Trinity Trigger is a game from another time, often to its benefit but at times to its detriment as well.

Trinity Trigger draws its line in the sand early: this is a throwback to the action RPGs of the 90s at its heart. If you've played titles like those in the Mana series, you will feel right at home here. This is a stylistic choice that informs the gameplay, the visuals, and the general ambient mood of the game too. I think Trinity Trigger successfully achieves this goal, and I commend it. At the same time, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better served by taking more risks to shake up the formula or if I'm asking too much and the changes would dilute the result.

The core structure is very straightforward. You quickly assemble your party of three heroes and fall into the game's rhythm. Towns are safe havens to equip, buy items, and find side quests. The trails and roads between important locations are full of monsters and treasure, and there are dungeons to explore, full of more of both, plus traps and bosses. While the characters and environments are #d, the exposition is delivered via scripted scenes with 2D character visuals. Occasionally the story is merely a text bubble or three coming off an in-game character model. Still, the game is chock full of fully voiced sequences between the characters in a visual novel-like format. Actively speaking, characters are often full color and at the front of the scene, whereas other cast members are slightly grayed out and in the background.

The actual combat mechanics are of the real-time action variety. The setup is deliberately very similar to older action RPG titles from the 1990s. Enemies wander the field and can be interacted with or evaded at any time without a separate battlefield transition. Each character will have a primary weapon equipped with the possibility to switch between various weapon times (this is initially very limited, but all the cast members keep gaining new weapon types throughout the story).

As expected, you mash your primary attack button to chain combos, but this has slight twists. Firstly, you do not have a distinction between, say, heavy and light attacks; all basic attacks are bound to the same button. Additionally, you have a stamina bar in wheel form, with each attack taking One Piece slice of the wheel. The stamina wheel will begin to refill after a short pause in basic attacks. The wheel only has six slots, so you have enough juice for about two full combo strings before it runs out. You can continue attacking at this point, but your damage is greatly (and I mean greatly) reduced. This makes it so much of your time is spent attacking for short bursts and cycling back out to let your bar recharge.

The next component is dodging. You have a simple dodge roll button to avoid enemy attacks, which can be repeated without delay (other than the animation frames). Most enemies – particularly larger elite and boss types – display large red zones to telegraph incoming attacks, and they fill to indicate when they are about to trigger. Your dodge roll is responsive and repeatable, so avoiding those attacks is usually not much of an issue. The extra wrinkle is that perfectly timed dodges just before an attack lands will refill your stamina wheel. This encourages you to learn enemy attack timing to attack and be aggressive. Then just when you might typically back off to try and rest, you can make a timely dodge to avoid damage, refill your gauge, then continue the assault.

The other big component is attack chains. Each press of the attack button has not only a unique animation but also a unique skill attached. For example, the first attack might be a flaming upper swipe, the second attack an AoE ground pound, and the third attack an overhead that stuns. This is locked in sequence – in our previous fictitious example, the third attack will always be a stunning overhead, so to use it, you have to make three strikes in quick succession to get that effect. Characters can assign different abilities to different attacks in the chain, though there are limitations (you can't assign a third-step attack to the first attack slot, for example). Because second and third attacks in the chain are often more potent and specialized, it makes you think about how often you want to attack both in terms of the required stamina and the enemy being fought.

This is further compounded by the fact that each weapon has its own attack chains. So, the first attack options for a sword, axe, and bow are all completely different. Since characters eventually pick up overlapping weapon options, you can create multiple builds for each character and swap them on the fly. Once you add in the recharging special attacks that can ignore the stamina wheel and larger team attacks that build across multiple encounters, Trinity Trigger has a surprising amount of depth regarding its party composition and combat complexity.

Monsters come with their own assortment of battle mechanics. You've got your typical range of status buffs and debuffs, novel attack patterns and animations, etc. The novel-ish layer here is that bosses have an armor/resistance bar similar to Octopath Traveler; this ablative health bar must be depleted before you can cause “true” damage to the boss's life total. Once the bar breaks, they are stunned, and you have a brief window to unload on them. The bosses are weak to certain weapon types that deplete both the armor bar and their health total faster, meaning that you will want to switch to the favored weapons and keep your implements fully kitted out for these occasions.

The aggregate result of all these mechanics is a favorable mix of action and thought. The gameplay is fluid, enemies are active, and you're never checked out while fighting. Sometimes you can mash and bash through the goobers, but most fights have enough heft to ensure you are not mindlessly mashing through them.

The characters are interesting, if not overwhelmingly deep. The fully voiced cutscenes greatly engender positive feelings for them, making their interactions genuine. There is a lot of high-level discussion about gods, wars in heaven, champions, and so forth; this provides a lot of intriguing context for the wider world, but it needs to be more connected to learning more about the cast. Still, Cyan, Elise, and Xantice are enjoyable and direct leads with fun little animal companions, so I enjoyed their scenes together.

