Trinity is an odd duck, not quite a third person slash em up, not quite a role playing game and not quite a party based game, but a mix of the three with a definite Japanese style. Despite it’s visual links to other titles from developer Koei Tecmo, such as Dynasty Warriors and Bladestorm, the game feels, at a primal level, more like the old Dungeons and Dragons styled RPG’s of the gold age of PC gaming.

While the nostalgic RPG elements are enjoyable, Trinity has a nasty habit of getting a bit too stuck in the past in other ways.

The over arching plot is pretty standard manga inspired fantasy fare. A prophecy kicks of events that the king of Vyashion, a grumpy infanticidal type named Balor, will be killed by one of his grand kids. Naturally he sends his forces out to butcher all his kids and grandkids. One of these kids, your character, escapes and grows up to become a gladiator, training for the day he can take revenge on his grandpa for missed birthdays and/or killing his parents.

Hot female rogue character with impractical armour stereotype reporting for questing sir

The game opens with one of gaming’s best known cardinal sins; showing you the ending and giving you access to the powers and abilities you’ll have in that ending. The screen goes black at the penultimate moment before an ‘earlier’ prompt appears on screen. This technique has worked in a few games, titles like Darksiders or Prototype, where the games are all about the powers and abilities you'll spend the rest of the game aspiring too, but it starts Trinity of with a whimper rather than a shout.

Your main character Areus is a stoic hero, often answering text based conversations with a dramatic ‘………’. He wields a sword and can cast up to five spells, although you start with one. Not long into the game you meet a burly and overly jolly tank character, followed by a mysterious vampire girl who plays as your rogue type character. Despite the fact you can switch between these characters any time you like with a button press you’ll quickly adapt to using Areus as your main fighter unless a special situation calls for it, ie. The Tank character punching a wall down or rogue character jumping to a hard to reach location.

There's plenty of classic fantasy style monsters in the game, it looks like someone just flipped to pages in a D&D Bestiary and picked cool monsters at random

The plot skirts close to being interesting a few times; mysteries crop up about the three characters pasts. But the plot never steps above 80’s cartoon fantasy fare level and the characters never step above their cookie cutter roles. Too much of the game is carried out through a snore inducing text exchanges with the odd cut scene at certain points for no discernable reason. There’s a bit of mumbling here and there about racial issues between elves, humans, half elves and vampires (its odd but vampires are counted alongside elves and dwarves as a staple of western styled fantasy games in Japan) but it never gets any where.

The best element of Trinity is undoubtedly the old school RPG structure. You visit adventurer guilds, taverns or shops in each town to collect quests and jobs and then journey to a previously visited area or unlock a new area to complete that quest and gain experience, cash and items. Quests are marked by a level of difficulty with storyline progressing quests clearly marked. The structure works well and does a reasonable job of staving of the monotony of visiting the same areas over and over again. At least for a time.

Big flashy attacks can be broken out when enemies get a bit over whelming

When I said before that you ‘visit adventurer guilds’ in villages I might have been overstating things a little teeny bit. The game world actually consists of a map dotted with adventure locations where you go to fight monsters and complete quests and villages to get quest rewards and follow the story. The villages are basically made up of a bunch of menus. While the old school questing and adventure system is enjoyable, the novelty of old school menu based villages wears of pretty quick and leaves the experience feeling a little cheap. We RPG fans take for granted how great we have it with titles like Fallout 3 and Dragon Age and forget the old days of Bards Tale when entire adventures were carried out with menus. Trinity seems to try and keep a foot in both camps, the traditional quest RPG game and the modern visually flashy hack and slash game but ends up hopping back and forth to make a real impact.

Expect a lot of the game to look like this

Graphically the game is a little subpar. It could easily be mistaken for a PS2 title with quick loading times and a few overly pretty magic animations. The character models themselves look blocky and move stiffly. Worst of all is an annoying grain to the action screens. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate move to give the game a washed out, water colour style appearance; but the end result for me was a series of painful migraines. It’s odd that a game should fall down so badly visually when Tecmo and Koei have such a good reputation for games with visual flare. Tecmo’s DOA and Ninja Gaiden games are never short of utterly gorgeous and Koei seem to magically fill a screen with hundreds of highly detailed enemies at once in their war games with zero slow down. Trinity isn’t outstanding visually in terms of quality or quantity.

Ah the complicated character menu, both the bane and love of any RPG fan

Trinity isn’t a broken or bad game. It’s a game with some great core ideas and enjoyable basic structure let down by an overall feeling of being just far too dated. For old hand role playing game enthusiasts it offers some enjoyment as far as levelling, questing and looting goes, all those corner stone RPG elements are there right down to elemental stats for weapons. But it’s hard to shake the impression you are playing a game you should been playing, and probably would have enjoyed a hell of a lot more, during the last hardware generation. As things stand there’s other titles that offer the same experience grind with better looks and more style.

Run from the tiny green men, they have sticks with splinters