Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll | Review


Synopsis: Koei has just provided us with their newest title from game developer Omega Force, Trinity: Souls of Zill O’ll, and of course we got our hands on a review copy to give our impressions of playthrough. The premise of the game is based on a prophecy that the king will be slain by his offspring and to top it off, the belief that the continent of Vyashion was created by the god Notoon is not shared by all its inhabitants, leading to a failure of a unified society. Your role is to control three characters, a warrior, a wizard, and an assassin on the fly to defeat enemies and ultimately the evil King Balor. Confused yet? Well don’t be as I am here to break it down and see if this story holds up through the course of the game.

Praise: I must admit that I had no idea what I was getting into with this game and turns out it has a strange effect on me and time as I have yet to play it less than two hours at a time, hell, the first night I threw this game in, I spent four hours playing in one sitting, saying just one more quest numerous times. The gameplay is great, being a fast paced hack and slash, you are able to map two sets of three skills that you can change on the fly on top of being able to change your playable character on the fly. What this means is that you can set up some devastating combos once familiar with the controls. Souls of Zill O’ll has some RPG elements that keep you playing, such as a wide array of weapons, upgradeable skills, and more quests than you can shake a stick at. The method to my madness in this game was to take on as many quests as possible then grinding through them all before going back to town and cashing in on my rewards. The graphics are good, but I feel the strongest part behind the visuals is that regardless to the amount of enemies I had on screen, I did not experience any slowdown.

Gripes: The story started out strong and fizzled out just a couple hours into the story. I still focused on the main story, but after a while, I found myself fast forwarding through the text on side missions along with the gossip in taverns. Being that there are three characters, it seems like it would have been possible to make this a three person online coop game for those wanting to play socially, eliminating the ability to switch on the fly. One thing I quickly noticed was that I was backtracking to a lot to places I had previously been to in order complete fetch and rescue missions. The closest comparison in which I can think of is Final Fantasy Tactics, where you take on new quests in places that you have already been to numerous times. The learning curve also takes a while, between two and three hours, to get comfortable with as you actively use every button on the controller, sometimes with little to no opportunity for much thought and the character development is relatively deep, with hundreds of options as to how to upgrade and focus on specific skills.

Overall, I am having a blast with this solid action RPG and don’t see it growing old for a while. I do wish I could play it in smaller amounts to prevent playing through it before the weekend, but is that really a bad thing? Though this is not a full-fledged RPG, the closest game I can relate this to would be what Final Fantasy XIII should have been in terms of action and gameplay along Final Fantasy Tactics in regards to the towns, where you don’t actually move around, but have a list of places to go to for gossip, spells, weapons, and quests. Now please excuse me while I go back to mad questing. Well done Tecmo Koei, as I have gone from not liking your action games, to now looking forward to what is next after Fist of the North Star and now Trinity.

Mashbuttons.com gives Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll an 8 out of 10.

Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll is available now for the Playstation 3.

4 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. "...what Final Fantasy XIII should have been in terms of action and gameplay" - Have you ever played the Square Enix game Nier? It is, in my opinion, what FF XIII should have been. Your description of Trinity sounds like Nier! :D

    Nice, relaxed review- that's what gaming is all about.

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  3. action good camera kinda sucks, and lock on not so great other then that i liked the game untill the ending :(

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  4. so far so good...the camera sucks though...

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