Have you ever seen an obnoxious movie or TV show where the entire script sounds like one person bouncing terrible one-liners off themselves, with every character using the exact same limited vocabulary and snappy speech patterns and cutesy turns of phrase and snappy one-liners and empty platitudes over and over for the entire runtime because it's painfully clear it's written by a single smug douche who thinks they're some kind of genius? That's Chained Echoes - the biggest pile of subpar sitcom slop this side of the Big Bang Theory. I'm just surprised they didn't leave in long pauses after every line expecting you to laugh or gasp or cheer; that's about the only way it could be any more self-fellating. Don't expect any decent character building either, because every one is just dropped into the narrative with a 3x5 card of flat explosion laying out their motivations and personality traits in plain text, and that's all the development they ever get. Guess what: it was a lazy way to establish character in Final Fantasy VI 28 years ago, and it remains so today. The difference is that VI transcended its stock characters and storylines on the merits of its brisk filler-light gameplay, top-notch presentation and having moments of ingenious writing and cinematography, whereas Echoes just labels itself as a 'tribute' or 'callback' to justify copy-pasting from smarter, better games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy and Xenogears while sparing no thought for narrative cohesion whatsoever. It's design sensibilities are firmly trapped in dated cliché too; there are tons of time wasting click-on-everything-to-find-the-arbitrary-plot-flag segments, obnoxiously drawn-out dungeons that only exist to fill time rather than provide legitimate challenge, and huge labyrinthine towns with nobody and nothing interesting to interact with; just bland NPCs who wander randomly and repeat inanities forever. Battles move fast yet still feel monotonous and slow, constantly pitting you against damage-sponge enemies that take dozens of special move hits to kill. You automatically get healed to full after every battle too, which removes any element of resource conservation. The only thing that saves the combat system from being completely brainless is a meter that fills as you deal damage and causes you to take more when it climbs into the red, but all this means is that rather than spamming your strongest attack until you win, you just find one effective attack/defend/heal pattern and spam it until you win.
Chained Echoes might look and sound a bit better than a stock-asset RPG Maker game, but at its core that's exactly what it is - yet another forgettable, low-effort outing that hides under the umbrella of 'homage' to justify stuffing itself with bad pacing, boring clichés, dated design elements and stolen characterizations and plot points while contributing nothing worthwhile of its own. And I do mean stolen; it never satirizes, subverts or even shows self-awareness about any of the tropes it's retreading, just copies. It's theft perpetrated not out of reverence for '90s RPGs, but solely to skim a quick buck off gamers nostalgic for an earlier era while propping up the author's own lackluster writing and design skills in the process. So instead of rewarding yet more plagiarism by another hack looking to exploit your nostalgia for personal gain, just play the games it's blatantly lifting from, nearly all of which are still available today for well under this game's $30 price point. Or if you want some fun, strongly written, well-paced and mechanically polished indie RPGs that actually pay tribute to the classics while doing much to themselves apart too, play Symphony of War, Ikenfell, Deltarune, Sea of Stars or Horizon's Gate instead. But hey, at least the title is apt for a game with design sensibilities chained to the worst kind of arrogant mediocrity and a plot that's a faint echo of scripts from much better games of the past.
Publisher: Deck13 Spotlight
Platform: PS4, PS5, PC, Linux, Max OS, XBox One, XBox Series, Switch
Released: 2022