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 stolen 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 characters in Final Fantasy VI 28 years ago, and it remains so today. The difference is that VI transcended its stock characters and plot on the merits of its brisk filler-light gameplay, top-notch presentation and moments of ingenious writing, whereas Echoes just copy-pastes from other, smarter, better games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy and Xenogears while sparing no thought for their pacing, strategic bent or narrative cohesion whatsoever. There are tons of time wasting click-on-everything-to-flip-the-arbitrary-plot-flag segments, obnoxiously boring and drawn-out dungeons, 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, 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. Basically, Chained Echoes is yet another "homage" game that uses that label as a free license to stuff itself with bad pacing, dated design tropes and stolen characterizations and plot points while contributing nothing worthwhile of its own. And that's the key word - stolen. There's no layers of depth or fresh twists to anything it does, and it never satirizes or even shows the slightest hint of self-awareness about any of the clichés it retreads; it's just theft, plain and simple. 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 hacky writing and design skills in the process. So instead of rewarding yet more plagiarism masquerading as homage by someone whose love of classic RPGs only stretches as far as they can exploit your memories of them for personal gain, just play a few of the games it's blatantly lifting from; nearly all of which are 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 pay tribute to the classics while setting 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 smug mediocrity and a plot that's a faint echo of scripts from much better games.
Publisher: Deck13 Spotlight
Platform: PS4, PS5, PC, Linux, Max OS, XBox One, XBox Series, Switch
Released: 2022