Have you ever read an awful fanfic where every bit of prose is incredibly terse to hide the writer's limited vocabulary and every line of dialog is comprised entirely of clichés and cutesy turns of phrase and references because it's all shat out by a 14-year-old who thinks getting a hundred views means they're now God's gift to the art of writing? Well, Chained Echoes does something nobody ever asked for and brings that lovely brand of inflated ego to the world of gaming. Don't expect it to provide any decent characterization whatsoever, because every single one is just dropped into the narrative with two sentences laying out their motivations and personality traits in plain text, and that's pretty much 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 transcends its stock characters and storyline on the merits of its gameplay variety, brisk pacing with minimal grinding, top-notch presentation and moments of ingenious atmosphere and cinematography that set a standard for years to come, whereas Echoes just brands itself as a 'callback' so it never has to make any effort to stand out. Likewise, the whole script is a mishmash of plot points, scenes and characters from smarter, better games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy and Xenogears with no thought spared for narrative cohesion or logic whatsoever. Its 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, dungeons that only exist to pad the runtime with tedious overlong corridors rather than provide any decent puzzles or interesting battles, mountains of dry exposition to explain all its 'deep' concepts, 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; you do more when it's in the green and 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 - another trite, hackneyed outing made to milk nostalgia for 'the classics' with no appreciation of what makes them such. It never once improves on or puts any new twist on the elements present in its
inspirations, and there's no satire, subversion or even self-awareness
about any of the tropes it retreads, just empty imitation. It heaps on bad dialog trying much too hard to sound witty and profound and
hopes you won't notice that there's no original thought on display anywhere in the whole game; just smug hackery masquerading as a tribute to what came before. Like so many 'homage' games it fails to recognize that '90s RPGs got popular not from having a particular look or vibe, but because they improved on their predecessors and dared to break new ground in the realms of gameplay design, character building and storytelling. Hell, there's a good reason Final Fantasy VII is still a classic and XIII is regarded as a cruel joke. Final Fantasy VII integrated a fantastic cutting edge presentation, some creative new gameplay mechanics, high concept storytelling and memorable characters into a format that, up to this point, was very formulaic and starting to get stale, and it did it all without ever coming across as pretentious. It respected its audience's intelligence by leaving them with some interesting mysteries and moral quandaries to consider and letting its fantastic, layered characters carry the story rather than shovel-feeding you dry exposition to make sure you 'get' the creators' vision. There's good reasons the game still resonates with audiences to this day. By contrast XIII is the prime example of developer arrogance, thinking shiny textures and flashy animations will carry them to more fan acclaim in spite of a lack of effort on every other front. Cardboard cutout characters, dumbed down inane gameplay, countless plot holes, a terribly presented story and grating, twee dialog through it all. It's the worst kind of insult to not just its parent franchise, but to the fans that made it a hit in the first place. That's why Chained Echoes fails too - it's another smarmy self-proclaimed 'genius' thinking you owe him the same respect as the creators of the classics simply because he made a cynical carbon copy of their work. 'Respect' of course meaning piles of money and little gold statues for their shelves, because material wealth and popularity and prestige are the only things people like this think hold any true value. And of course, more is always better; having a bigger portfolio and more fans yes-men and trophies of your "conquests" always means you're got more talent and intelligence and morality than all of your 'competitors' with less, right?
Instead of rewarding more plagiarism by yet another visionary who claims they're going to "save" the RPG genre by making it even more sterile and stagnant, just play some of the games it's blatantly stealing from instead; 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 set themselves apart too, play Symphony of War, Ikenfell, Deltarune or Sea of Stars instead. But hey, at least this game's title is apt for a game with design sensibilities chained to the worst kind of proud mediocrity and a plot that's an 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