I was on the fence about this one, but amazon prime's 20% off and Ashmedia's character design made me click pre-order. I am a sucker.



And I came away satisfied.



75 hours so far, I feel I kind of got lucky in that I played this game the almost ideal way.



30 hours in I beat Trillion on my last overlord on my last move by the slightest of margins and got the base ending. Played in a casual fashion, completely unaware of the tricks to become overpowered, I experienced the full spectrum of grim emotions as it felt like I trudged to my certain doom, only to spartan out a bitter victory. Had I read the boards or a guide at the get-go, I probably would have beat the game on the first overlord and missed 90% of the story and 99% of the emotional experience.



45 hours of new game plus has gotten me 5 other endings, and a mastery of the game, but now it's so easy diminishing returns is really setting in. A traditional SRPG this is not. I'm not going to get out of this 300 hours like Advance Wars, or 450 hours like Person 4 Golden. A visual novel this is not. A JRPG this is not. They frankensteined a bunch of japanese genres together into a kind of addiction candy, and it went down smooth.



Person 3 Portable, on easy, is the closest this feels a kinship to. Story and leveling, rough and tumble. I guess it comes down to the characters.



Ashmedia, The Poster Girl, Mammon, and Levia are the only characters I love. Faust is somewhat curious. Cerberus was amusing. The other 21 characters are either mostly uninteresting or so annoying I gotta skip your dialogue. Maybe had they super fanserviced the rest of the character designs I would have been able to tolerate them on an aesthetic level, but in the end it isn't a deal breaker. It just felt like padding. This is probably the biggest reason why I'm feeling 4 stars instead of 5, but I don't regret my playtime or anything. Not every game can go all-in like Senran Kagura Estival Versus. In my time well spent, Ashmedia's hot springs event and Levia's ending are what I look back on as the highlights of the plot.



The game doesn't have a clock keeping track of the hours played, so I had to keep track on a scrappy piece of paper. Not the way I like to do it.



The free DLC to nep-nep the underworld I actually regret installing, as it kind of took me out of the experience, but at least I didn't install it until new game plus so it didn't ruin my first playthrough or anything. It kind of turned it into an episode of Dr. Who, which, for me, is not a compliment.



7 times the game froze or crashed, so save often, just in case.



Overall, I really got hooked on this and just plowed through it. I appreciate that the game design was a little off the beaten path.



In the end, I put about as much time into Trillion as I put into Hyperdevotion Noire.



Nothing wrong with a 4-star somewhat iffy game.