: Red lines lead to hunting spots, yellow lines lead to hidden treasures, white lines lead to gravity cores (only in optional dungeons though, event dungeons don’t get a white line) and blue lines bring to Managraphic blueprint thingies. At the end of Event dungeons, which make the story progress, you will usually find a boss battle, and some dialogue. Some dungeons have “Lurkers”, which are really strong enemies that have rare drops. When you’re close to fighting them, a black mist appears on the screen, and if you wait too long to exit the dungeon, you get attacked. And those guys are STRONG. One thing I found about them is that, if you die against them, you don’t get a game over.

Other than event dungeons, other (optional) dungeons randomly come close to you that you can visit as well, for different types of items and more Lurkers. Destroying those dungeons’ gravity cores will make them leave the area, drifting them away into space (unless you anchor them using an Anchor item). One element about destroying gravity cores, which is also in some of the event dungeons, is that you have a time limit to leave the dungeon after destroying them, but, during that time, rare items start appearing in the dungeon, so you can try picking some of those up before leaving the dungeon. If you fail to leave a dungeon within the time limit, you’ll be stuck in it, and have to hitch a ride back home. That actually never happened to me, so I’m not too sure of the details for this. All I know is that it’s not free, so drifting away with the dungeon isn’t the greatest idea.

Fighting
The fighting system is relatively simple. Each character has a base AP which can be upgraded with equipment. Unless you get surprised by the enemy, you get a turn first, and then the enemy attacks when all your characters moved. You can skip your characters’ turn with R2, which gives extra AP when you get to your next turn (your AP increases by your base AP every turn, and can go up to 3 times the base amount… or 250, it seems it can’t go higher than that), enabling for major damage if you wait a bit.

When it’s one of your characters’ turn, there are a few things you can do. Pressing X does a mighty blow attack which does one strong hit, Square does a Rush attack which hits 3 times but not as strong, and Triangle does a magic attack that hits all the enemies. Pressing Circle does your first equipped ability, and holding Circle charges up the ability bar, which enables you to reach higher-level abilities if you have some equipped (Escaping battle, by the way, is an ability that has to be equipped… in addition, there’s things like buffs and healing). Each of those action uses AP, and you can continue attacking as long as you have AP. AP also goes down overtime as soon as you press a button. When you have no more AP left, it’s the next character’s turn. Doing certain button combinations in your attack can lead to special attacks, which don’t cost any AP, so they’re crucial to getting high numbers of hits. In addition to those special attacks, you have a special meter that fills up around the AP counter, which fills up in the form of gems. When you have 2 gems (it increases when you do special combination attacks, or kill enemies), you can press R3, which enables you to either heal the character by holding Circle, or to use a powerful super attack if you press Square (deals nearly 100 hits, and a fair amount of damage).

One special feature is the Fury Chain. This is activated by pressing R1 while you’re attacking (works during the last attack animation if you have no AP left, otherwise it works anytime you have AP left). When you press R1, some icons will appear. They will represent the other characters in your party, and stars for the remaining spaces. Each icon is assigned to one of the face buttons. Pressing the face button associated to a star gives random boosts, like Gold dropped by enemies, or drops, or boosts to the metter for super attacks. Pressing the icon represented by a character makes that character get his turn, as well as giving a randomly-selected stat boost. So using Fury Chains can be really useful for some of the tougher battles, and is needed to reach high numbers of hits and damage. Oh, and, if you deal enough hits before initiating the fury chain, there’s gonna be a green area in the fury chain meter, and if you switch character in that green area, you enter a combo attack with multiple characters.

It’s a fun battle system, though it eventually gets quite easy even if you don’t grind much.

Leveling
The leveling system here is really simple. Kill enemies, get experience, level up. That gives various stat boosts, and occasionally some passive skills and extra button sequences for special attacks. Leveling here is really fast. If you’re in a dungeon that’s around your level, using EXP boosts from the Fury Chains, you’ll be able to level once every 2 battles or so. And bosses can give multiple level ups.