The visuals are something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is a great deal of absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn art in certain contexts. The character portraits, setting backdrops, and dungeon exteriors are all wonderfully detailed and evocative. Sadly, the actual in-game depictions of these people and places are far simpler. So simple that the characters look bereft of features, like they've been resting at the bottom of a riverbed, and the detail has been worn smooth by ceaseless running water. The physical animations are lively, but the rudimentary-looking models do not evoke a simple stylistic choice and instead start to evoke feelings of a free-to-play mobile game.

The repetition on display further compounds this budget-title feeling. Each area reuses countless assets, often with only the barest modification. The slimes you fight in the first zone are recolored to a slightly different tint in the next zone, the next zone, and the next zone. This goes for many of the game's enemies and its environments too. Despite the outer depictions of the dungeons as unique god-weapons that you are traversing to unlock ancient mysteries, the interiors are all the same blocky dungeon interiors in dull grid-like layouts. A save point and an item shop pre-empt every single boss encounter. Every weapon shrine looks the same. The repetition makes the world feel infinitely smaller, and not in a good way.

Other elements of the dungeon and environment design are similarly mixed. There are hidden chests to find in each area, which help encourage you to go off the beaten path. Still, they feel less like a reward for exploration and remind me of running along the walls in Wolfenstein 3D as a kid, mindlessly tapping the same button while looking for secret turkey alcoves behind flags. Specific pathways are blocked until you gain access to the weapons that allow you to smash the rock formations in the way. The strange thing is that the rock formations have a giant weapon symbol displayed to indicate what is needed, like a picture of an axe or a picture of a bow. It's clear what you need to progress, and functionally not any different than needing a certain HM in Pokémon to progress down a new path. Yet the silliness of seeing a bunch of identical gray chunks of rock with cartoonish axes emblazoned on the side mentally kicked me out of the game in a jarring way.

There are many environmental hazards, such as spike pits and triggerable traps, often needing a mixture of careful timing to avoid or switches to deactivate. These provide another reason to stay mobile and responsive and are incredibly challenging when fights break out nearby. The struggle is that your computer-controlled allies don't always know how to avoid these traps the same way you do, and at times will mindlessly harm themselves on obvious hazards.

This brings up another wrinkle – this game has cooperative play! After the first few hours, you will have assembled your core trio, and that's when co-op play unlocks. Now it's offline only for you and buddies on the couch. But I'm sure that drastically impacts the game experience, as anything with friends is usually better than playing solo. Whether you can wrangle up a few other friends to play or not may change the mileage you get out of this one. While I can't speak to the experience, I think it's a good feature to have, and it once again harkens back to its '90s forbearers in a positive sense.

In a continuation of mixed results, some mechanical oddities were minor hurdles. The most surprising one was the way equipment upgrades work. You don't exactly buy new equipment so much as craft and find gems that are socketed into your weapons and armor. These run the gamut of effects but are largely your expected RPG staples – increased critical chances, status resistances, percentile buffs to HP, etc. Each of your weapons has unique slots, so you can kit each out with different gems, which pairs well with the previously mentioned attack chain customization.

The strange thing to my mind was that you have armor customization paired with weapon customization, meaning that when you switch weapons (which you often do on the fly), you are also switching to the set of armor runes paired with that weapon. This felt… odd, to say the least. It was really odd to change from sword to bow and suddenly lose 10% max HP in the middle of a fight, for example. It was a feature I had to remind myself of frequently, and it cost me a fight or two without realizing it.

Another place I can't quite decide my feelings on is the asking price. The MSRP at the time of writing is US$50. This makes it not a budget title but not quite full AAA status. It also is separate from the growing club of games creeping past the old US$60 price point. Whether it is worth this amount is hard to quantify. This is a complete game, with no technical issues, a fascinating world, and fun action combat, with a possibility for co-op play that harkens back to a style of ARPGs that is a fun nostalgia trip. Unlike many other supposedly AAA titles I have played recently, it is stable and complete, without the all-too-common feeling of “well, this will probably be a full experience a year or two after launch.” I commend Trinity Trigger for that.

That said, I wonder if US$50 is enough to justify an experience that feels more shallow than other titles in the space. You can easily get a host of other rich, deep, rewarding RPGs for the same price or a few bucks more. When you factor in sales prices or the host of titles available on various subscription services, that price proposition becomes harder to justify. The heavy amount of repeated enemy and environment assets don't do much to evoke the sense of a higher-priced title either. But then again, Trinity Trigger has co-op play, which many other roleplaying games do not have.

Trinity Trigger is a solid game with several interesting elements, held back by a somewhat lackluster and repetitive presentation. If you're playing single-player, the issues are more obvious, but I imagine playing with friends would make many of these concerns disappear over time. It's certainly one to consider if you're itching for a more nostalgic take on the ARPG formula, and it has plenty of strengths to make it worth your time – and if you can wrangle a friend or two to sit down and play with you, all the better.