Why it is amazing that Triangle Strategy was made

 

The Wii U and 3DS eshops are closing soon and last night I was in the Wii U eshop thinking about whether to buy the Fire Emblem GBA games so I could play them on the Wii U pad instead of my small GBA. On a side note, everyone is having amazing firesales on the 3DS eshop except for Nintendo. Sigh, really don't like them as a company because they just refuse to drop prices.

Anyways I was thinking about how much I dislike what has happened to the Fire Emblem series recently. I love strategy games and fantasy stories set in the middle ages with politics etc and they have turned the Fire Emblem series since the 3DS era into a dating sim. If you looks at the sales and reviews people love this fanservice but I hate it so much because there is so much disconnect between this huge war going on in the game and the stupid slice of life dialogue and relationship stuff that does not acknowledge what is happening in the main story. 

Triangle Strategy is exactly what I love about the strategy genre. Good writing about politics between countries with a main character who uses his brains and recognises the difficult decisions in front of him instead of a stupid hero who has no plan except telling everyone to stop this while killing all his enemies.

There are no dating sim elements in Triangle Strategy to sell the game, no getting married and sending kids off to an alternate dimension so that they can come back as teenagers fanservice. I hate it when games rely on fanservice to sell. I get why they did it and Sega tried it with Valkyria Chronicles 2 & 3 to improve sales but it just means it becomes a lower quality product overall.

There are no everyone can be any character class bullshit. I used to like it in Final Fantasy Tactics but I have realised that  every character having a specific character class is part of the charm and it makes each character unique. A character's class is part of their personality and if they can be anyone they are not really a character at all. The story has also a branching path system where your decisions and make the story turn out different.

My only 1 minor complaint is not having character portraits with various facial expressions next to the dialogue when they are speaking ala Grandia but it is a minor complaint compared with the perfection the game is. For Japanese learners being able to go back through a dialogue and replay the voices is very good for studying. 

While Square Enix has turned Final Fantasy into an action RPG series, I am grateful some producer had the balls to greenlight a serious turn base strategy RPG that did not rely on fanservice to sell. There are hardly any new games for for old school turn based strategy fans like myself so I guess I have to keep replaying old Shining Force and Fire Emblem games until Triangle Strategy 2 comes out. They have sold over 1 million copies so there is hope for turn based games without fanservice yet!