by: David (@friendshipguy_)

• Trillion: God of Destruction
• Developer - Idea Factory, Compile Heart, Preapp Partners
• Publisher - Idea Factory
• PC/Steam
• Rating - T

Strategy role playing games aren’t my natural forte; I lend my skills to twitchier, action oriented games which Trillion: God of Destruction is most certainly not. My only experience with sRPG’s to date are the Fire Emblem series which I’m not innocent from save scumming, and watching a few friends mill through Final Fantasy Tactics on a whim. Compile Heart takes some bold steps with their title, and throwing in rudimentary visual novel dialogue here and there certainly makes for a compelling mix of genres, but there’s a lot that is left to be desired with Trillion that asked me if I was really being rewarded for my efforts, and if the unique concepts they threw in really made up for it.

Trillion: God of Destruction is about the titular character Trillion, the god of destruction. The basic comprise is this: Trillion has arisen to consume the underworld and its core, leaving Zeabolos – the current reigning leader of Hell – and his fellow overlords to fight back to keep their kingdom from its untimely end. Really, it’s up to the Overlords who represent six of the seven deadly sins personified as adorable girls, for Zeabolos himself attempted to destroy the Trillion by his lonesome only to leave him a stitched together mess thanks to a mysterious girl named Faust. 

Gameplay consists of two phases: training, and interactions. Training occurs across a week, meaning players are given seven days of time to train, interact, or rest in an attempt to strengthen their chosen overlord in Zeabolos place. Every seven days, or a week, completes a cycle, and players are usually given about five to six cycles depending on their choices in game. Interactions are about as numerous as your days and consist of the player acting as Zeabolos cavorting with the current overlord in training. Training consists of nothing more than going to a menu, and picking one of the six (or seven after a particular story point) training “routines” that nets you a set amount of experiences points depending on your fatigue. These often lead to a set interaction immediately after a training session. 

Interactions take the form of visual novel sequences with some dating sim choices intermingled here and there – the official Trillion: God of Destruction webpage lists some of the characters as childhood friends to Zeabolos while others call him uncle in game, we’ll leave it to your discretion if this is, uh, ethical. It’s a shame though, because after the first few chapters, or deaths, most of the visual novel sequences are just repeats to net you more experience towards stats. Really, it’s only in the large dialogue portions between chapters to push the story forward, or what one can make of a story.

That’s the loop, nothing more than training and interacting until it culminates into a face off against Trillion itself, or a dummy run which is a sort of benchmark for your overlord to see if you can stand the impending face off. There’s a dungeon you can run that requires credits that you receive from training, which ultimately nets you more experience and better equipment for doing so, but the difficulty curve is less an actual curve and more of a cliff, often resulting in one shots from enemies you’ve never faced, nor never knew had status effects. That being said, everything is laid out for you from the get go; not one overlord plays different from the other, and there’s not level or barrier to get the skills that might seem appealing to one of two playstyles – melee, or ranged. Fights against Trillion are nothing more than one on one face offs, attempting to dodge attacks that are set to a timer through any means necessary to get into range to dole out damage. 

Speaking of damage, every number in the game is absurdly large. Trillion, true to its name, has a trillion hit points that needs to be whittled down bit by bit with damage numbers often rating in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. I thought the moniker of Trillion was going to be a euphemism, but really it seems like the name is just there to put a value on its head. Often times these numbers are convoluted because the overlord’s health is something along the lines of 100K, and damage numbers are seen in the same way meaning that if an overlord is about to get hit, and damage is unavoidable, quick math is required or you’re going to be left trying to figure out if your overlord is going to survive an attack or not, resulting in save scumming if there’s a particular overlord you either want to save for the ending, or if you don’t want to waste any effort put into training her up.

Waste and excess is something Trillion certainly gets right. Over a fourteen hour play period, battles were nothing more than short, five minute affairs that usually resulted in retrying a strategy, or reallocating points. I played through it twice; the first was a traditional playthrough, and the second was trying a few speed run techniques, both of which left me grinding a lot of time away. Grinding is something I’m used to, I used to play a plethora of Korean MMOs in middle school that were basically exclusively grinding – I’m looking at you, Maplestory and Ragnarok. I can see Trillion as something I’d play on the commute to work or to school whilst listening podcasts or listening to music, which consequently is something I ended up doing except on my PC. Menus make up probably 60% of the game, with the remainder lending itself almost exclusively to dialogue and less so to actual gameplay. I played the Steam version of the game which is a port of the PSVita version of the game, though a dual monitor set up let me slide back and forth between podcasts or videos as I grinded experience points. In this, Trillion is essentially an RNG simulator where instead of battling and getting experience points, traditional battles are mitigated for just pressing a button and receiving a rating and getting the experience tied to said rating.

Is Trillion bad? Not necessarily. Compile Heart lends itself to being a jack of all trades, and not necessarily a master of anything. I had a bunch of fun reading the dialogue and listening the voiceovers while it was fresh, but it got old pretty quick because of the repetitive nature of each interaction. That being said, there’s a lot of entertainment in the item descriptions, like the one for skinny jeans. The music is also pretty top notch, though listening to it on repeat was what had me reaching for a podcast or something more enjoyable to listen to in the meantime. Trillion is a game full of interesting ideas that needed a little bit more time in the workshop to finetune exactly how it worked, and maybe an extra dash of strategy to really make it something worth developing an actual strategy. Right now, Trillion is nothing more than playing hopscotch up to a piñata, with not a whole lot of candy billowing out after whacking it hard enough.