"It's things like that where I think it might be justified to call it a B+ game. I love it a lot, but there are some areas that Capcom could have polished if they wanted to."
That's exactly it. What was expected to be AAA simply got bumped down. B+ isn't bad, but everything isn't peachy. The game appears to have a healthy string of content to occupy players, and the online team play gives it an undeniable attraction. Rather than a big fish in a small pond, it's managed to be the only fish in a pond all to itself; it does set itself apart on Wii, having zero competition in its content style (outside Japan).
But for being touted as the "major" "important" 3rd Party Wii title (that incidentally gets a marketing push that many other games didn't), why were these technical shortcomings not patched up without question before the discs left the factory?
* There are 3 projectile weapon classes (light/medium/heavy bowgun), none of which use the IR pointer function for aiming. Wha? Did Capcom not want these to be overpowered, or did they not want them to make sense?
* The game has a low resolution in widescreen mode, combined with small text (result: small smeared text?), causing difficulty and discomfort that players here have already mentioned. Second, it doesn't save your wide/fullscreen preference despite your hope that you may have found a permanent solution.
* The online game is region-locked, reducing the potential number of (english-speaking) players to team up with. The Conduit doesn't have region locking, and it's almost a year old. Mario Kart Wii doesn't have region locking, and that's 2 years old.
* The boss monsters are synced among players in online play, but the smaller critters are not. Excuse me? On another player's screen, I could be chasing GHOSTS, that we can't really coordinate about? Is it to reduce lag? Conduit and Mario Kart keep track of 4+ players, flying items, and whatnot, and they sync fine while being multi-region. Battalion Wars 2 is region-locked, but syncs up 50+ soldiers, vehicles, flying rockets, bombs, grenades, everything, with negligible lag, and this game came out 2007. Capcom is suppsoed to have trouble with a few big turkeys?
* Despite Capcom being known as an action game developer, many of the major animations and processes in Tri are slow. <Put Weapon away. Take out Potion. Drink Potion (ENJOY Potion, ahh). Take out Weapon.> But I often remember getting knocked down as soon as the Potion worked, wasting both time and the Potion. Waiting for animations to progress is like swimming in mud.
This is the 11th(?) product in the franchise. It hasn't changed much compared to the (4-6 year-old) PS2 games in the series (aside from online features?), as greybrick mentioned. Why are these technical aspects worth addressing? Because they're between you and the content.
It seems backwards. I've bought quite a few Wii games the past year that are strong on the technical side, using Wii (interface) features well, just short on the content side. Tri finally comes around, it has tons of content, but the technical stuff falls short; I was hoping it had BOTH (cuz, it's supposedly from Capcom), but I guess Capcom showed me a thing or two about them.
I can see 9's/10 if the players were starved for content. I'm not starved for content, because I have something called a backlog. My still-wrapped copy of Tri is $44 that's trying to figure out if it will join my backlog or not; if not, then that $44 can volunteer itself into Galaxy2.