By all means, this game should be fantastic at a glance but it ultimately ends up being an extremely streamlined, watered down game of the genre it is trying to mimic and advertise itself at. The game falls short in almost every single aspect as a result of streamlining every single aspect of the game. There are no random encounters and levels but instead a skill system and equipment upgrade system to make up for it. The skill system, however, is completely locked to story progression and upgrades done through equipment are so marginal that you're better off waiting to just find a chest with the next tier of weapons(which you most certainly will find without fail for each one of your characters). What this means is that you are 99% of the time locked to progressing the story, as you will never be able to get past anything that isn't within the area of story progression you're currently at. It's an odd decision considering the maps are huge but you are discouraged to explore outside the area you are meant to be so they instead feel constricting. Enemies being set pieces on each map also mean that every single encounter will always be the same even after respawning. Considering fact there are no levels and the SP gain from battles to upgrade your skills is so marginal you're better off progressing the story to unlock better skills, I sincerely think you're better off skipping every battle you see and you will not be punished for it.

The worst part, in my opinion, is the story and characters. Again, at a glance this should be a star cast of characters and it certainly seems that way from the way the prologue plays out(which happens to be the best part of the story). However, I soon realized that the cast being SO diverse in their backgrounds is actually a detriment to the story. Ah, your party ended up locked in a cell? Well it just so happens one of our members entire background is her reputation as an extremely skilled thief. Oh you're backed into a corner by the royal knights? Don't worry, one of your party members is literally the princess who conveniently shows up to order them to back down. You've been stripped of your weapons? One of your guys literally summons weapons out of thin air. There is absolutely zero tension in any of the story beats because often times one of your party members just happens to be really skilled in the particular area that will get out of that situation with no repercussions. That aside, the story quickly devolves into a huge mess with a central villain never being clear. The shifts in story direction are so extreme that you're constantly wondering who even is a villain or ally anymore to the point of being infuriating.

Unfortunately this game just isn't for me. I really don't want to call it nostalgia bait but that's really what it feels like to me. The decisions that went into the game design at a glance seem good but the way they're executed are so poor and strip the game of anything interesting or meaningful.

As a longtime dungeon master, I love when a world creator has put a lot of thought into their world. It’s clear Matthias Linda put a lot of time and love into crafting this world. One of my favorite pieces of lore in any game are things that aren’t necessarily central to the game’s plot but give you a taste that there is a living world beyond the game’s mechanical boundaries. This game has plenty of that. It ends ready for a sequel and I would love to revisit Valandis and learn more about the lore than Linda has created here.

But my only real complaint with the game is that it sometimes feels too big. Especially the Dickensian size of the cast; who is who and what they did got confusing sometimes. I don’t necessarily think that it’s that the medium of video games don’t allow for this kind of complexity; but perhaps this 40 hour JRPG needs to be a 100 hour JRPG? The backstory is so deep and the motivations behind everyone’s actions so nuanced that you’re already trying to remember the overall plot. Remembering this one character’s motivation makes that tougher. So, my only complaint is really just that the story is too good, so not really a complaint at all.

I’ve seen a lot of comments that this is the best JRPG since Chronotrigger. I barely remember Chronotrigger, to be honest, and while I liked it, FF6 and FF7 hold bigger spots on the shelf of enjoyable old school JRPGs. Chained Echoes is quite good but I’m not sure if it will be as memorable in 30 years as those classics remain today.

There are mechanics to the game, of course, and the combat system has a unique feature that requires some careful planning. There’s also the sky armor element that completely changes the combat system midway through the game.

I played on my Steam Deck and my PC and the cloud worked flawlessly. I did encounter a few bugs when playing on Deck. They were mostly limited to the game freezing when transitioning locations on the same screen. Luckily, the autosave feature meant I didn’t lose everything most of the time.

After reading reviews and seeing 9/10's across the board, I was looking forward to playing this game, and admittedly i may have set my expectations a bit too high. As a precursor, I never played chrono trigger/final fantasy vi/most snes rpgs so i went into this game without that nostalgic aspect.

Pros:

-The on foot combat segments are very fun. Every character feels like they have a strong identity but are also customizable at the same time, it was a nice mix and kept making getting new skills and emblems interesting.

-The presentation is excellent. The game has very nice music, and the spritework is very well done. The lack of character portraits aside from the default can be jarring, but the portraits themselves are also nice in a vacuum.

