This is nothing new and I should've listened to you all, but... I Am Setsuna is a painfully average experience!

It took me around 25 hours to beat this game and, sure, while it successfully manages to convey the feeling of a retro JRPG from the PS1 era, the nostalgia just didn't pay off in the end. It felt good at first, but the feeling fled halfway through the game.

I Am Setsuna is beautiful, though. The artstyle is pretty, the character and bosses are well designed and the soundtrack does its own thing, becoming a driving melodic force throughout story and gameplay.

The solid battle system, optional content, easy grinding and challenging bosses make for a compelling reason to get you to the end. Setsuna's conumdrum about her sacrifice also caught me intrigued. Her story may not be very well written, but the ending happened to be quite nice.

But it just wasn't enough. Nothing surprised me and things kinda fell off.

For starters, environments, world map and dungeons are extremely repetitive and dull. The main cast is insipid and their motivations and reasons to join Setsuna on her quest are mostly unconvincing. The choices you make are useless (especially the final one) and plot development happens too fast and too dry, turning a good idea into something half-baked.

I'd also like to point out that not being able to sell equipment or skip cutscenes you have already watched were big issues for me.

And that's kind of it for I Am Setsuna. A good nostalgic idea executed in a very uninspiring way.

I don't regret playing it, but I also feel like I kinda wasted my time. I don't recommend the game, but I do think that you should give the soundtrack a listen...

Scroll down to read the review, or watch it in video form here!

So we all know that Square Enix isn’t exactly the most proficient of companies when it comes to giving appropriate names or titles to the things that that create. But I will give them props for choosing to give their subsidiary that developed I am Setsuna the name “Tokyo RPG Factory”. Because if there was ever a way to take the beloved style of the classics like Chrono Trigger and final fantasy and turn them into a cold calculated attempt to produce something with all the mechanical parts of those classics and not a fraction of the heart & soul, they have somehow found how to do it.

The story takes place in a typical medieval fantasy setting during winter in which you play as a swordsman for hire who is given a task by a mysterious employer to locate a girl known as “the sacrifice” and kill her. Of course things don’t quite go as planned, and our hero ends up being employed as the sacrifices bodyguard instead to protect her on her pilgrimage so that she may eventually fulfill her destiny by giving her life to rid the world of the monsters that prowl it. And from there, things mostly play out exactly how you’d expect. New characters are introduced and join your party as you continue on your quest and find out more about this pilgrimage the and purposes behind it.

Now I’ve said time and time again that there is nothing inherently wrong with having a cliched or familiar premise for your story. The devil is in the details, and as long as there is depth and nuance to the plot, interesting and likable characters, or at least enough charm or sense of fun to the whole thing, a seen-it-all-before premise is forgivable. The problem with I Am Setsuna you really have seen all of this before. Outside the generally premise there really isn’t any depth or interesting developments to the plot, as the characters simply move from location to location without a lot of memorable developments to tie everything together. It’s nice that the overall goal of our heroes is clear from the start and they never waste time on irrelevant plot points, but it’s all handled in such a rushed manner that even the few moments in the story that pique your interest don’t last for long or have quite the impact they need to.

This is due in large part to the mostly unmemorable characters you acquire along the way. As much as I love the designs both artistically and mechanically of each of them, the actually characterization of nearly everyone, from the main party to the supporting cast to the antagonists, is incredibly weak, with only the most simple of personalities and backstories given to. Not helping matters is the the two weakest characters of the group happen to be the two leads. Setsuna is every ditzy, naive, pure-hearted, heroine you’ve ever seen without any of the nuance that you’d find in the better examples of this trope. And the main character is even worse. He’s a masked silent protagonist with literally no personality or motivation of his own outside of the mostly meaningless dialogue options you make for him. Again I don’t hate the idea of a silent protagonist innately. It supposed to allow for a sort of surrogate avatar for the player and is used well in games like Persona or the older Bioware games as a way of focusing on the rest of the cast while still giving the player plenty of meaning choice that make them an actual driving force in the plot, rather than an observer whose being shuffled along without any real agency of their own.

