Project Triangle Strategy producer says tactical battles are a better fit for its mature story

Project Triangle Strategy producer Tomoya Asano  has offered some more insight into the choices that led to the new strategy RPG - and the choices its own developers made when playing it - in the wake of the demo when it dropped last month.

The interview with Asano was broadcast as part of the Game Live Japan event and translated by Nintendo Everything. Before Project Triangle Strategy, Asano led work on Square Enix's last "HD-2D" title, Octopath Traveler, and was a producer on the Bravely Default series. With all that traditional turn-based RPG experience, the interviewers asked why his latest project is a gridded tactics game.

"Developing Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default 2 gave me more exposure to narratives geared more towards adults and I began wondering if there was a more suitable game format for those stories than a stock-standard RPG," Asano explained. "That’s how we decided on a strategy RPG for this project."

Aside from following in the footsteps of classics like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, the other big point for Project Triangle Strategy is its emphasis on pivotal choices, and the way they affect and reflect each character's personal philosophy. The demo gives players one such weighty choice, and Asano shared the rough results of an internal team survey of how they resolved the situation. If you haven't played the demo yourself yet, beware of spoilers.

According to Asano, about 58 percent of the staff decided to protect Roland rather than handing him over, 29 percent played both paths, and only 8 percent made the shameful (though arguably most pragmatic) choice of giving him up to the enemy. Square Enix is also gathering feedback from players on which path they chose, so we'll have to wait and see where the masses landed on the grand scale.

Our own Heather argues that the Project Triangle Strategy demo is worth trying for anyone who loved Fire Emblem: Three Houses.