The look is A Choice TM, and not everybody is going to love what it is going for. Brilliant flashes of light as characters make powerful attacks, eerie translucent fog spawning enemies, the rippling of water beneath the battlefield, dynamic lighting with proper shadows cast by nearby torches – the game evokes the idea of an SNES RPG while being far beyond what was possible technologically in that era. The character sprites look like they are yanked straight out of my memories of playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance but the environments and special effects are on a whole ‘nother level. Now I’m no technical expert so I can’t really dive into the specifics of how this happens, but I can say that the effect works. Team Asano’s “HD-2D” is a distinct visual style meant to evoke retro RPGs while punching them up in ways that make the aesthetic feel modern. Speaking of art, let’s take a moment to address how the game looks generally. The character art is gorgeous, evocative of early Final Fantasy designs but most immediately resembling Octopath Traveler, the previous entry in the HD-2D series. One feature that helps make sense of what happening is that pressing the X button while a named NPC is talking pulls up their profile, a fully-drawn image of the character along with their name, affiliation, and title. If you’ve ever started a fantasy RPG before you’ll be familiar with the way in which unfamiliar proper nouns are dropped with little context eventually you just pick up on who is who and it really doesn’t feel like you’re missing any important details (which is admittedly a little worrying for how interesting those first five chapters are going to be). I appreciate the thought behind the warning, but it’s clear that chapter VI is simply the back end up a lengthy introduction because this section still feels very much like beginning of the game territory. Upon booting up the demo the game informs you that you’ll be jumping into “the middle” of the action with chapter VI, and that because of this you may not recognize all of the story elements that come up. Instead, this article will focus on my impressions of the demo’s mechanics. Now we can spend all day clowning on how ridiculous of a name Project Triangle Strategy is, but funnier people than me have already tackled that task with gusto. Dubbed Project Triangle Strategy, this game promised a tactical RPG experience with a choices and consequences system that dramatically impacted the story. One game in particular that caught my attention was the latest project in the HD-2D series made Square Enix’s Team Asano. The Direct contained a number of announcements which inevitably disappointed a swath of people who expected a different set of announcements, but I personally came away pretty satisfied with what was shown off. February 2021 marked the first full-length Nintendo Direct in 530 days, a stat which I know because I watched a potentially unhealthy number of Direct speculation videos and they all started with this little trivia fact.
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