In today's edition of "Etrail should have investigated this game a bit more before buying" we have Trinity Trigger. So I knew on a basic level that this game was supposed to be capturing a 90s style JRPG with simplistic graphics and gameplay and a fairly straight-forward narrative surrounding a small cast of characters fighting to save the world or something. I'm not sure if I read a misleading article or just the fact there was a "Trigger" in the title, but I got the impression it was supposed to be most inspired by Chrono Trigger and while I'm not always trusting of nostalgia traps, I was in the mood for something like that to unwind with in the evenings. So it's not particularly like Chrono Trigger at all, at least not that I can recognize. The game it most resembles is Secret of Mana, a game I rented to play on the SNES and played a bit of, but didn't revisit until a couple years ago in its remake form. While not a bad game entirely, I wouldn't consider either of them to be my kind of thing and not an experience I'd prefer to recreate. Trinity Trigger aims to be Secret of Mana and achieves it to some degree, but in trying to improve the janky combat I hated, actually makes things even worse.

There's a lot of fighting in this game. It's sort of action-RPG sort of ATB based, as you have some special attacks on cooldown but your main attack has a stamina-like gauge that goes down as you attack and recharges when you're not attacking. You can also use a special aura ability periodically to gain certain buffs and activate a super linked move to use all your characters in a big attack that deals a ton of damage. The story has your characters traveling between several dungeons called "Arma" that house shrines capable of granting your triggers (these little annoying talking Pokemon they each have) the ability to turn into different kinds of weapons. Enemies are weak to different kinds of weapons and strong against others though frankly, there's 0 logic to it, it's just kind of randomly decided that this snake monster is weak against a gun and a wizard staff but strong against swords and bows, because ya know, that's how snakes are I guess.

The above paragraph certainly indicates some similarities to Secret of Mana which also focused heavily on swapping out weapons to hit weaknesses. But this game was made in 2023 and had to make things a bit more complicated in an attempt to make things better. And boy did it complicate things that didn't need complicating. So, every character has the ability to customize the three ways they can use each of their weapons, swapping out the style of basic attack, aura, and special attack, each with usually 2-3 options to choose from. You also spend TP to level up each of those options up to 6 times, though it's difficult to really power up more than one of each per weapon per character. The different characters also don't have the same options for those attacks even if it's the same weapon. Now this is sort of cool, as it gives you options, but you get so many of these weapons and so rapidly (there are 8 different weapons across a ~15 hour game), it's hard to keep it all straight long enough to even check them out and pick what you want to invest in. Further, because that wasn't overwhelming enough, you get "manatite" which are upgrades to your weapons. Each weapon can equip multiples of these and they do different things, like make it stronger against enemy barriers, restore health when you attack, do more damage, etc. You have slots for these for each weapon, for each character and ideally, you would have them all loaded out with manatite in each slot...but considering you should be switching between all 8 of your weapons on your 3 chars that means equipping, eventually 72 different manatites (and you can't overlap with like 2 attack upgrades either), which is simply absurd for a game that's mostly about just hacking at monsters. I eventually gave up and just didn't bother equipping manatite because it was taking too much time and effort and the game otherwise feels like it should just be a simple straight forward romp. I did not come to it looking for such a mess of a system. As another complicating factor, different characters are better with some of the weapons than the other characters are though I didn't even notice this until the end of the game.

This rambling discussion of the systems of the game are really just me trying to demonstrate that to avoid being overly simple, Trinity Trigger WAY overcomplicates things to the point I don't even feel like engaging with its systems anymore, especially considering how much of the actual combat boils down to attack them with the thing they're weak against and occasionally use the special attack. If the combat is couched to be so simple, just make it simple and fun. Fun will always outweigh more options.

However, the worst part about the combat wasn't the overcomplication, it was some awful design choices in the basic flow of combat. First, your weapons have 0 stopping power. You can hit them with everything you've got and they can just start up a combo and hit you. Now that's not inherently bad, it can work with some combat systems. But on the flip side, every enemy attack will interrupt yours. And your basic attacks are all combos. This essentially means you can't get off a combo on an enemy—your primary method of doing real damage—unless the target is attacking one of your allies and you're not in the wide hitbox of its attack, or if using one of the ranged weapons. I cannot imagine how this basic design made it through playtesting as it is infuriating to play. I found the lance pretty much useless because even just its first swipe took such a long windup I could only get off a single hit if the enemy was distracted by an ally. The other awful decision was that there is no real status effect resistance. If a snake poisons with its attack, you're just instantly poisoned and need to use an antidote if you want to heal it. If after you go into your item wheel and heal the poison, it hits you again, guess what, you're poisoned again. There's no temporary protection from the next poison or low chance of proc, they're just nonstop. It started to feel pointless to even bother healing status ailments until after the whole fight and even then, I got so tired of opening the item wheel especially since you have to do it so much just to heal your health.

The above issues didn't bother me for much of the game simply because the game was pretty easy overall. I didn't do any real grinding and only did a few side quests to get other weapons that don't come from the main quest and I was able to get through pretty much every encounter without much trouble until close to the end of the game when things suddenly get more difficult. At this point, weirdly when I finally got some challenge to the game, I found that everything I complained about above became so much more noticeable and annoying. I don't generally like super easy games but at least this had made for a pretty relaxing experience until it wasn't. Then the end boss was so ridiculously overpowered I finally had to grind just to beat it. I try not to make myself play games when I'm not enjoying them but it's harder to drop a game for me when I'm like RIGHT at the end anyway. So about the only plus side I can say is that at least grinding in this game doesn't take very long, you level up pretty quickly and it was about an hour of killing some mobs while listening to an audioboook before I could go mop up the end boss with 15 more levels under my belt.

I left this game feeling not just disappointed but "frustrated" and I think that tone probably comes across in this review. It's one reason I kind of didn't even want to write it, I don't really like dwelling on that sort of attitude. But this emotion is because when I started it out, while not blown away, I was leaning toward a 4-star-ish game that hit on what I was looking for with a cute simple JRPG. You can tell that there was a lot of heart put into the game. The character portrait art is decent and reminds me of Legend of Mana, a game related to Secret of Mana, but that I did enjoy a lot more. Much of the main story is voice acted pretty well. The lands you travel to and the sights you see very much capture that JRPG sense of wonder, heroism, and whimsical adventure. While the story isn't great, it's functional and does involve some intriguing elements. But weirdly, I think by trying to do too much at once, the development got spread too thin. I really really don't need to be able to equip 72 different powerups and have hundreds of abilities to choose from and if less time was spent on that crap and more on making the combat feel less like losing a fight with a wall, there might've been an enjoyable gameplay experience, one that didn't get in the way of everything else the game was actually doing at least a decent job of. Then when I got to the end and found myself slogging through and debating just dropping it in the last 5%, I knew I couldn't really justify giving Trinity Trigger more than 2 stars.

And at the end of the day, that's what really gets to me so much about Trinity Trigger. I almost wish it had felt like a thrown-together pile of junk. I've played those before. But I get bored and I move on. Instead, Trinity Trigger feels like a game that people really cared about making, and did a good job on some things, but just totally botched other aspects of the execution that just ruin the whole experience. The fact that love shines through is why I still give this game 2 stars. Technically it does fall into the "I regret playing this" category that means 1 star for me, but recognizing the spark underneath it all and the fact that the frustration at the end really isn't representative of the whole gaming experience, I'm okay with bumping it up to 2 stars.