Review: Fight your destiny along with your party’s in Trinity Trigger

Japanese developer’s FuRyu‘s – whose previous release Alliance Alive HD I reviewed years ago and had a pretty good time with – Trinity Trigger is yet another RPG that’s heavily influenced by the games of yore. This time, however, we’re talking about the action variety of RPGs from that period, and from my gaming repertoire, the ones that this game sticks very close to are those from the Ys series, one of my favorites.

Much like the latest entry in that, Ys IX: Monstrum Nox, you could very well see Trinity Trigger as comfort food gaming. It’s a very by the numbers action RPG that doesn’t do anything particularly noteworthy, but it follows that script competently enough to make it worth your while. It’s breezy enough to make it easy enough to pick up, and its charming presentation will keep you interested to continue on with the adventure as the plot thickens.

In it, you play as a group of teenagers who are bound by destiny to take place in an age-old feud between chaos and order. Cyan, the first one of them that you run across and who’s the main protagonist, has the bearing mark of chaos, but has no knowledge of his part in the grand scheme of things, not until a girl he’s never seen in his life suddenly pops up in his village along with her trigger, a familiar of sorts with the power to bestow elemental magic to her attacks.

Before that fateful encounter, Cyan himself ran into his own trigger while out spelunking, and it’s upon that fateful encounter that his adventure begins. But the main goal of his journey isn’t to vanquish his enemies nor follow his pre-determined birth goal, quite the opposite in fact. Their objective is to find the warrior of order and get them to agree not to fight what they think of as a needless battle, and hopefully put an end to a seemingly endless war.

The isometric action works as you’d expect, with each of your trio being capable of wielding a different kind of weapon. Their attacks are dictated by a cooldown of sorts, and special powers become available after you score enough hits. You can also make use of each of their triggers in order to dish special elemental powers which come into play when exploiting enemy weaknesses throughout the game. It’s not the deepest combat ever, but it’s enjoyable enough and does not overstay its welcome.

Overall progression in Trinity Trigger is satisfying enough on its own to make it very well worth playing, but it’s also got quite decent visuals, a pleasing soundtrack and surprisingly good voice acting. It’s no wonder this game came out as well as it did, considering some the names behind the project, such as artist Yuki Nobuteru from Trials of Mana, and Raita Kazama of Xenoblade fame, as well as Hiroki Kikuta also from the Mana franchise, hence the shared DNA between these games. 

It’s quite a team and they sure pooled their talent into making an otherwise standard RPG fare into something closer to top shelf material. While I wouldn’t go out and say that Trinity Trigger is must-play, if you do end up picking it up you’ll find it to be a game that’s aimed to be pure, uncompromised entertainment, just as its inspirations from the past were, and in that regard, it surely succeeds.