Chained Echoes

Its a solid jrpg with a customisable difficulty allowing one to play the game at their own pace. A robust world full of interesting enemies and a quest board that you can collect from at any time anywhere. Along with excellent boss fights bar one. Tons of hidden secrets and treasure. A very unique world. Now a here is a few gripes with the game. - the stories pacing is not great. - the main combat mechanic known as the gauge is underutilized in most regards. Only 1 of the characters has abilities pertaining to the gauge, and while their are a few bosses that mess around with its not much. -when a character gets knocked out you need to revive them to access your backrow for that slot which is a major hindrance. -their are too many characters and the story feels it with many characters not getting much time to develop, your stuck at a 6 for a while but end up with 12 characters by the end of the game and their just back row fodder. -many of the characters have gimmicks and situational a...

Pros: Art is great, I really enjoyed the visuals. The story is engaging and feels larger than the characters. Monsters are fun and unique Switching between characters in battle is a really cool idea and leads to fun strategy decisions. Cons: Really don't like the overdrive system. It feels clunky and seemed to only serve to lengthen battles. The story switches between so many characters that it loses it's focus. Didn't feel like I could grind to gain more power and I found that I was missing it. The upgrade system is really bland. Maybe I just haven't gotten far enough though. There are parts of the story that seem to just drag on. Objectives aren't always clear and it can take some time to figure out what to do next. Not impossible by any means but I found it was taking me out of the immersion.

This game has probably the most long-winded story-build-up I have ever seen. Made me lose all interest at some point. I mean the imagery is obviously very sweet and you can eventually specialize your characters but it was too much rail-roading for me. Kind of easy to lose track of who is aligned with whom in the story as well because of too much info-dumping in the beginning.

The game is OK. I am not a fan of the battle system. Some of the tricky battles, like the one where you are riding on rails, is more annoying than anything. I have tried to push through the game a few times now, first on gamepass, and everyone that liked RPGs raved how good it is so I sat down and gave it an honest 10 or so hours on Steam and just found myself not having fun.

[h3]Story: 7[/h3] [h3]Gameplay: 8[/h3] [h3]Overall: 7.5/10[/h3] A disjointed and very random prologue, a climax that I enjoyed very much peaking at the halfway point, and finally a very mediocre ending. The party's characters had a great chance to be amazing with very interesting backstories made for all of them, but they were explored only on the surface, leading to a disappointing conclusion to each and every one of their stories. The game has nice gameplay mechanics when it comes to on-foot combat, but sky armor combat is borderline horrible and lacks the customization its on-foot counterpart has in abundance. Some of the content it takes from Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger/Cross and other classic JRPGs can be quite a shameless rip-off and sometimes borders on insulting.

This game is incredibly good and surprising. It perfectly blends FFVI, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears. The combat system is very entertaining, and I like it because you have to use a lot of buffs and debuffs, at the same time you have to be aware of the overdrive. I haven't finished it yet, but the more I progress, the more I fall in love with the game. I hope one day it will be translated into Spanish and more people can play it. The music, OMG the music!!!!

This game would feel at home in the golden JRPG era of the SNES; actually you can feel it was heavily inspired by it (e.g. FF6, Chrono Trigger: it even has a fair at the start). Chained Echoes is stunning with a memorable OST, and rewards exploration and tactical play in battles. It also runs perfectly on Steam Deck with a ~5 hours battery life. Two small drawbacks for me: - I liked the game pre mech armor better, exploration and battle both felt more natural - The crystal and upgrade mechanics are a very cool equipment customization touch, but it makes finding a new piece of gear frustrating as you know you'll have to wait for an anvil and go through the tedious unsocketing/resocketing process before using it. This already happens by early/mid game if you use the mechanic seriously (which you should because crystals are insanely powerful)

My hats off to you, Umami Tiger (Matthias Linda), for a great game. I just finished the DLC and I really hope there will be another one to finish the story. I loved the story, characters, puzzles, games, scenery, battle play, and the reward board. Thank you, from The_RPG_Fan_Addict Gotta love RPGs

Uhh, gave it a shot, art is great, story is somewhat generic (I'm like 6 hours in so maybe it gets better, idk), but that overdrive system, man.... Would probably finish the game if this system is not present, but I'm not enjoying battles at all. Sorry, thumbs down from me, dropping the game, just because of that overdrive system, everything else seems cool but battles are just making me frustrated.

It's not perfect, but it has charm. A few story details had really good payoffs, too.