I'm not even going to pretend I didn't miss the last 4 days, and that I don't really have much to write today either. School's been really taxing, and I've been working like 12 hours a day, with the other 12 going into keeping me alive, fed, and mentally okay. So instead I'll pretend the opposite, that I missed the entire week and will continue on Sunday. I'll try to have my opinions on Trillion gathered by then.
So, it's Sunday, and I have finished
Trillion: God of Destruction. And if I had to summarize it with one short sentence, it's the worst game I've binged for two days straight.
Okay, but that's a rather odd claim, so let me elaborate in some fashion. I'm honestly not quite sure where to begin though. There will be spoilers, but then again, I don't really recommend you play this game anyways.
Trillion is a game about fighting this huge and immensely powerful monster named Trillion that has the power to consume entire worlds, and now it's at the Gates of Hell, ready to eat its way to the Core. As its name may hint, it has a trillion health points, which you are supposed to wither down to 0. The game begins with you getting a quick taste of combat against it, only to see that your attacks barely manage to scratch it. It's played in a turn-based fashion on a grid, and all of Trillion's attacks are displayed a turn or few in advance on the grid, so you could move aside before they hit. Still, it's not quite as easy as it may sound, as there's often multiple attacks each turn, and most are not only aimed at you, but also cover a very large area. So, eventually you probably get hit and die instantly, having taken at most 0.01% of Trillion's HP. But that's all part of the game, as you get revived by some mysterious person asking for help killing Trillion as well as your soul once Trillion has been defeated. Then you get a briefing of what the hell is going on as well as rather obvious foreshadowing that no single person could kill Trillion alone, but instead you have to send people to their deaths one-by-one, with each chipping away a fraction of the immense health pool. (Also you can't all attack at once because you need some fancy ring to even stand a change against it, and any other plot holes are also quite conveniently, although not very elaborately, patched up.)
So, up to that point, stuff looked pretty good. I liked the combat mechanics, the overall idea of the game. The setting was pretty cool with each of the combatants being titled and personalized after one of the seven sins (with you being Wrath, although now already out of the fight), and it was supposed to create this sad and desperate atmosphere as the other six were all either your family members or close friends (and cute girls, because of course they were)... and you were sending them to their deaths. But sadly, this game failed to deliver on what it seemed to promise at this early stage of it.
I'll go through my own experiences of what the game was like mostly chronologically. This will focus mainly on the gameplay aspect, and a bit on the story. The audiovisual side was about average for a Japanese game, except for the magic casting bits in cutscenes. I could literally not find a more ear-piercingly painful sound if I tried. Also, keep in mind that I'm probably a lot better at strategy games than the average person, so the average person would probably have had a more difficult (and thus an arguably better) experience.
So, I select the first of my dear friends to head to
death battle against Trillion. Except Trillion likes to take month-or-so-long naps inbetween its gluttonous rampages, so I have that time to train my cute little
sacrifice combatant who fights with an oversized lollipop. This part has a bunch of menus for various things such as training, point allocation, skill unlocking, resting, shops, etc. The tutorials were scant (but luckily not completely absent), and I was left mostly guessing as to what might be the optimal approach to spend the limited amount of time I had to train. This is definitely a part where people can and probably will choose a suboptimal approach, which makes the game much more difficult. (Un?)luckily, my intuition went for a pretty solid allocation of both my time and the points I got from training. Now, in hindsight, the game was pretty poorly balanced and most of the options I had been given were useless. But I can't particularly hold this against the game, as that felt like a part of it. You're fighting this mysterious all-powerful enemy, of course you don't know what the optimal way to approach it is. There
was a weekly practice session against a training dummy that imitated Trillion's moves and allowed you to gain a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't. I found out a relative safe spot near the tail that would allow me to constantly keep attacking, dishing out great DPS with little risk. But I would later discover that that practice was the most terrible deception of them all. Namely, it's health pool was tiny. Why was that a bad thing?
Well, let us fast forward to the first real fight against Trillion. I went in quite motivated and exited, perhaps even planning to bring it down in one go. After all, I had managed to find a safe spot where I was nearly untouchable, as I had never been hit even once during practice. "Just like we did in training," I even whispered to myself. But alas, my enjoyment was not fated to continue. It turns out that the real Trillion had a mechanic against just this. Inflict too much damage on it, and it leaps forward. Forward where? Towards the weird glowing line that for some reason was synonymous with me losing. Probably there for that exact reason that you wouldn't just finish the game in one go if their balance wasn't faring too well against you. And so, try as I might, it inevitably crossed that line.
At that point, all my hope for this game was swept away. Imagine my frustration. My perfect plans, ruined. The story, ruined. What is this? An all-powerful force running from a little girl who was supposed to not stand the slightest chance. And worst of all, the game dared say that I
lost? Still, that only counted as a defeat, not an outright death, so I had two tries remaining, but with a shortened training period. And this changed everything. Where initially I thought I had all the time in the world, as long as I managed to stay alive, I now forsook everything else and funneled all my points towards DPS and speed. And that was, as I later learned, indeed the most optimal build (with a few extras, which I won't delve into). But what that also meant was that about 90% of the skills and training possibilities were pointless. All this variety and complexity, reduced to a shallow grind. I honestly considered quitting right then. But I didn't. And I also didn't have enough training time to get enough offense. There was no way I could bring it down with the last two tries I had remaining, but losing altogether seemed out of the question as well.
