by Raging Justice Mon Oct 02, 2023 1:34 am
Three bosses beaten so far in Chained Echoes, the game is amazing.
The characters are great. the story is interesting (so far).
The graphics are not the best I've seen from an indie jrpg, but they are certainly good. Graphics are low on my priority list when it comes to what I want from a game anyway. Gameplay, story, and fun factor are much more important.
The soundtrack is excellent, and sometimes reminds me of old Final Fantasy games.
The use of sound is great. You step outside of a building into the night air and you suddenly hear crickets. Go back inside, and you don't hear them anymore. I got near a torch on a wall in one building and suddenly heard the crackling sound of fire. The dialog isn't voiced, but in some parts of the game when you're in an area with many NPCs and something important happens, you can hear various voices or whispers from every one around you. It helps set the mood. Also, at one point in the game, a character heals another character with a spell. There's no indication of this visually or in dialog, but if your hearing is good you can actually hear the sound of the spell being cast.
Battles are fixed, so you don't have to worry about random combat. They just trigger automatically when you reach certain areas. The combat system is great. You have four characters, but can link each of them to another character that can be swapped in during combat. Sometimes an enemy will FORCE one of your party members to have to tag in their partner, which is a neat mechanic. There's also a thing called an overdrive meter that you have to monitor in every fight. Every action from you and your enemies moves a cursor along the meter. There's a green zone that beefs up your party. However, there is also a red, overheated zone that puts you at a severe disadvantage. Monitoring where you are on the overdrive meter is key to every battle. Some actions will move you forward on the meter, others will move you back. The game also randomly determines what actions move you backwards on the meter every few turns. You can also see the turn order of everyone in a battle. I love when rpgs do this.
There are times in the game when you have to make choices, unlike most jrpgs these choices do have consequences. They're nothing earth shattering, but it does lend a sense of you ACTUALLY ROLE PLAYING, which is rare in jrpgs. Little things in the story can play out differently based on your choices, like an NPC living or dying. Your choices may even determine the difficulty of an upcoming boss fight. Sometimes the game will even test you to see if you're paying attention to what's going on around you. There's a series of questions one of your characters has to answer at one point, and the only way the player will answer them correctly is if he actually took the time to talk to the NPCs in the area and actually remembers what they said. Answer each question correctly, and the game rewards you with a cool item that you would otherwise not get.
The game is super polished too. When you put a cursor on an enemy, you can see their strengths/weaknesses, if they have anything to steal (or if they have anything left if you have already stolen something from them), as well as any items the enemy has available to use. The game also has autosaving like practically every 5 seconds it seems so you don't have to worry about lost progress, and you can manually save at any time too. When you put a status effect on any enemy, you can do it again while it's still active. That means you don't have to wait for it to wear off before casting it again. If the enemy is going to be poisoned for one more turn, you can cast your poison spell and it will reset the enemy to be poisoned for another five turns. It's little things like this that a lot of jrpg devs don't think about.
The game is full of surprises. I jumped into a boss fight with a bunch of bandits, and mid battle, a giant monster showed up and wiped them all out, triggering the REAL boss fight. There's other cool things too, like a mini game where you bet on turtle races. I was not prepared for the race starting and a fucking heavy metal vocal track kicking in! Awesome! Chained Echoes has a way of never feeling boring.
There are a ton of indie jrpgs out there these days, but Chained Echoes is one that gets all of the little things right.