Hey you! Yeah, you over there! Have you heard the news? Trillion has appeared and wants to devour the Underworld! Thankfully, there are Overlords who are willing to risk their lives to defeat it in Trillion: God of Destruction.
Trillion: God of Destruction is a new strategy RPG for the Vita. You’ll take control of various Overlords who need to train up (one at a time) to defeat the threat of Trillion who is threatening to devour the Underworld. When each Overlord dies, the next one will step up to the plate. This trend will continue until either Trillion dies or you run out of Overlords. Prepare yourself for a lot of training… and I mean a lot of training.
The main focuses of Trillion are training up your Overlord, interacting with them (and the other residents of the castle), and facing off with Trillion himself. The majority of your time will be spent in the interactions parts, although the training does come in as a close second. This will lead to a lot of downtime from regular “gameplay”, and also leads to a lot of repetition. You’ll see a lot of the same scenes over and over again, though there are some rare scenes that do sometimes come up.
The amount of downtime in Trillion ends up being one of the major drawbacks to the game. Each time you start up with a new Overlord, you’re back to square one with your upgrades. Any inventory items and unused money will come with you, but you’ll only maintain 10% of the earned experience that your previous Overlord had. Any work you put into upgrading their weapons is lost, as are any items they were carrying with them. Considering one of the better ways to get money will take away one of your training days, money can often be hard to come across. Weapon upgrades are fairly valuable to get though (and can be the difference between doing 5 billion total damage and 150+ billion damage), so you will need to find a good balance in how you handle your days.
At the end of each week you will be able to face Mokujin, the training dummy created by the mysterious Faust to help you practice. Mokujin is great and all, but it does come with some drawbacks. Mokujin will not take into account any sealed parts Trillion might have, nor can you make use of him when you’re on the final form. Mokujin is a pretty good source of experience however, so try and do your best in taking him out whenever you do face him. Each time you defeat Mokujin, he will gain an additional 500 million HP. By the time I had made it to the final form, my Mokujin was only around 12 or 13 billion health (and I was dealing 4 billion or so each hit), so he never lasted long enough for me to really practice against.
The other decent source of experience comes from the Valley of Swords, a randomly generated map that you can only access if you have 5 Training Medals. Training Medals are obtained by obtaining either a Good or an Excellent during the Training Mode. Within the Valley of Swords, you will need to traverse through the area, defeating enemies and finding treasure chests, until you make it to the exit. You only have 120 turns to get there though, so you’ll need to make each move count (depending on the size of the map). The Valley of Swords can really help you pull in some extra valuable money, as well as help you pick up useful usable items and equipment. The best part about this mode? It doesn’t use up a day of training, so you can just spam it to death right before Trillion is about to wake up!
The gameplay of Trillion (when you actually get to it) is very much based in strategy games. Your movement is set to a grid, allowing you to move one of 8 directions. There’s a pretty easy method you can use to get even more movement out of your time on the maps as well. Some of the moves you can learn will let you move your character ahead a few spaces. Another one of the skills you can learn increases your attack for each turn you’ve taken without moving and well… the skills that move your character forward don’t actually count as moving. This makes it very easy to make it up to Trillion with a high increase on this ability that will only keep going up until it caps out at 200% or you accidentally move. I’m pretty sure the only reason I managed to actually beat this game was because of this, so yes, it is definitely very useful.
As for Trillion himself, you’ll need to do a lot of pattern learning to figure out how to best deal with each of his phases and parts. Of course, should one of your Overlords die, one of the Death Skill options you can choose is to seal one of Trillion’s parts. This can help you remove an annoying ability (such as the last phase’s spreading floor poison ability), and definitely became key for my ultimate victory. All damage you do to Trillion is cumulative as well, so whatever damage you did with a previous Overlord (or just a previous attempt) will carry on into the next battle against him. Once you either run away, die, or finish off a phase, Trillion will go back to sleep (with the previous two resulting in him destroying more of the Underworld) for a certain period of time. This period of time will become shorter for each time you run, and will also be shorter should you finish off a phase. If you die, however, the period of time is extended so as to give you more time to train up for your next battle against him.
The music is close to what one would expect to have heard in a Disgaea game, with several of the track being quite good (especially the Trillion tracks). Once you complete the game and return in New Game+, the music player will unlock, allowing you hear any track you want at any time. As for the voice acting, players have the ability to choose between English and Japanese. I didn’t actually mind the English voices, though boy did just hearing any voice get annoying when you were doing repetitive things (IE: selling items, using the same move). Graphics will also be quite familiar to Disgaea fans, with it becoming very clear where a lot of the team that worked on this game have roots in. While some designs are so close you could swear they WERE pulled right out of Disgaea, others definitely have a more unique feel to them. With that said, I did like the graphical design of Trillion.
Overall I have very mixed feelings about Trillion: God of Destruction. The combat is nice and strategic, and I really did enjoy putting all this work into training… the first Overlord. Once I lost the first Overlord, I lost all the upgrades I had put into her weapon, and had to restart from square one. The cutscenes can start to drive you mad since there are some you’ll see a lot with just a few lines changed for each different Overlord. The combat is fairly fun, although some of Trillion’s moves can frustrate you horrible (if I ever have to see a poison floor or get knocked back again, I will cry). If you don’t mind the repetitive nature of the game and are into strategy games then give this one a look. If having to restart any work you did on weapons and needing to build up your stats all over again each time an Overlord dies isn’t something that sounds enjoyable to you, give this a pass. I had high hopes for Trillion as it did sound like it had a somewhat unique system, but a lot of the execution in it just fell short, and because of this I just can’t completely recommend it. I am planning to go back to work on the NG+ soon though – in fact, writing this is what has made me want to – so it does at least have a somewhat addicting element to it, even if it does get so repetitive.
Trillion: God of Destruction Review Score
3/5
I would like to note that the review build I played had a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. There was a day one patch put out that was supposed to address this though, so I can’t completely comment on how the spelling and grammar are in the end.
Trillion: God of Destruction is available now on PSN and Amazon for PlayStation Vita.
I would like to thank Idea Factory for providing me with a copy of the game for review purposes.
