Triangle Strategy is Square Enix producer Tomoya Asano’s newest game, and it’s already attracting a lot of attention. Aside from its style and story, it’s also captivating due to its strange name. Asano’s previous releases have also had some odd titles, like Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler, so it’s no surprise that Triangle Strategy follows in those footsteps. However, it has left a lot of fans wondering what the reasoning behind these names is and whether they mean anything at all.
In an interview with The Verge, Asano mentioned that his name convention is a balance between making the games sound unique without being so bizarre that they alienate the audience. However, there are a couple of other reasons for Triangle Strategy‘s name. He wanted to make the game’s contents obvious just from reading the title, and he definitely succeeded. As the title suggests, it’s a strategy game. However, the reasoning behind the name goes a little deeper than that.
One explanation for Asano’s naming conventions is to attract attention to his projects. Many games do this through art style, narrative, or unique mechanics, and while Triangle Strategy is innovative in all of these, especially its retro HD-2D style, it also makes good use of its name. There are tens of thousands of games available at any given time, and the name of a game is the first impression it leaves on its audience, so making an impactful name that stands out from the crowd is a useful tool for commercial success.
In the same interview, Asano said he asks, “native English speakers about the new titles, and they usually tell [him]: ‘It’s obvious that a Japanese person named this game.'” By having an obviously Japanese name, it attracts attention. On a similar note, having two seemingly unrelated words also helps to generate hype. Whether the name is cool or just plain weird, as long as it attracts interest, it’s achieved its goal.
Asano mentioned that he likes for both words in a name to balance well. His past titles like Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default both have words in the names that mesh well together, with them having the same number of letters and a close balance of consonants and vowels. He says it takes “one to two months of looking through English terms to decide what to use,” so there’s definitely a lot of thought that goes into the aesthetic and aural side of his games’ names.
In a similar vein, odd titles are an integral part of Asano’s branding at this point. Alongside the obvious similarities, each has two words that don’t really fit together but make for an interesting title. Because of this, it’s easy to see that the titles are all made by the same developer. It also places them into their own little bubble of games as a sort of faux series. Despite not existing within the same universe, they do share some unique qualities, and their names help place them together in this way. This helps to set Triangle Strategy apart from the many other high-profile games coming out in 2022.
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