Chained Echoes is a fantastic game with a couple issues that prevent it from being the masterpiece it could be.
At the beginning of the game you're introduced to your main cast of characters and get to play around with them a bit before their paths converge and are thrown into a conflict bigger than any of them. This leads the party into a story with tons of twists and turns that is just beautifully executed. The main focus of the story is the war in Valandis. This isn't a Fire Emblem game, this war is taken with the utmost seriousness and severity. War is cruel and dark and inhumane, and this game executes those themes perfectly. Because it's an RPG, there's also a lot of supernatural and magical aspects to the story as well. Those are great as well, but I think the war setting was the more well-baked of the two ideas. There are a couple things that go unresolved at the end, but they are relatively minor in the grand scheme of the story.
The main cast of characters consists of Glenn, Kylian, Lenne, Robb, Victor, and Sienna. There are a few others you meet down the road, along with some optional party members, but these are the main six, get to know 'em while you're here. Out of the six, Glenn and Robb end up being the weakest links. While Robb is just...annoying, Glenn suffers from being a protagonist with no agency—he simply lets the plot happen around him rather than being the one who drives it forward. That's just about the worst thing a protagonist can be aside from boring...but he suffers from that too, unfortunately. His backstory and motivations are cool, but his personality is just as stale as a rice cake. Fortunately, the other four get a ton of great moments during the story and are easily some of the best characters in the game. Also Sienna is gay. So like...always a plus.
The side characters don't get skimped either. The game has some incredible villains that are really good at portraying just how vile and desparate people can be under the wrong circumstances. I won't name names in fear of spoilers, but one of them is one of my favorite characters in the game.
The overall writing in this game is just top-notch, there were so many occasions where I would have to take a step back and let the words sink in. So many great conversations, monologues, and one-liners. Oh yeah, the game has a great sense of humor, by the way. There's this point early on where you can bet on racing turtles. It lasts like twenty seconds and plays the most intense metal music my poor ears have ever heard.
Gameplay is an absolute delight. The first thing I noticed upon starting the game up for the first time was just how FAST everything was. You move fast, picking up items is fast, combat is fast (and can get even faster if you press R2), talking with NPCs is fast, I can't sing enough praise for how much this game appreciates your time.
Something I was quick to notice was that the game doesn't give you EXP. Rather, you get what're called Grimoire Shards for defeating bosses or filling up a certain number of reward board squares (touch on that in a bit). Now for those of you worried that this'll be something like Paper Mario Sticker Star, allow me to alleviate those worries. I LOVE how levelling was handled in this game. It's not like SS where you can avoid battles and be better off without them, you're still rewarded for participating in fights with SP, points you can use to level up your skills. Also, fights are just mandatory most of the time. There are a handful you can skip by walking around the trigger for them, but why would you when combat is so much fun?
Combat is pretty standard fare, you got an MP bar, you can buff, debuff, heal, use items, and the like, but the main differences are that turn order is determined by speed—meaning a faster character could go twice before a slower character even gets to act—and the additions of the Overdrive and Ultra Move bars.
Ultra Moves are pretty self-explanatory. A big bar that everyone can build towards, and then you get a big attack with one character before building it back up again. But the Overdrive bar is the fun twist this game brings to the table. The bar is split into three sections, yellow, green, and red. Yellow is neutral, green is overdrive, and red is overheat. While in overdrive, your attack and defense are both boosted, but in overheat, both are decreased. You build this up by doing literally anything. Attack, magic, buff, you get the idea, go for a bit and you'll enter overdrive, but go too long and you'll end up in overheat. "But if everything builds up overdrive, how do you prevent overheat?" I'm glad you asked—all your moves have a chance of being given yellow text. These will decrease the overdrive bar instead of increase it. That, along with defending and swapping to another character and certain items will all decrease the bar, leaving you with a push and pull mechanic that you have to manage during combat. It's a lot of fun.