The best character by far is a female knight by the name of Julienne. There’s are two prolonged periods of the story that are almost dedicated exclusively to her as we learn about her backstory, her goals and motivations, and discover who she is as a person though the choices she makes, making her stand out as a real person rather than a one note trope. It really is a darn shame that the rest of cast and plot are so tired and hum-drum, as there are a handful of genuinely endearing moments sprinkled throughout, but when the majority of the experience is so unmemorable, it’s hard to say it’s particularly good.

Now that’s not to give the impression that I Am Setsuna is totally without merit. Thankfully much of the rest of the game is able to make up for the narrative shortcomings at least to some degree. Combat is nearly identical to Chrono Trigger. It uses a classic and simple ATB combat system that utilizes a dual tech combo system allowing party members to combine their techs together for more powerful attacks and supports. The most notable addition here is the momentum system. Essentially a second ATB meter, upon you first ATB meter filling, the momentum meter will begin to charge. When it fills you will gain a momentum bonus so that upon using any standard attack or tech, if the action button at the right moment, you will receive a bonus for that specific skill. These range from additional damage to improved healing, to stat boosts and so on.

This works great as it adds another level of strategy to combat, especially in boss fights where you must constantly make strategic decision whether or not to pull of an action immediately or wait for the momentum meter to fill for a stronger attack or improved healing and so on. It’s a great example of how one simple addition can add so much to the game.

Unfortunately most of the other changes made to the classic RPG system aren’t so welcome. Unlike in Chrono Trigger, where new techs and abilities are learned automatically upon leveling, your party only gains new techs by purchasing them from a vendor with materials you collect. Now this isn’t necessarily a terrible idea on the surface, but it has two major issues that hamper it.

First, you are able to purchase more than one of each kind of tech, but every tech only works on a single character, so there is no reason to ever buy more than one command tech. However the more notable issues is how this is tied into the talisman system. Similar to Final fantasy 7’s materia system, each character can equip a talisman that opens up new slots to equip a limited number of techs on. The problem here is that this kind of customization is both pointless and user hostile for a system in which every character only has so many preset abilities available. The thing Chrono Trigger’s battle system is that, while each character only had a small number of techs available exclusively to them, every single ability was useful in some way or another. It was a case of quality over quantity. Instead of balancing combat with limited skill slots like other RPGs do, the talisman system only adds another level of needless convolution between the player and the game.

And the convolution doesn’t stop there. There are several new additions that are either unnecessarily complicated or else just not well explained at all. Like cooking. Or the flux system. I’ve spent 20 hours with this game and I still cannot for the life of me figure out what the heck the “flux’ system is or how it works. Admittedly these are more minor annoyances rather than actual flaws, but they just make you go “why is this even here”.

Where I Am Setsuna shines brightest is with its atmosphere & aesthetic design. Despite being rather thinly written, the plot and world are successful in evoking a powerfully consistent tone throughout the whole playthrough. There is a heavy emphasis on themes of sorrow and loss, and this is made no more apparent than through the games frankly outstanding soundtrack. It relies almost exclusively on the use of the piano, focusing instead on creating melodic themes rather than grand sweeping orchestral pieces. Being an innately quieter and more intimate instrument, the piano tracks not only create a vast array of memorable tunes, but also perfectly fits with the heavily melancholic tone of the whole story and can even add more emotional weight that would otherwise be non-existent to a few scenes. I have no qualms in saying I AM Setsuna’s music is easily on par with the 16-bit RPG it attempts to emulate. Making the tone even more potent, is the art direction. I already mention the fantastic character artwork by the elusive toi8, but the overall world design has a heavy winter and snow motif that compliments the cold sorrowful atmosphere perfectly.

That said while the winter design of the world is pretty, it’s also the only real design that virtually every single dungeon, town and location is model in. And this is the other major problem with I Am Setsuna: a heavy sense of monotony. As good as the music and art is, when you’re seeing and listening to very VERY similar seeming environments it’s easy to start to slip into a sense of mundanity and wanting some kind of variety or something new to discover. This extends beyond the world design, though. After about half a dozen hours, you really get the sense that you’ve seen everything that the game has to offer you, and without a strong narrative thrust, it becomes difficult to try and see the game through to the end.

