Chained Echoes Review – Old style, new ideas

Chained Echoes is a deceiving game that you will find hard to believe at first. It makes you wonder if it was around when other similar titles, such as Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger were making big waves. The truth is that this extravagant and creative RPG is completely new. It was developed mainly by one individual developer, as a tribute to those older games and a celebration, while adding a few new concepts. Although the resulting adventure might look familiar from thirty years ago, it is characterized by a level of sophistication worthy of attention.

Developers love to play with preconceived notions. Sometimes, it’s fulfilling those expectations at precisely the pace and moment you are most ready for them, in both story and gameplay, and at other times it’s about subverting them. Want to try a different approach to combat? Here’s a new additional system in which you control mechs in a fascinating alternate combat style, recalling classics like Xenogears. You think you have a good idea of what the storyline about the fated hero is. Perhaps things are more complex than you think.

The classic JRPG-style adventures are all included in this balanced, rewarding adventure. This combat system is designed to reduce the number of repetitive, grindy battles. Each fight is a challenge that requires you to pay attention. This includes leveraging enemy weaknesses and characters, as well as party formation changes on the fly. The unique overdrive mechanic keeps your party in the best spot of damage-dealing. The party fully heals between combat, so it’s always about throwing everything you have at the enemy. Regular fights often come down to having only one fighter to take the victory. The high challenge was enjoyable for me, particularly since I could make bad choices and have the game over. This gave me the option to immediately replay the fight, which is a negligible penalty.

All of the upgrade, leveling, and gear systems offer compelling choices and are engaging. A class emblem allows you to customize each hero’s skills and can be used as a way of enriching your character’s abilities. Gems can give you new bonuses and allow weapons and armor to be modified. Players will enjoy spending time on the optimization games menus. There’s even a fun “Reward Board” that offers precious materials and leveling options for completing specific tasks around the world, encouraging extensive exploration and discovery.

Chained Echoes is a genre-specific game that plays within established rules. However, it tells an interesting and mature story. It touches upon themes like fate and free will and recovery from trauma. These and many other tropes are available for exploration in the dozens of stories and sidequests. Thankfully, it’s an enjoyable fantasy world, filled with unusual species and monsters, intriguing biomes, and a complex geopolitical structure. Sometimes, the political components can be overwhelming. This distracts from more interesting character drama. Chained Echoes will make everything seem more logical if they give it enough time.

A beautiful throwback musical score is accompanied by pixel-style visuals that relay nostalgia without being a game you’ve played before. Despite the nostalgia, it can sometimes feel like the story’s scope and the maturity of characters interactions are not in sync with its retro look. It can also be an advantage as it emphasizes terror and war crimes. The visual restrictions can hold back the story at times when it is most dramatic.

While Chained Echoes has the advantage of decades of distance from the games it looks to for inspiration, it’s a better experience in many instances than those vaunted games from which it arose. This combat is superior to the JRPGs that I was so fond of playing. That’s the highest praise I can heap on a game so removed in time from the games to which it might be compared. Whether you currently count yourself a JRPG connoisseur or fondly recall the ʼ90s heyday of the genre, Chained Echoes is well worth your time.