Trillion: God of Destruction for PS Vita

Don’t be fooled by appearances: Trillion: God of Destruction may look like your typical dungeon-crawler or run-of-the-mill JRPG, but the reality is actually far different. While the entire game is centred around a boss battle — against the titular Trillion, who is, as the rest of the title implies, the God of Destruction — the actual gameplay is all about what leads up to that boss battle.

In other words, training, and lots of it. After all, Trillion isn’t just the antagonist’s name, it’s also how high his health bar goes. This means that you’ll have to devote a whole lot of time to building up your characters’ attributes, and preparing them for battle against this improbably tough foe.

However, there are two major things to be aware of here. First — and this isn’t a spoiler, since it’s laid out pretty plainly in the neverending dialogue — you fail on your first go against Trillion. And most likely your second, and third, and probably fourth, and so on to your seventh try. The twist is that with each failure, you aren’t just losing an attempt, you’re also losing a party member, who gets killed by Trillion in their attempt to take him out. As stakes go, that’s relatively heady stuff, especially since the game makes an effort to give each of the murdered characters personalities. Admittedly, most of these personalities are straight out of JRPG central casting, and it seems like a pretty blatant attempt by the game at pandering to that whole “waifu” weirdness, but still: Trillion should be applauded for giving your actions weight and putting something at stake.

The second thing of which you need to be aware is that you don’t really do much of the training. Yes, it’s the core focus of the game, but in general you’re just picking one of several options, and then seeing the end result as your chosen character’s attributes rise. In this respect, Trillion probably has more in common with a management sim than anything else, since it’s more about managing resources effectively and efficiently than it is about putting your heroines through their paces.

Somewhat surprisingly, this means that the actual combat part of Trillion doesn’t amount to very much. You certainly get to take a few stabs at defeating the boss, plus you get a few dry runs against a practice boss, but that’s about the extent of it. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you: the combat is by far the worst thing about the game. Moving your character around the battlefield is a chore, and considering you regularly inflict your enemies with hits that are worth millions of points, your attacks all feel pretty insubstantial. For a game that is essentially one big boss fight, the actual fighting is kind of an afterthought.

Not that I’m complaining about that. Trillion is much more interesting as a resource management sim than it would’ve been as a generic JRPG. There’s a lot of the latter, but as far as I know, this is the only one of the former out there. The end result is certainly a little talk-heavy at times, and your mileage may vary as far as the characters go, but if you’re looking for something out of the ordinary, Trillion: God of Destruction definitely fits that bill.