And unfortunately, even if you did, the game’s actual ending isn’t all that great. Without getting into spoiler territory, despite the majority of the story being fairly straightforward and easy to follow for the most part, the final dungeon and ending inexplicably began throwing plot revelations and exposition dumps, all of which come out of nowhere with no build up to them. It makes things so needlessly convoluted to where I instead of being hit emotionally by how powerful the final moments were, I was instead left scratching my head trying to figure what exactly just happened and why. And it’s sad, because there actually a few creative tricks with where the plot goes and how the final moments are presented that, in a better written plot and clearer scenario, could have potentially made the ending so much more emotionally powerful.

In fact that’s almost a good metaphor for I Am Setsuna as a whole. While I don’t get a feeling of cynicism from the games design at all, and there are a lot of elements like the art, the music, the tone, and a handful of evocative moments throughout, the end product still feels very mechanical and factory produced. It feels like the people who made it genuinely loved Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy, especially Final Fantasy X, but instead of creating game that drew heavy inspiration while still standing on its own, it seems like the developers of I Am Setsuna felt that the best to essentially try merely duplicate and combine the various elements of those games, but without any clear idea or vision for why exactly they worked individually or how to properly update mechanics.

And yet even with all that negative stuff said, I still kinda like it. If you want a proper food metaphor, if Chrono Trigger is a 5-Star quality chinese restaurant, I Am Setsuna would be “Panda Express”. While it is essentially “fast food, and it will never even remotely compare to the profession top tier quality of that 5 Star joint, at the end of the day, as cheaply produced as your meal might be, it’s really difficult to say that it wasn’t at least a tasty one.

LIT ON THE SPOT - REVIEW

I Am Setsuna is a simple JRPG that, with a monotone aesthetic, tries to discuss themese such as death and alterity. The game, however, doesn’t do these subjects justice, being marred by a shallow cast of characters and a broken combat system.

The plot revolves around a pilgrimage that is promised to end in death. Setsuna, a young girl who has just turned 18, is chosen as the sacrifice who will give her life to safeguard her people: doing so for many years has been their way to keep the monsters at bay. Although she is the story’s protagonist, the player actually controls the actions and choices of a mercenary hired to assassinate her, named Enrir. Understanding that she’s going to die anyway, Enrir decides to accompany her in the pilgrimage instead, joining her personal guard to see that her journey is fulfilled.

That means that, either way, Setsuna’s quest is bound to end in death. Setsuna means “a moment, an instant”, signaling the exact relation between life and time that she represents: in the grand scheme of things, the life of a person fades in a second. By being called Setsuna, the character carries this burden as her identity: she represents this transience, being marked by what awaits her at the end. To further remind us of this looming presence, her group is constantly chased by a mysterious man called “Reaper”, who wants to murder Setsuna before she has a chance to complete her task.

The game’s chapters mostly work around the same themes: it’s either discussing death, sacrifice or the “otherness” of the monsters. One of the first chapters, for instance, deals with the questionable nature of her goal, showing a leader that doesn’t hesitate before sacrificing people for the greater good. He is deemed “wrong” by the characters, who nonetheless fail at the time to notice the obvious parallels to their own quest. The next big event introduces a character that brings another perspective to the matter of death. He has to face a dilemma: either he lives a long life, but hidden, or he shortens it by a huge amount, but lives it the way he truly wants. Here, death is portrayed as a worthy price to pay to be able to live fully. Life and death appear not only as opposites, but as complementary: you can’t have one without the other.

The other major theme in I Am Setstuna is the question of whether monsters are intrinsically bad or deemed so just because they are called monsters. There is a chapter when Setsuna’s group meets a monster pretending to be human, making the barrier between the two groups thinner. The monster in question has feelings and mourns the death of closed ones the same way that humans do. He has a conscience and is very angry for being an outcast: he is unable to make friends because people eventually find out what he is and feel both betrayed and threatened. Setsuna, of course, sides with it. When she says something like “I refuse to believe that ending someone’s future is ever the best choice,” she is doing so not only because she has a gentle soul, but mainly because her own future is being cut short by her own choice. She thinks being a sacrifice is an honor, and that forces her to value the lives of every other being.

