Chained Echoes

released on Dec 08, 2022

Take up your sword, channel your magic or board your Mech. Chained Echoes is a 16-bit SNES style RPG set in a fantasy world where dragons are as common as piloted mechanical suits.


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Chained Echoes has so much to like while also managing to feel unpolished in many other ways. It's genuinely impressive how much one person has created here, with a strong art direction, a solid story, and some great music as well. The battle system is the area that I take the most issue with. The ovedrive / overheat system is cool in theory, but ends up resulting in more micromanagement than necessary, often getting in the way of strategies by requiring random moves to reduce the heat bar. The Sky Armor battles feel even worse, given there are fewer ways to manage the heat bar. On top of this, too many bosses have the ability to act multiple times per turn, creating some scenarios that feel truly unfair. Despite these quirks, I did enjoy Chained Echoes a good bit, but it wasn't as enjoyable as it could have been.

Behold the second coming of Chrono. Blah blah love letter blah blah golden era jrpg blah blah. Jokes aside, while the game is clear about its inspirations, it does stand on it's own without resorting to nostalgia. It masterfully ticks all the box of what makes a great rpg. The story is really well-paced and starts strong. The characters are interesting and have their own arc inside the story. There are interactions between the party members that adds to the flavour of the game. The battle system allows for challenging encounters that actually needs strategy (buffs and debuffs really makes the difference). The graphics and sounds are also amazing. Overall, this is a incredible experience and a must-play to every rpg fan.

Chained Echoes is not perfect, it's not the most artistic game I've ever played and it definitively has its flaws, but it was an extremely fun experience. I went into the game not expecting much but I was really surprised by what the game gave me.

Let me start with the worst parts: yes, this game's story is a mix of maybe too many things, you don't always understand where the creator wanted to go and many things feel rushed if not unexplained. Despite that, I think the game has a likeable cast, an extremely solid intro of over ten hours and the story manages to be good enough to be enjoyed and have its touching and memorable moments.

That aside, what this game does is something I don't often see in a JRPG. The gameplay is extremely FUN. From the combat to the exploration, this game really nails it and in a lot of ways it reminded me of why I loved CrossCode. You have to go from point A to B but the level is so big and full of stuff that you might spend hours just looking up for every small chest instead of doing the main quests.

As for the combat, I never got bored of the combat system and every trash fight was enjoyable even if not providing a challenge because the game has so many fun skills to use or combos to create between different abilities that I really enjoyed just mindlessly wrecking a horde of trashmobs, instead of trying to save my MP while spamming physical attacks.

And perhaps the strongest point of the game is the sidequests. The game has very humorous and lively quests that are unlocked as you progress or that you discover by exploring. They're all fun and there is a LOT of optional areas to explore. Hell, at some point the map really opens up and you get an overwhelming amount of things you can do at once, I thought it was a blast.

Chained Echoes is a really good game. It knows how to be fun and I could feel the author's spirit. I don't care that it's flawed, I think it's fine the way it is because ultimately the author wanted to do an homage to his childhood games and I think he managed to do so.

(from original post in 2023) Annoys me that idk why i didnt like this more (and i liked this a LOT)

I disliked the art style of this game quite a bit - it felt like an RPG-Maker sprite system. Everything else about this game was phenomenal though. I loved that every encounter felt like a boss fight, the plot-tethered leveling system made every character viable, the story was good (not great), both styles of combat system were incredibly interesting - the best turn-based combat I've maybe ever played, and you could make a base by completing quests and spending resources (my favorite). If this game and Sea of Stars could DBZ-style fusion dance, you'd have the perfect RPG

This review contains spoilers

What I liked:
- Music and artstyle are very nicely designed, but also have their flaws
- Overdrive system is fun and brings variety, but unfortunately also forces me to use skills that make no sense in the current situation : /
- Reward board is simple but super cool to motivate me to play a lot of optional content
- Exploration is mostly very rewarding
- Building Hermit's Isle was a lot of fun, I love that
- There were no boring side quests, all of them had their own interesting story and sometimes there was content here that I would have expected in the main story, really good

What got on my nerves:
- In general, the story starts off promisingly, but becomes increasingly stupid as the game progresses :/ Here, I often had the feeling that the story mainly relies on blatant twists and surprises, but that these weren't really organically integrated into the plot, but just happened randomly. Scenes like Frederik's death are supposed to be tragic, but I honestly had to laugh out loud because his "explanation" for his misdeeds was so incredibly stupid and pointless, but it was really taken seriously in the game as his motivation, what nonsense...and that happens quite often towards the end
- Tonally the game is so inconsistent, I don't know what to feel :D It's basically rather lighthearted, but then jumps into topics like mass suicide, human experimentation, religious wars and much more...but deals with all these topics rather superficially, maybe less would have been more?
- The level with the flying islands -> fuck that :D just stand around and wait for a flying platform != fun.
- Many to almost all ideas of the story are at least inspired by other games or anime, which would be fine. What I find problematic, however, is when entire story sections are copied 1:1 from other media, such as the machinations of the church in this game and in Xenogears, which is simply copy-paste with virtually no ideas of its own. The fact that the church produces monsters here to unleash them on humanity is simply the plot of Solaris/Ethos stolen from Xenogears, that's quite brazen. And the fact that the priest likes boys is also an old cliché...AND IT'S ALSO IN XENOGEARS WTF!!!! :D Kylian and Glenn are 1:1 Delita and Ramza from FFT, Nysa is Lea Monde from Vagrant Story....it's really cheeky
- You can almost completely ignore the class system (with the emblems), you learn enough skills as it is and can only use a handful so it's rather annoying
- Hardly any character moments between the party members, there's no real sense of companionship

All in all, this game left me a bit disappointed. I was really looking forward to this one since there was universal praise from game critics and people, whose opinions I respect. The first half was very promising but to me, it just falls apart in the second half due to bad writing. It is charming though. If you like the JRPGs of old, give this a look but maybe don't expect the best in terms of story, world, and character writing.