In these situations you have to listen (at great length) to advice from the other characters and try to talk them round if they’re not leaning you’re way, often by using arguments and evidence collected elsewhere. This coyness is a particular shame because when you have to make a big decision – equivalent to the one big moral choice in a Life Is Strange episode – it’s made much clearer what impact it will have, one which often comes at the expense of the local peasantry. Japanese games always seem to prefer a more opaque approach to moral choices and here you’re frequently told to make a decision between doing the humane thing, and the more militarily expedient, but it’s usually never made clear what difference that makes to the story, or indeed the characters. There is a certain level of interactivity to the dialogue though, via the much vaunted Conviction system which… the game never proper explains. The script is well written but the pace of the spoken dialogue, and the storytelling in general, means it takes forever for conversations to come to any kind of conclusion. There’s obviously no way Square Enix could’ve known that ahead of time (which in itself shows how depressingly predictable the business of war is) but it quickly becomes a meaningless coincidence as the game starts to bury you under several appendices full of invented history, confusing names, and baroque dialogue. Even one of the flags – the one on the box art – is curiously reminiscent of Ukraine. The plot machinations include a neighbouring kingdom invading under false pretences and with the intention of installing a puppet government, following a false flag operation, so despite all the fantasy stylings there is an unexpected topicality to the plot. This quickly (well, as quickly as anything happens in Triangle Strategy) goes to pot though, when the king is deposed and the groom-to-be is forced to go on the run. This led to the Saltiron Wars 30 years previously, but the game starts with a new generation of nobility trying to put the past behind them with a royal wedding. The root of the disagreement between the game’s three warring kingdoms is resources, with one controlling salt, one iron, and the other trade. It’s hard to know for certain what Triangle Strategy’s story influences are but from a Western perspective the immediate point of comparison for a medieval fantasy world locked in a cold war of Machiavellian politics is Game of Thrones.
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