But the game’s strengths end with Setsuna. Enrir, the character you control, is poorly developed, having few remarkable traits. The developers expect to make him your avatar in the world – you can change his name and pick all of his answers – but, at the same time, they make him a character with defined characteristics. It’s difficult to balance the two approaches and I Am Setsuna shows how schizophrenic the narrative can become when this is not done right: you can choose to pick only kind answers with him, for example, but the characters will still react surprised by them, as if Enrir was often insensitive. If that is how Enrir “really” is, why give the players the choice to act differently in every turn? The way it is, players are not making Enrir their character and at the same time he is not being coherently developed because his dialogues choices can enter in conflict with what he is supposed to act like. Either he ends bipolar or a shallow brute. And, either way, he is uninteresting and boring.

The narrative doesn’t falter only with Enrir, though. The writing is often blunt enough to be dull. When the monster that claims he’s good appears, he explains “We monsters are no different from humans.” When Setsuna’s guard, Aeterna, explains to Enrir the reason of the sacrifice, she says “Is that the sacrifices keep the monsters at bay, and stop them becoming more ferocious.” It is with this eloquence, subtlety and complexity that every character speaks. It’s not like every character must sound like they come from Deadwood, but a bit of personality or even subtext is necessary to make the dialogues interesting.

And there is the fact that they all speak with the same voice. Any player will be hard-pressed to discover which character wishes this at a certain point: “If people can become just a little healthier… just a little happier…” Is it Setsuna, her friend Aeterna or the knight Julienne? We can’t say based on the language alone. And the answer is none of the above: this is a line from a NPC called Smiling Aide. The point is a simple one: when a random NPC says something that could very well have been spoken with the exact same words by the game’s protagonist, or any of her female companions, you have a problem. The only character that stands out from the crowd is the warrior Nidr, for his constant use of contractions and swearing: “Whadd’ya take me for, dammit?” Voice acting would have remedied this problem by giving a distinct tone to every character, but without it, this simple and blunt prose is everything but engaging.

It also doesn’t help that some narrative threads are basically dropped as the game progresses, while others appear out of nowhere. Enrir, for instance, is hired to murder Setsuna at the beginning, but soon even that is forgotten: we eventually discover why he was hired, but incidentally. There is no confrontation, no big twist; it leads to no climax, and not even complications arise from his original mission. Meanwhile, at the very end, the player is sudden bombarded with random plot points, like the existence of clones/projections/whocares, which were never hinted at before.

The side characters also suffer from a lot of problems. Julienne’s plot is overstuffed with notions of “the necessary traits and mindset a good ruler must have” that overstay their welcome and lead nowhere. Aeterna is just random. Nidr doesn’t have his big moment of revealing his identity. Kir, a boy from the forest, has to face a good dilemma at the beginning, but that is it: his narrative arc ends in the same chapter where it starts. And finally, there is Fides, who comes too late to have any impact, feeling more like a throwback to Magus of Chrono Trigger than anything else.

Speaking of Chrono Trigger, I Am Setsuna borrows its combat system shamelessly. There are three characters you can control during battles and they act only when their respective gauges fill up. Each character has a group of “techniques” to choose from and they can create combos with their companions’ abilities. One such combo even deals damages by making an “X” on the battlefield, in another reference to Square’s masterpiece.

The only useful novelty comes from the fact that, once the gauge to act is filled, you can wait more time so that it fills up again, allowing the attack/technique to gain more power and attributes if you press a button at the right time. There are other new systems and mechanics, but they are just there to make the game feel a bit different, having no great impact in the gameplay: characters, for instance, don’t gain techniques by leveling up, but by equipping “spritnites” obtained in shops by selling enemies drops. There is also a thing called “Flux” that activates in battle when certain conditions are met and help the party by modifying their attributes or granting some more. But, as with most elements in the game, you can safely forget that it exists.

