JRPG 2.0: How Chained Echoes Changed the Game
Video transcript:
If you don’t know about Chained Echoes, let me let you in on a little secret. There are dozens of indie RPGs inspired by the 16-bit classics, but 2022’s Chained Echoes is the rare gem that actually deserves a spot alongside the greats that came before it. Which is even more impressive when you find about its creators, but more on that in a moment.
Here’s a perfect example of what this game brings to the table: it starts with a nearly identical scene to the opening of Chrono Trigger, with Mom trying to wake you up. And then suddenly you’re being smacked across the face to find that you’re about to go into battle, and it’s a perfect little scene that shows you this game is gonna feel familiar in some ways, but it’s also gonna branch off and be a whole new experience.
It’s a classic turn-based RPG, but it does several things to modernize the experience a bit. I’m gonna list five of the biggest ways it does this. Think of it as a list of quality of life improvements to the tried and true jrpg experience.
First of all, there’s no level grinding or under leveled characters. In fact, there are no levels for the characters at all—just levels for their abilities. You can level up attacks and powers, but you do it through regular gameplay and completing certain objectives, rather than just roaming around and repeating the same encounters over and over. And everyone levels up together, so you don’t have to worry about any one character falling behind or becoming more and more useless.
Secondly, HP and TP (the game’s version of mana or MP) refills after every encounter, so you can feel free to spam away on your favorite attacks. You don’t have to hold them back in case a bigger enemy comes along. Just go ham! And taking too much damage in one encounter isn’t going to affect you in the next. You don’t have to worry so much about potions and revives.
Instead of managing potions and rationing out your special attacks, you manage the third improvement to the JRPG formula: the Overdrive bar. Every time you use an attack or special ability the bar goes up. When it’s in the green zone, you do more damage and you receive less, so it’s super important to stay in it. But if it gets too high and goes into the red, then it has the opposite effect. You bring it back down by actually using the one ability I almost never use in other games: Defend. There are other ways to bring it down, but the point is managing your attacks and the Overdrive bar is much more entertaining to me than trying to guess when’s the right time to spend mana and potions.
The Fourth improvement? There are no random encounters. I’m never stuck grinding out battles right before I reach my destination, but more importantly I’m not punished for exploring or getting curious. And you move so fast in the game, I mean look at this. It’s just another example of how anything that’s tedious or uninteresting in these types of games was just sanded down.
Improvement number Five for me is the fact that your party can have up to 8 characters, and while you can only field 4 of them at a time, you can hot swap in the middle of battle without losing a turn. So you create 2-person teams that can swap back and forth, depending on how the battle is going and what skills you need most.
Now, each of these improvements have been done before to some degree or another. But before this game, I’m not aware of anything that did them all at the same time. Side note, I just reviewed Sea of Stars that came out eight months after Chained Echoes, and it comes damn close to checking all these boxes, too. In fact, if you compare these two games head to head I may have enjoyed the combat in Sea of Stars a little more, but Chained Echoes still comes out on top for story and pacing.
The game kept surprising me by rationing out new ideas, new mechanics, and story twists and turns throughout the game. It always felt like I was learning something new or there was some new story hook, and the game managed to roll those out at such a measured pace. It’s hard to describe, but not many games are able to pull that off over the entirety of the game.
I don’t want to go into spoilers, but there are majors aspects of the game that don’t even appear in Act 1.
I love story-driven games, and Chained Echoes is oozing with plot development and interesting characters. As much as I love all the quality of life improvements in the gameplay, it’s the story that’s the star of the show for me. That’s what kept me coming back night after night.
And each night I came back it seemed like I was facing new enemies in new lands. The game is vast, the looting and crafting systems are deep, it’s just jam-packed—but again it’s not overwhelming because it’s introduced in such a deliberate way. And each time I played I was impressed with what this team at, uh, “Matthias Linda” was able to create.
Wait, is that some guy’s name? You’re telling me this entire thing was created by one person?
Yes, that’s right. One guy developed this entire game, from the story and characters to the combat and crafting systems. That includes the art! Like, all the character portraits and the attack animations and the enemy designs, and that’s just the graphics! I still don’t know how one person did all this but I suspect he wears an overcoat and inside that coat are three or four smaller developers that each specialize in a different aspect of game development.
The one thing he didn’t create is the soundtrack. That honor goes to Eddie Marianukroh, and it truly is a stellar soundtrack.
That’s not to say the game doesn’t have any flaws. I didn’t fully understand the fusion abilities and I’m sure I wasn’t using crafting and upgrading to their maximum effect. Some battles seemed to drag on a bit, even with all the combat improvements. The game was shorter than typical JRPGs, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I would’ve been just as happy with an even shorter game but I may be in the minority there. What about you? What’s the ideal number of hours for you and an indie JRPG?
The game is available pretty much everywhere: Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox, Steam, and GOG. I played it on Xbox Game Pass, which it’s still available on at the time of this review. I haven’t actually completed the game yet but playing Sea of Stars got me thinking about this game a lot, because a lot of what I loved in Sea of Stars was done here first, and in some cases even better. But I’m highly confident nothing between now and the end of the game is going to change what I’ve talked about here.
It’s gonna be a busy month ahead with reviews and impressions for Spider-Man 2, Forza, another indie I’m excited about called The Lamplighters League, and more, so hit that subscribe button if any of that sounds good to you.
I’ve mentioned in other videos that I didn’t play JRPGs until this year. I actually started Chained Echoes in December of 2022 when it launched on Game Pass, and I’ve been playing it off and on all year. In the meantime, I’ve reviewed Octopath Traveler 2, Sea of Stars, and I’ve even started playing through the original Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster, and Chrono Trigger. So, yeah, I’m all over the place. But the point is even though Chained Echoes was on my backlog and kept getting shelved for newer, shinier games, this has been the year of JRPGs for me personally, and I think of Chained Echoes as the one that opened the floodgates. It’s so good, it makes me nostalgic for games I didn’t even play.
Matthias Linda obviously loves the genre and owes that love to a pantheon of classic that inspired this game. I would love for him to know that what those games were for him, is what this game is for me. It goes without saying at this point, but I give it a thumbs up and I highly recommend it for story-driven, strategic gameplay.
Check out my channel for other reviews, I play everything from AAA shooters to indie gems like this one, so poke around.
