Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll (PS3) Review - PAGE 1

If there's one thing Tecmo Koei and Omega Force are known for, it's the Dynasty Warriors series and all of the vaguely familiar clones. Omega Force steps out of that comfort zone to bring you a new action RPG titled Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll. For the first time ever an installment from the Zill O'll series is being offered outside of the Japanese market, much to the excitement of RPGers everywhere.

I may have said this in the past, but I think it's great Omega Force is trying new things outside of the Dynasty Warriors Universe. Albeit, Trinity is not going to win over gamers anytime soon. There is still a long ways to go before the Zill O'll series will be a winner in the States.

First off, the quests are really pretty mediocre. They are neither thought provoking nor challenging unless you attempt them a few levels below the suggested level for your characters. Even then, players can easily skew the challenge by relying on healing and recovery items. Such items are limited to only a handful at a time, however, players can easily skirt around these limitations by using the right tactics.

You are also going to have a hard time dealing with the constant nagging the game continuously throws at you. Is it really necessary to continuously warn players about the dangers of spending their coin wastefully, or leaving on a quest unprepared? It feels as if Trinity isn't targeting the core audience and babies the player too much when it is clearly unnecessary.

Your party consists of three characters. Areus is a swordsman who also can cast various magic spells. He happens to be half elf, and is chastised by both the human and elven race. Dagda is the human brute who excels in physical strength, but is weak to magic; Selene is the swift and nimble assassin, who also happens to be a misunderstood vampire. Players have the ability to instantly change characters during battle, giving them extreme flexibility during combat.

I definitely enjoy the party dynamics. Switching between characters allows you to quickly turn the tables of a battle in your favor by doing so to lob fast strikes and cause confusion. Larger enemies target only the player controlled character, opening themselves up to further exploitation. Using these tactics will cause the enemies to literally spin in circles trying to target and attack you without much success.

After you damage an enemy to a certain point, you have the option to perform a trinity attack. As you might have guessed, this is a powerful attack that utilizes all three characters. There isn't much beauty to it, and once you've done it a few times you get rather bored of the monotony that follows.

Characters in your party can also cast special buffs on you. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to cast any buffs on my party members, which would have been nice to do from time to time. I would have also loved to have been able to control the buffs coming my way, as there was one in particular from Selene I would have went into every battle with. 

If you think you're in for beautiful landscapes and sprawling deserts, you are wrong. All of your travels are performed by merely selecting the destination and waiting for the load to be finished. Once you do get to your destination, the dungeons are merely linear paths. While there are a few hidden paths, they are hardly worth the trouble. The worst part of the game is the fact there are so few destinations and you will see them multiple times as you go back time and again for various quests.

You will also get sick of fighting the same types of enemies over and over again. When you're done fighting them in the field, you can head into the arena to fight them some more. There are elite monsters that are hard to track down. As with most RPGs, they drop special loot that makes finding them worth while. Still, I found most enemies to be boring.
 

The cut scenes aren't bad looking, but the graphics during normal gameplay look more fitting for the PS2. There also seems to be some odd effect filter applied over the entire screen that makes it look like you're viewing the game through a burlap sack. It reminds me of an amateur Photoshop user trying to impress their friends with a new found effect and going overboard with it. The developers have dubbed it "tablo", and I have seen it described as an oil painting in motion. Personally, I dub it "annoying" and very distracting.

Every once in a while you will enter a town or a shop, and it will trigger a dialogue between NPCs. These conversations are usually about the most mundane topics you could imagine. Every once in a great while you may catch a fact that helps you to understand the lore of the land, or even move the story forward. Most of the time though, you will find it's just useless filler.

Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll suffers a bit from an identity crisis. It doesn't really know if it wants to be an RPG or a hack and slash button mashing adventure game. In the end, it isn't overly successful in either genre. Many gamers who enjoy RPGs will overlook the game because of the weak quests, while fans of adventure games will overlook it due to weak action elements and lack of locations.

No matter what side of the fence you are on though, Trinity is a game worth at least one play through. It may not completely satisfy your needs one way or the other, but you will get enough out of it to pass the time. To be fair, I hope Omega Force pursues their ventures into the RPG market and brings us more adventures in the Zill O'll series. With a little bit more polish on the quests and a lot more adventure added, they may indeed create a successful RPG recipe to add to their arsenal.