Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher
Game: Trinity Universe
Platform: PS3
Played For: 11 hrs
You probably didn’t know this, but there’s been a recent huge advance in the world of Japanese visual novels. What, pray tell, is a visual novel, you might be asking. Have you ever played through one of those Japanese Role-Playing Games in which the story unfolds in a series of conversations between still images of pairs of characters? Think Fox News when the screen is split in two to accommodate a pair of talking heads… only with less animation (if that’s possible.) Since visual novels and RPG visual novel hybrids like Trinity Universe are very popular in Japan, it is big Otaku news when some great innovation changes the very fabric of the medium. Daring to go where no previous game (that I know of) has gone before, Trinity Universe has audaciously added a small amount of animation to the previously static talking head anime characters. Yes, from this point forth, anime characters in visual novels are allowed to breathe.
According to the Trinity Universe official website, this new exciting technology that transforms the traditionally motionless slide show of anime portraits into seemingly living, respirating Moe goodness is the AAA (Active Animation Adventure) system. You may have thought I was joking (as AAA is hard not to think of as simply a reinvention of the animated gif) but this is one of the major selling points for the game. Watch out… thanks to revolutionary chance-takers like Trinity Universe, the JRPG might soon graduate to actual cut-scenes, and… wait, hasn’t Final Fantasy been doing that for years?
While this stylistic change to the “tableau vivant” may be a pretty big innovation for the Visual Novel, it doesn’t manage to cover up just how stale and vanilla the RPG surrounding these scenes has remained. To be fair, twenty years ago or so when I was busy playing Wizardry and Bard’s Tale on my Apple IIE, I would have flipped to see a vibrant animated character followed third person through the endless self-similar corridors of video game dungeoncraft. The 3D animation of each monster encounter would be so beguiling, that I’d have retained my feeling of excitement and adventure at even the thirty or fortieth scuffle with the same three skeletons or orcs. Those were the days when the dungeon grind was fresh and new, so people didn’t worry so much that every corridor was completely level and straight… things like stairs, unique locations, flora and fauna were barely conceived of inventions for the far future. So playing Trinity Universe is kind of nostalgic in its utter lack of dungeon innovation. If you can still thrill to endless hours of grind in order to raise those stats, Trinity Universe may be for you. But then again, it may not, as you sure have to wade through a whole lot of visual novel anime exposition, tutorial and overly cheerful music to get down to the action. When the game begins you have a choice of following one of two interwoven storylines. The suggested starting character is Kanata, the Demon Dog King (an ideographic pun on Demon God Gem.) Kanata recently skipped out on some ritual meant to transform him into a protective magical gem that shields his realm of Empyria from falling meteorites. Kanata chose to opt out of that fate, and is instead diverting the falling objects (i.e. dungeons) himself as he looks for a better way to deal with the problem.
The opening visual novel stuff is entertaining enough (although Disgaea prinnies and other overly-familiar characters can get a little boring as they each enact their signature routines), but just as the game gets you revved up to fight some monsters… “beep! Beep! Beeeeeeeeeeeep!” goes the game in a cloyingly shrill little girl voice. This is the way that Macaroon, your unskippable tutorial guide introduces herself. Get used to it, because the next five hours of game play suffer constant interruptions as Macaroon’s voice bleats out an imitation of a cell phone and everything grinds to a halt. While Macaroon’s tutorials are clear and easy to follow, all of the information is also easily accessed in the manual and in the in-game encyclopedia. Whoever thought that Macaroon’s pace-destroying blathering was a good idea was simply nuts.
Dungeons (i.e. floating meteorites poised to drop on Empyria at any time) come in random, whimsical forms like giant bananas, pirate vessels, presents, sushi, and so on. In each dungeon is a gravity core, which when nabbed will prevent the dungeon from dropping on Empyria, and is thus your primary goal. Each dungeon is also full of random stuff… Trinity Universe has taken a page from the atelier/mana khemia series and fully embraced loading down the players with tons of nonsensical garbage to be used as alchemical reagents. Like some bipedal Katamari everywhere you walk you accumulate stuff. Most of this random crap is important for building better weapons, character skills, and higher level stuff. I couldn’t help but notice the DLC for Trinity Universe consists mostly of lists of rare items. This seems to me a bad sign… it is like paying the company for the right to not play their game, and the fact that they offer it doesn’t exactly make the prospect of finding the stuff yourself sound like much fun.
Trinity Universe is, however, full of character customization options and things to collect besides the expansive alchemy ingredient list. For instance, the game introduces managraphics, which are images painted onto weapons that add visual and game effects on each swing. This was pretty interesting and fun to experiment with, as were the other subsystems like meteors and monster souls. Time also plays an element in the game, with available items and monster encounters changing between day and night. All of this elaboration around such a basic dungeon crawl begs the question once again… why couldn’t there have been more depth to the actual places you explore to find all of this stuff?
I did like the fight system, which seemed both intuitive and broad enough to allow for a good degree of strategy. The action is pseudo-turn based… for each character the game pauses until you set them off, but then your actions during the turn occur in real time. Fights weren’t too difficult as long as you travelled to the right dungeon… while each one is labeled with average monster level, it takes some experimentation to decide what level monsters your party is really ready for… and a run-in with one particularly strong critter can mean a lot of lost progress since the last save point.
Trinity Universe is a strange game, in that in theme and humor it seems to be pitched at nine-year-olds, but in strategy and depth it can easily occupy an adult. On the visual novel front the game is a procession of anime celebrities from previous games for old experienced players to enjoy (look who’s here, everyone! Let’s give a warm round of applause for demon pirate Etna… isn’t she a darling!) But on the dungeon crawling front, the whole game feels like you are a newbie in training for something better. An elaborately wrapped gift with twenty year old fruitcake inside, Trinity Universe is a strange mishmash of a game. It shows its Japanese roots in favoring form over substance, and in featuring a lot of anime characters who are all trying just a bit too hard to please.