For I Am Setsuna is a fairly easy game. That wouldn’t be such an issue if that didn’t turn most of the game’s mechanics useless. Take the combos, from example. Players can easily beat the game without using a single one. The good old tactic of “attack, attack, heal” works like a charm here, especially because you have three characters in the battlefield and can designate each one of these actions to one of them: while two attack, the last heals the party. Even bosses fail to push other strategies. Therefore, mechanics such as flux and combos can easily be ignored, sounding like fluff that is only there to make the combat system feel complex. Yes, you can use them wisely to create devastating attacks, but that would only make an easy game feel even easier. Only the endgame content – some belated side quests – require some thinking in their boss fights, but before reaching that point players will have alreadt had plenty of reasons to lose interest in the game.

Another baffling design decision is the fact that some attacks and enemies require positioning but you can’t move your characters in the field. There are enemies that explode when defeated, damaging their surroundings, for example. In other words, the game makes unit placement relevant but players can’t easily change it. It’s an unexplainable decision that makes as much sense as any decision by Nintendo about their online services.

The only thing coherent in the game is its presentation. I Am Setsuna has a striking monotone aesthetic: all lands are engulfed in snow and the whole soundtrack – which is great and deserves a better game – is played on piano. This can result in a repetitive experience, no doubt, but it reinforces the melancholy one expects of a story about death and sacrifice.

Even though I Am Setsuna aims to be a simple RPG, and is clearly inspired by such gems as Chrono Trigger, it fails when it comes to the most important things of the genre: its story is uninspiring and its combat system is deeply flawed.

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I think the development team wasn't communicating. It's almost as if they were designing different games. The story writer was trying to tell a story about a world being overrun with demons and monsters, but the enemy designer was making a game about arctic wildlife and cheerful cartoon animals. meanwhile the dialogue writer sustained a massive head wound but they couldn't afford to hire anyone else so they just let him go nuts. And the poor music composer was told they were composing for a serious and emotional ballad. When they found out it was for this garbage fire, it was too late.

The premise of the story is fine. and that premise is Final fantasy 10, but less developed. from there it all falls to bits. The dialogue is the worst I've ever seen in a game. That's truly an achievement. I would have enjoyed this game more if it was in a language I didn't speak. Everything looks fine. sort of. the models are nice. They just don't match or make any sense as what they are apparently supposed to be. The music is very good. It doesn't belong here.

I really struggled to like this game. at times I didn't hate it for almost entire minutes at a time. that's..something

7.5/10

We'll just get this out of the way since it's in every conversation/review/preview/article: this is Chrono Trigger meets Final Fantasy -- specifically FFX. The battle system is right from CT, the story is ripped directly from FFX. There are references all over the place to previous Square titles, such as techs being named the same, characters being very familiar, etc. It is a nice tribute to old games while seeming a little too entrenched in them.

I actually adored the storyline, even if it's derivative. Most of the characters were fleshed out enough, except for someone like Endir who is just a silent protagonist. I do like that he's a mercenary, but he's very shallow compared to the rest of them. Ultimately though, it's all about how tragic and beautiful the tale is. This is a game meant to make you cry, and in that regard I think this is a resounding success; one of the most emotional plots of the year so far. It does throw a bunch of stuff at you at the end, but I enjoyed it.

It's a very linear game but I appreciate it because in an age where every game needs to be open-world, it's nice to see one that is trying to tell a concise story. It could have probably have used a little more time to give the plot more meat, but it did it for me.

Mechanically, I Am Setsuna is all over the place. The battle system works with its combos and momentum mode, but it can be incredibly easy. It's not a very balanced game, and I figure that's up for the rather quick development time. The core system is completely functional, however, and I'm always down for some more Chrono Trigger.

On the flipside, enemies don't drop money. They drop items that you sell for money, and that's a mildly annoying extra step. You sell the items, get your cash, and that opens up more spritenites (more on those in a second) that you can use. Why make us do that? It doesn't add anything to the game. I'm okay with requiring items to unlock abilities, but don't make us have to sell them; and just give us money after a battle.

Spritenites are basically materia-lite. You equip talismans and those have slots. You can then equip the spritenites, which give you techniques and passive upgrades. It's satisfying being able to customize your characters to a degree, especially since you can literally only equip weapons and talismans, but it's not real deep. It's just a matter of being good enough.

