First 50:
51. Ori and the Blind Forest - Xbox One52. AM2R - PC53. Total Annihilation - PC54. I Am Setsuna - PS4So along with Bravely Default this game shows that Japan still knows how to make a quality JRPG and it hasn't just all turned into flashy effects. It's really disheartening that this game isn't reviewing well. There has to be some sort of mismatch between expectations and results or something in the press.
I Am Setsuna is a fusion of FFX's story with CT's combat system. Without going into spoilers your journey is to guard Setsuna as she travels to the Last Lands as the Sacrifice to help drive the monsters away for a time until the next Sacrifice. The journey itself is fairly straightforward, with the expected learning a bit more about the nature of things and a few diversions along the way. That said, there's no real sidequests, which is appropriate given the theme of the journey. The story does the job, and I personally enjoyed the ending.
As I mentioned the combat is straight up Chrono Trigger. You've got three party members with an ATB battle system where positioning of party members and enemies is important and the ability to combine skills to create double and triple techs. This game does add in some things. The biggest addition is an SP meter. This fills as you attack, are attacked, or just idle when your turn is up. When it fills up you get a charge, and can store up to three charges. You can then expend a charge when attacking or using a skill to trigger Momentum. This involves triggering a variety of effects that enhance what you're doing. Momentum on a physical attack will add damage of the character's element while using it on a status effect might increase the duration. Momentum can also trigger two others effects, Fluxes and Singularities, which I'll get into in a moment. The other change from Chrono Trigger is that you have more ability to affect the positioning of things on the battlefield. In Chrono Trigger your characters were always in fixed spots and enemies might move around on their own. Here certain skills and attacks can change the positions of party members and enemies. One character moves up next to enemies when you have him attack and then he stays there (compared to the jumping back that happens in CT or with other characters) and there's a spell which draws a group of enemies to a single point to better hit with area spells. The only miss in the combat system is the fact that there is no indicator for area of effects; whereas in CT you'd get the secondary cursors to show that this enemy but not that enemy would be hit with Cyclone if you target this enemy you don't get that here. The only difference in cursor is between hit all attacks and focused attacks which may or may not have an aoe. It's the only downside in the combat system, in my opinion.
Now, skills are learned a bit differently from other games. Here skills are gained by selling enemy drops to a certain NPC and then combining particular amounts of enemy drops to create a skill. These skills are then equipped on your characters. So think of it like a cross between a system like FFVII's Materia and FFXII's selling of goods to unlock items in the store. What makes this a bit more interesting is the extensive nature of the drop system. Enemies have up to 12 different drops. You've got your normal drop and your rare drop, which function as expected. But then you have a large number of conditional drops. If you just barely kill an enemy you get an Exact Kill drop. If you massively murder an enemy above and beyond what was required for the kill you get an Overkill drop. If you kill with an attack that does elemental damage you will get one of the five Elemental Kill drops. If an enemy is suffering a status ailment you get a Debuff drop. If you kill an enemy with a dual or triple tech you get a Link Kill drop. And finally if you triggered momentum on the attack you get a Momentum drop. All of these can be combined; every condition is a new item so if you're diverse in a battle you'll get a huge list of drops. This encourages you to kill enemies in a variety of ways to get the drops you need to unlock your skills.
Now I alluded to two other systems, Flux and Singularity. These two are very poorly explained, but fortunately they're not necessary for beating the game. Singularity is the easier one. Randomly when you trigger a momentum attack you will enter Singularity. This will be a randomly selected field effect which lasts 20-30 seconds. These tend to be unique bonuses. One ensures all enemies killed will drop every single item they've already dropped before, so if you've painstakingly killed a particular monster with one of every type of attack you are free to kill this monster with whatever is easiest and you'll still get everything on the loot table. Another vastly increases your ATB speed but disables the use of combos. A third makes your attacks deal all five elements (and the game always has weakness win out when calculating the damage from such an attack) as well as giving you massive elemental resistances. There's one skill that will automatically trigger Singularity.
The other is Flux, which is the grindy min-maxing mechanic. Each character can equip Talismans. These both have slots for skills and can have both passive and flux effects. Passive effects are things like "See enemy HP". Flux effects are effects that can be imbued onto your skills randomly. The way this works is that when you use momentum while using a skill and the game decides to trigger a Flux, then at the end of the battle the game will have selected a random Flux effect on your talisman to apply to that skill; you then get the opportunity to accept it or not (limited number of flux slots on a skill and it can't be erased afterwards). Flux effects can be things such as increasing the damage of the skill, reducing the MP cost, or giving you an ATB bonus so you don't have to start from an empty ATB bar after using it. These bonuses aren't really noticeable unless you take the time to really grind them out. Hence, they're really only for min-maxers and post gamers.
The final thing to discuss is the game's aesthetic, as it was my favorite part of the game but also seems to be one of the things I'm seeing people complain about. The first is the game is entirely snowed in. It's not clear if the entire world is always gripped in winter or if you're just in a northern area, but it's clear that the game's explore able area is no stranger to snow. Indeed, you'll notice little details like tress that sometimes have snow suddenly fall off and the fact that as your characters walk through the snow they leave fairly deep trails. This does lead to some sameness in the dungeon design, as you have the snowed in forest, the snowed in mountain, and the ice cave as the majority of the dungeon space. Personally, I think this really fit the overall theme of the game; this is a fairly bleak world and the endless winter is a reflection of that.
The other half of the aesthetic is the music. This game's soundtrack consists of a solo piano playing appropriately evocative music for the variety of areas. It's composed extremely well and the characterization of areas is not hampered in any way by being a single instrument. This is actually one of my favorite soundtracks in recent years. And for some reason people aren't happy with it; I'm guessing they just have no musical sophistication. The complaints against the game's very deliberate aesthetic come off like if people complained that Limbo was just black on black with no music at all; it's missing the point entirely.
I cannot recommend this game enough to classic JRPG fans.
I loved Vanquish, but if that game had starred Vanessa Z. Schneider instead of Sam Gideon, I think I would have just exploded into gooey dork bits.