In addition to Levels you have a few ways of powering up. Equipment is the simplest way. You have 4 types of equipment: Weapons, Kotodamas, Codes and Spaces. Each upgrades certain types of stats. While you’re limited in what you can buy in the store, this is where the dungeon crawling comes in play. While exploring dungeons, you’ll find items. Those items are used as materials to synthesize stuff i the store. You can make any of the 3 kinds of “armor”, weapons, and usable items. In addition to normal equipment, you get access to Meteorites, which are used to boost your stats further. Each character has his own Meteorite settings. You can place one “planet” which gives the biggest boost, and then you have 3 rings which have multiple slots for meteorites. The further they are from the central planet, the lower their stat boost. Just like synthesizing items, you can make meteorites using materials, as well as extra slots for meteorites on the rings.

There’s also Managraphics… All of them give the same stat boost, from what I’ve seen. You can have up to 2 of them equipped at once, each giving the stat boost. All that really changes is which types of Mana you get when you win a battle. There’s also some enemies that are strong or weak against certain managraphics, but it’s rather rare.

A last type of shop is the coliseum, in which you can use materials to make monsters, which are generally stronger than normal enemies. Fighting them gives you a reqard, which is either a bunch of stat-raising potions, or some materials. This can be useful for leveling, though the enemies quickly become really easy… but the stat boosting potions can really help.

The bad stuff
Well, the worst thing about this game is that it’s very prone to freezing. My game froze 4 times, each time after tough bosses or in the “chapter end” screen. That is… terribly annoying. Each time I lost a little bit of gameplay, even if I made it a habit to save often after the first time it froze. And I know this is a wide-spread problem, it’s not just me that was unlucky on this. Games should be at least tested a little before finally being released, this is unnacceptable.

After finishing the game, you get a new game+ option. That’s fine, I love going back through a game with all my strong items and levels. But here, you get something called the Convert Shop when you start a NG+. This enables you to trade in items for points, and you can use those points to buy any item in the game. Including the best equipment. There might be some items that cannot be bought there (some DLC-exclusive items maybe), but for the most part, you can get anything there. That’s all fine too… or it would be if it wasn’t so damn easy to abuse. Basically, there’s multiple ways to exploit the convert shops, making it easy to get any equipment you want. If you manage to get 6000 points in the convert shop, you can generate infinite amounts of points by buying certain items in the convert shop, selling them in the normal shop, and buying certain items in the normal shop with the gained money, and converting them for even more points in the convert shop (basically, 6000 points become 18000 points in the method I used). That kinda makes the second playthrough really easy (starting at chapter 8 that is, when the required item becomes available in the normal store). The convert shop makes any need to search for items in the dungeons completely useless. Sure, you can hunt for items anyways, but what’s the point when you have such an easy way to get the same things? The convert shop isn’t exactly a “bad” thing, but it kinda cheapens the game. Oh, and you can even get the stat boosting potions, and they’re stupidly cheap. You can essentially get a 4950 stat boost for only 198 points.

Overall
Trinity Universe is a fun game. The dungeon crawling aspect is fairly well done, if not rendered completely useless by the Convert Shop. It might not be too great graphically (even if the style is quite good), but the gameplay is quite fun, and, other than finding certain materials (which isn’t really needed because of the Convert Shop), it’s not as grind-y as you’d expect. Even if the max level is well above 500, you can still level up relatively fast if you fight enemies in the proper places.

Really, the only gripes I have with the game is that it freezes a lot, and that the convert shop makes it way too easy.

Still, the gameplay is fun, if not a little bit repetitive (but, then again, what game isn’t at least a little repetitive, especially in the RPG genre?), the story and characters are entertaining and it’s overall fun to play.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Fun battle system
- Leveling is fast and fun
- Funny dialogue
- Dungeon crawling/looking for materials is interesting before you get the Convert shop

Cons
- On a second playthrough, the convert shop is so easy to exploit that it makes the whole game a cakewalk
- The game freezes up rather frequently
- Graphics are sub-par

The Save Factor
The game has a starting price of 50$. I feel that it deserves a Save Factor of around 35$. It’s entertaining, but the production value is rather low (low-quality graphics, bad testing leading to freezing game) so it might not be worth buying full price for everyone. I still feel I got good value for my money at full price, but other people might not think so.

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, Review