Rather than a four-person team, the player gets to manage and field an army. There are many differences that allowed Asano, Arai, and the development team to explore different concepts from a standard RPG. Before starting on Project Triangle Strategy, he played a lot of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and says he got a lot of influence from those games. Arai tells me he’s a big fan of both Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. Of course, influences were felt from previous giants in the tactical RPG space. With Triangle Strategy, Asano said the theme could focus more on human-versus-human conflict, and appeal to an older audience. “Because in these kinds of standard RPGs, it would be like you watch an event in the town, you go into a dungeon with a bunch of monsters in it, you fight the boss monster, and that’s kind of the cycle of the game.” “Specifically for a standard RPG Octopath Traveler, we were feeling that there were limitations on what kind of story we could write that appeals more to the adult, the older audience,” Asano says. The second is that, with the set-up of Octopath Traveler, the team had to work with standard RPG conventions. “And even after our release of Octopath Traveler, we saw that there were some reactions and kind of wanting to, anticipating, a tactics, FFT-style game with the same HD-2D visuals.” “We thought the HD-2D visuals would really match and look great in this tactics RPG genre,” said Asano. The standard party-based RPG is no stranger for any of these developers or publishers, but it’s been a while since a major tactical RPG came out of Square Enix.Īsano outlines two reasons for turning to tactics, the first being visuals. One of my first questions for the pair was why they turned to the tactics RPG genre. This interview has been edited for clarity. We discussed storytelling, battles, motivations, and the tactics RPG genre as a whole. We’re still working through the game here, but ahead of launch, we got a chance to talk with the producers of Triangle Strategy: both Asano and Yasuaki Arai. Its HD-2D style has become more prevalent in the years since, and some have wondered whether Triangle Strategy might make a similar impact on the tactics scene.
The latter made a big impact on the RPG scene with, among other games, 2018’s Octopath Traveler. Triangle Strategy is the latest tactics RPG from Square Enix, developed with Artdink and the infamous Tomoya Asano. And Triangle Strategy is at the vanguard. Big entries like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, coupled with impending releases like the Front Mission remakes and Firaxis’ Midnight Suns, have grid-based strategy on the rise. The tactics genre has seen a resurgence as of late. We asked the producers of Triangle Strategy about how they concocted the Switch’s latest tactics game