Yet some of the systems are really obtuse. If you don't understand the flux system, you aren't alone. It's a way to improve the techniques that you use, but it feels like an afterthought. You can go through the entire game not really giving it much thought and be completely fine. I Am Setsuna doesn't do a great job of explaining it; same with the singularities, which add buffs to your team during battles.

The amount of snow in this game will turn some people off because the entire world is covered in it. Usually in JRPGs, you travel to a lot of different, exotic locations, but here you are in mountains, woods and plains: all covered in snow. I liked it because it made thematic sense, and when you couple that with the piano music--which was fantastic for the most part but could have used more variety--then you have a really moody game.

There are little problems that exist like the UI being wonky, no world map, and other minor issues that detract from the experience. More polish could have improved it and streamlined some of the matters that are irritating for the sake of, I don't know, difficulty? Adding fluff to the playtime?

I Am Setsuna didn't end up being the brilliant throwback that we all hoped for, but it did manage to add a few wrinkles to the formula. It does feel like baby's first JRPG for a team that was literally made to do this with quick turnarounds, so maybe the next game will be more substantial. IAS is a sad, flawed title but definitely worth the time.

TL;DR

This game feels like it was made in the 1990’s… and I love that.

General Thoughts

As a JRPG fan who grew up in the 90’s, Square Enix’s SNES and PS1 era JRPGs were a huge part of my childhood. Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IX are two of my favorite games of all time. Suffice to say, I’m a sucker for games that cater towards this nostalgia.With that being said, my experience with “I am Setsuna” so far is everything I could have wanted or expected from a game like this. “I am Setsuna” is by no means the best game of 2016, but if you go in expecting to experience what it’s like to play your favorite 90’s JRPG for the first time again, you’re in for a treat.

The good

Music

My words would not do the music any justice, just listen. The music in this game, consisting mostly of solo piano pieces, is haunting, full of emotion, and absolutely carries the game. The soundtrack has an amplification effect on all aspects of the game. The characters, settings, story events, even the gameplay all feel more “full” due to tracks that perfectly set the tone throughout the game.

Gameplay

While the gameplay isn’t exactly deep or challenging so far, it is still very satisfying. The battle system is very similar to that of Chrono Trigger, while the equipment/skill system is similar to Final Fantasy VII. Skills aren’t acquired through levels, they are acquired by combining loot obtained from monsters. The way the drop/loot system works is genius and something that I wish more JRPGs would try to emulate. There are no random drops from enemies, instead, enemies drop items when you satisfy certain conditions with the way you defeat them. If you satisfy multiple conditions, you will get all of the items for the conditions that you satisfied. For example, if you defeat an enemy with a powered up lightning based attack, then you will get two drops from the enemy: one for defeating them with a powered up attack and one for defeating them with a lightning based attack. Random drops are extremely frustrating; This system feels like a breath of fresh air for the JRPG genre.

Scale

The game oozes “small budget production” in almost every aspect of the game, but this is a good thing. The budget (or lack thereof) forced various design decisions throughout the game. The developers didn’t have the budget for an overwhelmingly amount of side quests to distract you from the surprisingly personal story of sadness and suffering that this game tells. The developers didn’t have the budget to populate the world with hundreds of NPCs in tens of towns, so they created a small world with personality. I appreciate the fact that I won’t have to invest large amount of time to experience all that this game has to offer.

The not so good

There’s not much that I don’t like about the game. I’m very satisfied with every aspect of “I am Setsuna” at its core. However, the game is not perfect and there are a few things that I think could have improved the game. I consider the below points nitpicks about an otherwise great game.

Setting

All of the environments I’ve reached in the game so far can be described as “snowy, wooded, wasteland”, and I don’t see this changing much for the rest of the game. While I do like the general graphics and art style and how the setting matches the tone of the story, I can only handle so much snow. I think the town and dungeon design is fine; I enjoy exploring all of the environments in the game (mainly because that means I get more time to listen to the soundtrack). However, instead of thinking “Nice, a new dungeon/town! Can’t wait to explore it!”, I find myself thinking “oh… another icy/snowy town/dungeon…”.