-Field exploration is fun and rewarding, interactive elements are apparent and each area has hidden things to find that the story doesn't force you towards.

-The story, while flawed, has some interesting aspects, and some of the characters were very enjoyable. I found myself attached to Bathraz and Sienna by the end of the game.

Cons: -The sky armor battles are dreadful, and sapped a lot of the enjoyment i had throughout the game. Sky armors disregard the customization towards the characters and instead opt for a very clunky reimagining of the overdrive system which worked well until this point. The only way to turn back the gauge is to be in a stance where you take more damage, but you can't stay in this form forever so you need to shift gears to regain tp, but enemies can only increase the overdrive gauge so it's imperative to get back to shift 2. It is very difficult, and in boss fights with multiple attacks, practically impossible to get the gauge back to a normal level. It feels like you're fighting the overdrive gauge the entire fight instead of working with it like with the on foot battles.

-While there are interesting aspects with the story, overall it feels wayyyy too bloated and shifts way too often. Many, many characters either do not get conclusions at all or are just never given anything to do in the plot (seriously, Frederik's generals might as well have not been there despite how many scenes they're in). Frederick himself is a thoroughly unenjoyable villain despite having a lot of screen time, with a very weak conclusion. I also found the ending very unsatisfying, and there are quite a few plot threads that are hand waved and not really addressed, like they're setting up for a sequel or something instead of concluding the current story.

-The game difficulty is generally on the very easy side once you get a few grimoire shards in the early game. Story bosses generally don't keep up with how much you can upgrade your characters, making it somewhat trivial to defeat even late game bosses in like 4-5 hits with a little bit of setup.

Overall, while not a game i regret playing, Chained Echoes has quite a few lows in gameplay and story to offset the aspects i really did enjoy, and they unfortunately negatively impacted what was a very strong foundation of a game for me.

Chained Echoes is exactly what you expect it to be. A retro indie game, trying its own take on classic JRPGs from back in the day. In my opinion, it actually succeeds in it, but it just doesn't reach greatness, like the games that inspired it.

The thing that you'll immediately notice when starting Chained Echoes is its charm. It oozes style and nostalgia with its beautiful graphics and solid environmental design. It's definitely a treat, if you like games like this. Characters and their animations are cool to watch, the monsters are quite creative, bosses look threatening, the world looks beautiful, dungeons are cool and the overworld map is just perfect.

In this beautiful world, I loved how fast and freely you and your armor can move, how quick you can explore the fairly linear areas and just how well each event is paced. You pick up things pretty easy and they never overwhelm or stay long enough to bore you. I also liked the focus on the main quest and how they handled the few sidequests you can find. More open world games and RPGs should take notes from this design.

On top of that, you have a very fun and engaging combat. It's quick, clean of grinding, the overdrive system keeps you on your toes and the freedom to swap characters and improvise during battles, creating your own strategy, was very neat. You can see how well the combat works during boss fights. They're not only epic, but require some thinking in order to win, while maintaining everything fast and fun.

It comes at a cost though. Chained Echoes is a very easy game, with very few good challenges. It manages to wipe the need of grinding, maintaining the flow with easy encounters. I actually don't mind it too much, but I know some people will not enjoy it. Also, while dungeons are cool to explore, some of the gimmicks are a hit or miss. They're good, for the most part, but some of them, like the final one, can get really annoying.

My biggest gripe with the game is something that I actually enjoyed. The story. It is good, but it's not great. It's engaging, but also sort of forgettable. The writing is mostly at fault here, along with how I just couldn't develop a good bond with almost any character or villain. It's all thrown at you. Motivations are shallow, with its issues being resolved with ease, sometimes. And that's a shame, because it actually reaches epic proportions at times, but it never really breaks the bubble of just being a decent story. Good, yes, but I wish it were much much better.

Soundtrack disappointed me as well. There are some really good songs in the game, but not a lot them. It's mostly repetitive, failing to immerse you in parts of the story. One other thing that kept distracting me, this time in regards to gameplay, was character progression. This type of leveling up system just did not work for me, as I felt I wasn't getting stronger or improving at all, just learning new things, often not as useful as who I was in the beginning. Leveling weapons and armor suffer from the same problem, since using crystal, upgrading them and then having to do it again and again once you get a different item just didn't cut it for me.

But, at heart, Chained Echoes is a good game! One that mostly succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. It did manage to scratch the itch for a good "classic" JRPG, even if just a little.

So if you really want to play FF6, but not replay FF6, now we have a solution for you now!