Trinity: Souls of Zill O’ll is an RPG where you play as Areus, a half-elf swordsman, as he gathers a party and ventures across the land of Vyashion to take down evil King Balor.
Wait, let me try that again. Trinity: Souls of Zill O’ll is an action-adventure title where players take the role of burly Dagda as he uses his bare hands and the environment around him to take on larger and larger bosses on the path to redemption.
Okay, I think I messed up. One more time. Trinity: Souls of Zill O’ll is a mission-based hack-and-slash game from Omega Force, the makers of the Dynasty Warriors games, starring the vampire assassin Selene taking down hordes of enemies and building up meters for super attacks.
Actually, all three of those are true.
In the game, you can switch between the three characters as they take on quests and find enemy weak spots. There are good times to use each one, and while most will find a favorite and stick to it in the early game, the developers did a good job of forcing players to use everyone. Need to bust through walls or take down armored foes? That’s what Dagda’s for. Need to get to high ledges or just get anywhere fast? Switch over to the speedy Selene. Areus’ elemental attacks are needed for taking down certain enemies.
As with most quest-based games, there are many hours of gameplay in Trinity. It can get a bit tedious at times, but the signature Omega Force combat system works much better in this context than it does in the Dynasty Warriors games. It makes much more sense to grind and search for better versions of items in a quest-based adventure than it does to replay historical battles to do the same thing. Focusing on three characters also works well, as the team made each have its own range of potential play styles.
Everything is presented in a visual style that hasn’t really been seen in games. The screen has some sort of filter on it to make everything have a texture that, while not hand-drawn like Valkyria Chronicles, feel somehow fantasy-based and foreign. The voice acting? It’s signature Koei, which means when people speak, the focus on making mouth movements line up means no one sounds natural. Luckily, this isn’t Heavy Rain, and the story is a means to giving you new quests, special items and bigger bosses to defeat.
You’ll spend a lot of your time buying and selling items, upgrading stats and abilities and talking to random people in taverns. All of this is menu-based, with action only taking place in certain zones. The game’s not immersive, and it doesn’t try to be. The process of honing your characters’ abilities and boosting the aspects you use most, though, is an engrossing task, and one worth experiencing.
Our biggest disappointment? It’s a squad-based game, and there’s no cooperative mode. Being able to have three players control all characters at once would have made things much more interesting.
Trinity scratches a very specific itch, and it does it about as well as anything on the market. If you’ve ever enjoyed an Omega Force game and don’t mind a little grinding in your RPGs, pick this up and say goodbye to a few dozen hours of your life.