If you like sidequests, you're gonna have a field day with Chained Echoes. While there are only like...seven(?) eight(?) traditional sidequests in the whole game, they are all very much worth your time and have some great rewards tied to them. What fills the need for filler quests is in the reward board—this huge board with 150 little tasks that you can complete whenever you want—usually by accident. Because it's all right there, you don't have to talk to 150 separate NPCs to trigger all the challenges, you can just do them at your leisure. It's so handy and something that I think should replace traditional filler sidequests altogether.
I was bobbing my head to just about every song in this whole soundtrack. Some of the best music I've heard in an indie game, and that's saying a lot. I think I have like half the soundtrack in my mega playlist.
The two big issues I have with gameplay are crystals and Sky Armor combat. Crystals are basically Materia, where you can put them on weapons and armor to increase your stats. Problem is, the requirements are annoyingly specific, and if you fuck up and remove the crystal from your gear, they get big and lose all their purity, punishing you for making a simple mistake, or just finding better armor.
Sky Armor you get at the beginning of act 2. Basically just fights with bigger enemies and bigger numbers. They kinda screwed with the overdrive feature, there's no more overdrive, it's just default and overheat—remedied by the additions of the gears, where 1 is attack mode, and 2 is defend mode. 1 moves the bar to the right, while 2 moves it to the left. There's also a gear 0 that (if I remember correctly) is identical to gear 1 except for the fact you can't use skills and replenish MP at the end of every turn. This sounds cool on paper, but the execution felt a bit...wanting. I found that I was usually forced into gear 2 no matter what I wanted because enemy attacks still move the bar to the right, then I'd run out of MP way too fast and be forced to do nothing for a turn. Rinse and repeat. It doesn't help that, while you are still rewarded for combat, it's far less substantial than what you earn on foot. Depending on the weapon you're using, you get a set number of skills in a set order before you need to swap around your weapon to get new stats. You can't even keep the skills if you master them like you can with Class Emblems. Hell, you can't even master skills. It's super bare-bones and feels like a cool idea they had early in development but didn't know what to do with it and left it in anyway.
Despite those issues, I loved this game and am very glad my friend recommended it to me. If you like Chrono Trigger or any other classic SNES RPG, you're gonna love this one.
At the beginning of the game you're introduced to your main cast of characters and get to play around with them a bit before their paths converge and are thrown into a conflict bigger than any of them. This leads the party into a story with tons of twists and turns that is just beautifully executed. The main focus of the story is the war in Valandis. This isn't a Fire Emblem game, this war is taken with the utmost seriousness and severity. War is cruel and dark and inhumane, and this game executes those themes perfectly. Because it's an RPG, there's also a lot of supernatural and magical aspects to the story as well. Those are great as well, but I think the war setting was the more well-baked of the two ideas. There are a couple things that go unresolved at the end, but they are relatively minor in the grand scheme of the story.
The main cast of characters consists of Glenn, Kylian, Lenne, Robb, Victor, and Sienna. There are a few others you meet down the road, along with some optional party members, but these are the main six, get to know 'em while you're here. Out of the six, Glenn and Robb end up being the weakest links. While Robb is just...annoying, Glenn suffers from being a protagonist with no agency—he simply lets the plot happen around him rather than being the one who drives it forward. That's just about the worst thing a protagonist can be aside from boring...but he suffers from that too, unfortunately. His backstory and motivations are cool, but his personality is just as stale as a rice cake. Fortunately, the other four get a ton of great moments during the story and are easily some of the best characters in the game. Also Sienna is gay. So like...always a plus.
The side characters don't get skimped either. The game has some incredible villains that are really good at portraying just how vile and desparate people can be under the wrong circumstances. I won't name names in fear of spoilers, but one of them is one of my favorite characters in the game.
The overall writing in this game is just top-notch, there were so many occasions where I would have to take a step back and let the words sink in. So many great conversations, monologues, and one-liners. Oh yeah, the game has a great sense of humor, by the way. There's this point early on where you can bet on racing turtles. It lasts like twenty seconds and plays the most intense metal music my poor ears have ever heard.