So, skipping forward another fight which it escaped, I was now on my last try, and it had lost around 250 billion HP. But after losing another 50 billion the fight suddenly stopped. "I won?" And indeed, it cut the fight, Trillion went to sleep, and I still had my last try left. But what was most to my surprise was that it changed its form. And while I'm not sure why I hadn't quit already, this sparked my curiosity again. A short training period later (with no practice match this time), I went to battle again. But I knew nothing about this new form, and I couldn't even begin to predict that it had two new body parts which had a non-telegraphed attack if you went right next to them. Which I did. And it proved fatal. But this reset the sleep timer back to the long one and most of the exp I had spent on my little lollipop warrior also carried over to the next person. But this time I could allocate it correctly. This time I could make the perfect build.
And so I did. And the training was back too, allowing me to figure out the optimal way to beat
this form. It was a little tougher, as it really had no safe spots and made my prioritize mobility and range a tad more, but overall, compared to the first learning curve, this was easy to overcome. And so, came the time face Trillion again, I was prepared. I finished it in one go, all remaining 350 billion health of this form, but of course there was the next one with the final third of its health pool. I was prepared to lose this lady as well, considering I couldn't go for a practice round, but with how well she was trained, I was at least expecting to give Trillion a run for its money. Well, turns out that even in the future I couldn't do any practice rounds against this form. And this form... was bullshit.
I go for a slow and steady approach, to conserve the mana I have left, but Trillion has other plans. Bam! Huge-ass AoE straight on you, ready to strike the very next turn. It takes my longest range dash to escape it, but I'm immediately showered with more. For every turn I am free to approach it, I have to spend three dodging backwards, and my mana reserves are low from the previous form. It's worth noting at this point that there is a stat in this game called speed, which is supposed to be your action speed. It really puzzled me at first, as this is a turn-based game, and nobody ever gets two turns in a row, nor does it affect your movement speed. But I figured out that what this does is make Trillion do attacks less often and have a longer delay before an attack hits, to simulate you being faster. And this turned out to be the most important stat of the game. Another very important thing was a passive ability that cleaved your starting stats in half, but gave you 2-4% of your stats back each turn. That was pretty much the only way to reach 999 on the stats, and an absolute must-have. Now, I had about 400 speed in the situation described above, and even as my speed approached 999, Trillions attacks were still lightning fast and executed often. I had enough mana to figure out its attack patterns, but there was no way I could get close enough to attack
and have time to get out. So I spent the last of my mana getting close, getting two attacks in, and that was that.
I was beaten. This fight was literally impossible, and I couldn't even train against it, not that it would have mattered - I had already seen all its attacks. In even further hindsight, possibly not such a great idea, but I resorted to a guide that basically told me I just had to seal its torso. See, each of the girls gets a death skill - one final attack to execute before they die. One of the options was to seal a body part, preventing all attacks from it. And it just so happened that the torso was responsible for the two worst attacks it had. Stumbling upon this myself would have been very rare, and yet it turned the completely bullshit fight into something of about equivalent difficulty with the second form.
And that's about the end of the story. For whatever weird reason, I only had one try against this form, instead of the usual three, and it, too, was adamant about rushing forward. Training the third girl didn't go optimally, (praise RNG) and they weren't able to finish Trillion in time, so I lost them too, finally securing victory with the fourth one. But I wasn't satisfied. It felt like the game had cheated and completely strayed from the path it promised. While looking for the guide, I had also caught wind of a so-called "true end", which got me curious. Sure, they had a bunch of events with each of the girls, and I still had two remaining. The true end wasn't the same as game-over either, meaning I couldn't lose all of them? So how could I reach that? With no desire to play this horrible grind any longer I resorted to quickly skimming the playthroughs and endings. For 4 hours. Yes, 4 hours to "quickly skim" the visual novel side of this game which, as it turned out, I had barely seen. and that's when I realized that this wasn't a mediocre/kind-of-bad-and-grindy strategy game, it was just a terrible visual novel. But before I explain that, let me quickly recap the gameplay.
After a promising start filled with much uncertainty as you navigate the poorly documented training menus, you quickly realize 90% of what you see is useless, everything's a terrible grind, the game is badly balanced, and nothing fits with the story as you overpower the bosses while they run away from you.
"What, you were actually
playing Trillion? No, no, that is all wrong dear lad, this is a visual novel through and through, as I can easily prove by simply explaining to you the requirements to reach the true end." See, I'd expect most people would win the game at one point or another even if they just mindlessly went with it, at the worst case scenario picking the "Final Blow" death skill, which deals a good 50-100 billion damage. You actually have 9 character to fight with instead of 6, so unless you're really bad at this, you
will win. That triggers the specific ending for that character, which is usually some romantic plot as 8 of the 9 characters are female, and only 4 are your blood relatives. (Not that it would stop the romantic plot... Thanks Japan.) But still, that's not the fabled "True End". You can basically reach the true end by acquiring a boatload of "affection" points with each of the 8 girls (and 1 dog), and having Trillion on its third form by the time they all die. (Remember, the first two were relatively easy.) However, the way you get affection is by "interacting" with the characters during training. Basically this consumes a day of training and gives you a nice cutscene with that character and a bunch of story. That's right, you skip training to play with your damned waifus, and that's the "correct" way to play this game. Let that sink in. You are
not allowed to beat the game. You are
not allowed to spend your training time actually training. Just go through the 20-30 hours of visual novel instead, lose miserably, and through the magic of I don't even know what, you gain supreme power, one-shot Trillion, all your waifus resurrect, you no longer owe your soul, and everyone lives happily ever after.
And
that is why I hate
Trillion: God of Destruction.
