Pleasantly surprised by Triangle Strategy (10 hrs in, mild spoilers)

It's actually a pretty great game. It plays with a lot of fun SRPG ideas, and the story surprisingly goes places.

Beforehand, yes, the intro story bit is really long, but there is a pay off. There are a lot of story and character intro in between the 1st and 2nd fight, but after that point, fights are a lot more frequent with story spaced a lot more consumably

In terms of the story, it doesn't hold much back. You might even get to know a character really well only to have them straight up canonically killed. As far as I can tell though, characters dying in combat won't affect their status in the story, but that may as well change. There are also quite a few route splits it might seem. I can't tell but there are 2 very distinct things that could happen at few points in the story. The way they decide is by democracy, and you have to find out various facts to convince your allies to decide one way or another. I thought the choices would be pretty easy, and it's been overall easy as there's one person who will go with just about any decision you decide to go with, but seems the secret choices you get from gathering info can actually backfire, which was a nice surprise.

But also because they do take their time with the storytelling, you do get to care quite a bit about the characters, so their deaths or plights will actually feel pretty shocking.

Combat-wise, this is where the game really fucking shines. So I heard people lament there are no class changes etc, but the game makes up for it in a ton of ways. In fact I think class change would've hurt the game's potential a bit. Every single character plays by their own little gimmick. There are shared moves, like base ice spell is known by 2 different characters so far, but almost everything else feels unique to the character. There's a thief girl who can shroud herself but also act twice per turn. She does half dmg compared to other characters, but when you notice that she can do things like attack > move > attack 2 or attack > heal > move to safety or attack > move > shroud etc, she's really powerful to people willing to be creative.

Also because every characters play so differently, using all of them together feels really important. Like the tank in this game feels so overpowered because ranged attacks are so far in this game, and using all sorts of doodads to get your tank in the middle of fucking everything to just taunt the hell out of the enemies generally means you straight up win. But the doodads tend to come from other characters who can give him move buff or every turn etc. The way all of these characters have very fragmented skill sets result in you planning ahead feel really rewarding.

Characters are also balanced pretty well. All of them have TP, which is mana, and a lot of them start with like 3 mana, moves cost 1~3 with basic attack not costing anything. They recover 1 TP per turn, and mages tend to require 2+ TP per magic, which means you can't just go gungho. You occasionally need to know to pull off or use other characters that regain your TP or speed up your turn counter. This also calls back to how characters can rarely function by themselves. They always have weaknesses that can be covered by another unit.

Also one great thing, altitudes actually matter. Characters have jump stat, which determines how tall of a terrain they can move through, which isn't new, but there are characters that are dedicated to taking advantage of them. If you're like 10 altitude higher, some moves do higher dmg or have longer range. Moves all have a natural buff when you're on a higher plane as well, which makes positioning really important. But there's something that absolutely becomes a gamechanger. You can recruit a blacksmith that can craft ladders on walls that have surfaces on top of them. Your archer is a flier so generally she doesn't care much, but this not only makes your mages able to stand on terrains that can't be touched, it also vastly improves their range.

Anyways yeah, sorta review style post, didn't intend to write it this way so it might feel wishy-washy, but I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. I'm antsy to see like what other routes or characters are available or whatever secrets there might be. Also as an SRPG fanboy, I'm loving every single new idea the game keeps fucking chucking at me. I'm kinda gasming but I can't tell if everybody will appreciate it like I am right now.

Just get past the first bit of heavy storytelling. Trust me, there is a pretty big payoff.