Menus/UI theme

This complaint arises from my complaint about the setting. The main menu which is used to manage items, skills, equipment, party, etc. has a sort of “gray, arctic” theme. This is fine, looks great, and the UX of the menu is pretty good. However, because most of the game takes place in a snowy environment, the menu tends to blend into the surroundings. It can be hard to navigate the menu in certain areas of the game due to the colors blending in to the background.

No Attack Range Indicators

In battle, many attacks and skills are targeted at an enemy, but affect an area around the enemy. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t show you the range of the attack you are using. This means you will often be asking yourself, “I’m targeting enemy A, is enemy B close enough to be hit by this?” and you will often be wrong. If the game were actually difficult, this would be a huge problem, but as it is, this is just a minor annoyance.

“Much have I fared, much have I found, Much have I got of the gods: What shall live of mankind when at last there comes The mighty winter to men?” –The Ballad of Vafthruthnir

.

The perfect game to play over a Winter vacation: I Am Setsuna. Developed by Tokyo RPG Factory and published by Square Enix, this JRPG is famously evocative of those of yesteryear.

How I remembered them well while trudging through the endless snow of Setsuna, 90’s titles like Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, Breath of Fire II, and of course Chrono Trigger. Yet while Setsuna reminisces about these classics, its biggest triumph is that it never directly emulates them. Not to the point where you feel like you just put money down on a modern price tag for a retro game. I Am Setsuna feels like its own new, fresh experience while at the same time being informed by some of the best of the old.

To rephrase that balance, I recently finished Abzû. It was everything I wanted it to be, absolutely stunning. However, and I think those who have played it might share this view with me, I felt it was almost an exact copy of Journey. Now please don’t send me hate mail. Both games are great. I don’t think this harmed Abzû in any way but it was Journey under the sea, complete with ancient civilization, a catastrophic past, an enigmatic wanderer, themes of the dangers of rampant technology, harmony with nature, and so on.

With I Am Setsuna, I got the vibe of Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger, but I didn’t sense I was just playing any of those games with a swapped setting.

I Am Setsuna is set in an elegiac, melancholy world where many people have given up hope. Every generation, a single town sends out a young maiden on a fateful pilgrimage to the Last Lands, never to return. With great sadness they send the girl off, believing that her sacrifice will prevent monsters from overrunning the world. It is cruel but it is the only hope that humanity has.

When it is Setsuna’s turn to undertake the terrible voyage as propitiation, she is accompanied by a cold and violent mercenary named Endir, a member of the tribe of masked men. How could such a fair and pure-hearted girl trust such a man? Though she senses it, she doesn’t know that Endir was secretly hired to assassinate her and prevent her from reaching the end of her journey. Still, she welcomes him. Can her warmth and unconditional love melt the heart of stone in the hard mercenary?

Even as they journey together with Aeterna, Kir, Julienne, and Nidr, they come to discover that the world is far worse off than anyone suspected, and the bond they form will be their greatest defense against evil. There is more at stake than just Setsuna’s life and there is more horror lurking in the shadows than just the monsters.

Check out the full review at... https://thewellredmage.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/i-am-setsuna/

Before all sorry for the puns now... First the good, there where times I just stood still hearing the beautiful music I am enjoying the sound

The ending is fitting to the story, I am not spoiling

The graphics have some good touches here and the I am aphatic to them

No the gameplay, you will need a freaking encyclopedia to understand how the momentum Flux system works, for a 20 hour game is just to complex for it's own good I am not a librarian

The difficulty curve is upside down the first boss killed me 4 times and the final boss wasn't able to sustain 10 momentum attacks, I couldn't use genesis as intended, I am not entertained

The name of the game should change to I am locked, such a cheap way to prolong the game with encrypted chest that are scattered from the very beginning

I am NOT into airships, the engine sound is just horrible, and the lack of a map is just stupid

If you would like to see final fantasy in a snowy setting with a compelling story exquisite music and overcomplicated mechanics with a quasi next gen look, this is your game.

At the end of the day I am disappointed.