Gameplay is an absolute delight. The first thing I noticed upon starting the game up for the first time was just how FAST everything was. You move fast, picking up items is fast, combat is fast (and can get even faster if you press R2), talking with NPCs is fast, I can't sing enough praise for how much this game appreciates your time.
Something I was quick to notice was that the game doesn't give you EXP. Rather, you get what're called Grimoire Shards for defeating bosses or filling up a certain number of reward board squares (touch on that in a bit). Now for those of you worried that this'll be something like Paper Mario Sticker Star, allow me to alleviate those worries. I LOVE how levelling was handled in this game. It's not like SS where you can avoid battles and be better off without them, you're still rewarded for participating in fights with SP, points you can use to level up your skills. Also, fights are just mandatory most of the time. There are a handful you can skip by walking around the trigger for them, but why would you when combat is so much fun?
Combat is pretty standard fare, you got an MP bar, you can buff, debuff, heal, use items, and the like, but the main differences are that turn order is determined by speed—meaning a faster character could go twice before a slower character even gets to act—and the additions of the Overdrive and Ultra Move bars.
Ultra Moves are pretty self-explanatory. A big bar that everyone can build towards, and then you get a big attack with one character before building it back up again. But the Overdrive bar is the fun twist this game brings to the table. The bar is split into three sections, yellow, green, and red. Yellow is neutral, green is overdrive, and red is overheat. While in overdrive, your attack and defense are both boosted, but in overheat, both are decreased. You build this up by doing literally anything. Attack, magic, buff, you get the idea, go for a bit and you'll enter overdrive, but go too long and you'll end up in overheat. "But if everything builds up overdrive, how do you prevent overheat?" I'm glad you asked—all your moves have a chance of being given yellow text. These will decrease the overdrive bar instead of increase it. That, along with defending and swapping to another character and certain items will all decrease the bar, leaving you with a push and pull mechanic that you have to manage during combat. It's a lot of fun.
If you like sidequests, you're gonna have a field day with Chained Echoes. While there are only like...seven(?) eight(?) traditional sidequests in the whole game, they are all very much worth your time and have some great rewards tied to them. What fills the need for filler quests is in the reward board—this huge board with 150 little tasks that you can complete whenever you want—usually by accident. Because it's all right there, you don't have to talk to 150 separate NPCs to trigger all the challenges, you can just do them at your leisure. It's so handy and something that I think should replace traditional filler sidequests altogether.
I was bobbing my head to just about every song in this whole soundtrack. Some of the best music I've heard in an indie game, and that's saying a lot. I think I have like half the soundtrack in my mega playlist.
The two big issues I have with gameplay are crystals and Sky Armor combat. Crystals are basically Materia, where you can put them on weapons and armor to increase your stats. Problem is, the requirements are annoyingly specific, and if you fuck up and remove the crystal from your gear, they get big and lose all their purity, punishing you for making a simple mistake, or just finding better armor.
Sky Armor you get at the beginning of act 2. Basically just fights with bigger enemies and bigger numbers. They kinda screwed with the overdrive feature, there's no more overdrive, it's just default and overheat—remedied by the additions of the gears, where 1 is attack mode, and 2 is defend mode. 1 moves the bar to the right, while 2 moves it to the left. There's also a gear 0 that (if I remember correctly) is identical to gear 1 except for the fact you can't use skills and replenish MP at the end of every turn. This sounds cool on paper, but the execution felt a bit...wanting. I found that I was usually forced into gear 2 no matter what I wanted because enemy attacks still move the bar to the right, then I'd run out of MP way too fast and be forced to do nothing for a turn. Rinse and repeat. It doesn't help that, while you are still rewarded for combat, it's far less substantial than what you earn on foot. Depending on the weapon you're using, you get a set number of skills in a set order before you need to swap around your weapon to get new stats. You can't even keep the skills if you master them like you can with Class Emblems. Hell, you can't even master skills. It's super bare-bones and feels like a cool idea they had early in development but didn't know what to do with it and left it in anyway.
Despite those issues, I loved this game and am very glad my friend recommended it to me. If you like Chrono Trigger or any other classic SNES RPG, you're gonna love this one.