Trillion: God of Destruction

March 28, 2016 /

A while back I came to the realization that I really don’t like rogue-likes or dungeon crawlers. Then a few days ago, Idea Factory sent me a review copy of Trillion. Trillion is a game where you must kill a boss with a trillion hit points. There is a lot of Disgaea-like story within, but that last statement pretty much sums up the game’s premise. You are the Great Overlord of some netherworld who rules over the other overlords. Some giant creature comes through a gate and kills everyone by the thousands, devouring everything in sight. Your brother asks if he can go destroy this threat once and for all, but in the blink of an eye, he and all of his armies are destroyed. Not one to take the death of his brother lightly, Zeabolos sets out to kill this monster himself and winds up a stain on the ground himself. Lucky for him, a girl named Faust offered him revenge in exchange for his soul. Not having much choice, Zeabolos agrees, but to his dismay is a weak and mostly helpless zombie. Faust comes through with her end of the bargain by trapping his power in a ring that the other overlords can wear in their fight against Trillion.

Trillion is a god of destruction, but I guess he gets the itis after snacking on whole cities as he slumbers for months on end. During this time, you can choose one of your six remaining overlords to train in earnest. After each “cycle”, you must fight Faust’s dummy Mokujin who mimics a much weaker version of Trillion to help you better prepare for the actual fight against the massive monster.

So you’ve got this monster who has a trillion hp. How are you ever going to destroy such a thing? Well, let’s be honest here; you’re an overlord. As an overlord, you are already a boss in your own right and you don’t do the classic JRPG numbers in damage. I think that before I did any leveling up, I was hitting for something like 50,000 damage. After my first real fight with Trillion, my damage was closer to 200,000 with each blow. The thing is, you really can’t take too many hits early on. You start off with very few affection points. These are your saving grace as you can use them both as HP and as MP for spells. You gain these by building affection with your followers and from training. Every time you defeat Mokujin, you get a big chunk, and whenever you take the time to stop training to talk to your minions, you also get a nice boost. These points are permanent and refill after each battle, but once they run out in a battle, you can no longer retreat.

Speaking of retreating, when you retreat from a battle against either Mokujin or Trillion, you will still get some experience and affection. If fighting Mokujin, you just move on to the next day, but if you escape from Trillion, he will devour some of the netherworld before taking a nap. Each time you retreat, he will sleep for a shorter period. He advances less when you deal more damage to him, so try to make the most of your battles with him.

I mentioned at the start of this review something about roguelikes. That’s because Trillion is something like a roguelike. See, whenever you move, the enemy moves in the same manner as other roguelikes. Due to the speed stat, you can actually take more than one turn before the enemies get to take theirs. This is key in defeating Trillion as well. You want to be able to attack him as many times as possible before he gets to attack you because you really can’t survive more than one or two hits from him. He’s a brute for sure. As you build your affection points and defenses, you’ll be able to take more hits, but early on, speed seems to be the stat to boost the most.

Ah, boosting stats…It seems that, aside from killing a big boss with a trillion hit points, this game is less an RPG or Roguelike and more a character building game. If you’re trying to beat the game on your first try, you’ll need a guide to do so, but I don’t recommend that. What I do recommend is turning off the animations for the training exercises to save yourself a good deal of time. I watched them a few times to see them, but ultimately turned them off completely. Doing this also speeds up other things like the day to night cycle. Training, building, and learning your skills is the main way you get better in the game. Each time you train, a day passes. There are only so many days in a cycle and only so many cycles before Trillion wakes up, so you have to bide your time and train efficiently in order to be strong enough to fight the big bad at the castle gates.

Unfortunately, you’ll probably lose some of your overlords in the process. While it’s sand (and brutal) to see them die, whenever they do, their power gets absorbed by the same ring that holds Zeabolos’ power. In addition to that, they are capable of dealing a final blow to Trillion, incapacitating one or more of his attacks by disabling a part of him. Any damage you’ve done to him caries over, slowly whittling down his enormous life bar in the process.

I would not mind seeing games like this show up on mobile platforms. Because of the bite-sized nature of the character building and mini dungeons, the game lends itself perfectly to portables. Slap an energy system and a free to play market on this game, and people would eat it right up. I just wish you were given more chances to go dungeon-crawling enough. Those little loot-finding adventures are a big change of pace as well as your main source of loot.

I just realized that I’ve talked about leveling up your characters through training, and I’ve mentioned the dungeon missions, but I haven’t really explained how you level up your characters. It’s actually less complicated than you might think. Most of the game consists of you looking at a screen that displays how many cycles and days are left before Trillion wakes and your fatigue in the upper left, your affection level in the upper right, and a picture menue at the bottom. In the center, artwork of your current overlord is displayed. The first option you have is to train in any of the following categories: Fury Impact, Concentration, Infinite Imbuing, Flame Dodge, Asura Training, and Blade Dance. Each one of these corresponds to a different stat. Next, you have the option to rest. Sleeping restores your fatigue while interacting will build your affection. You can also order your minions to help you with money and spend special tokens on an egg machine thingy which grants you prizes that you can gift to your overlords. Your next option is to venture to the Valley of Swords where you go explore mini-dungeons to obtain new gear and a load of XP to all of your stats. It costs training medals that you get from doing excellent or great in the first option. This shit seems random as can be, so don’t sweat it too much. If your fatigue is high, you’ll have a lower chance to obtain them though. Make sure to rest regularly! Beyond those options, you have Stat Increase where you trade in points in skills for battle attributes and active skills, Research Lab where you can buy potions and stuff from Faust, and the Blacksmith where you can enhance your weapons.

It’s pretty straight forward in its design, and for some, that may be a turnoff. I kind of like it. The game is fast-paced, and you progress swiftly. It’s quite satisfying to see your overlords deal 450,000 damage per hit. Another thing that is a bit off-putting is that the random events seem to be few and repeat themselves. In the beginning of my game, I ran into the maid cleaning up, eating snacks on the job 3 times in a row. That’s absurd! There should either be more of these or at least some kind of programming in place to keep the player from running into the same one twice in a row, let alone three times.

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