- Game: Matthias Linda's Chained Echoes.
- Release Month: December.
- Quick Look: N/A.
- Started: 30/01.
- Completed: ???.
I wish I could say I saved this one for last because I had the highest hopes for it or was intending to end on a showstopper, but really it's because there was no way I was going to finish a decently-sized RPG and still have room for all of the other nineteen games on the GOTY list I'd been gradually building since the start of December. So I figured I might as well get as far as I could in whatever time I had left. (Dunno what this inside baseball is in aid of, but you gotta start a review somehow.) Chained Echoes released very late last year and saw an unexpected amount of attention from this site and others given it's a 16-bit JRPG throwback that usually doesn't register for those outside the RPG sphere: there have been plenty of great ones popping out of the Indie circuit for the last decade and change, though most have had to wrestle their way through a crowd of uninspired RPG Maker projects someone brazenly stuck a price tag onto in order to gain the attention they deserved. Chained Echoes, conversely, is a really sharp looking game with some remarkable depth to its character development and combat: I'd easily stick it in the same conversation as an Ara Fell or anything from Zeboyd.
Chained Echoes sees a disparate group of adventurers brought together by common purpose, working to curtail a recently-reignited war on their embattled home continent of Valandis while also looking into a mysterious artifact called a Grimoire that more or less nuked a major city and may be linked to the sudden rise in monster sightings across the world. I'm not too far into the game after just two days of playing so I can't speak much more to the story (not that I'd drop a bunch of spoilers regardless), though I'm far enough out of the learning stages of the game now that I feel confident enough in speaking to its strengths as a RPG with a healthy dose of compelling features at its core. We'll start with the combat: while your active party can only include four people, there's a feature where you can tag in a second character for each slot that effectively gives you eight members to work with. Tagging is often necessary as it helps rescue characters with low health or TP (technique points, used for skills and spells) or those with a specific status effect that prevents them from acting on their turn. It means you can build strategies around characters that are best employed early or infrequently, like those capable of dropping TP-expensive buffs and debuffs, and switch them for those that can dish out damage or can tank same over a long period. The combat system also has something called Overdrive and Overheat, the gauge for which moves up for most attacks both incoming and outgoing: once you pass into the green zone of this gauge you enter Overdrive, which improves your stats and halves the TP cost for skills making it a very desirable state to occupy. If the gauge keeps filling, however, you'll reach the equally disadvantageous Overheat scenario which greatly reduces the party's efficiency and defense values. The way to keep the gauge in the green is to either regularly tag in characters, waste a turn with the defend command, or use a type of skill that the Overdrive gauge has highlighted (provided your current character has one that qualifies; seems prudent to ensure characters have a selection of active skill types). Last, because every battle heals all HP and TP at its conclusion, you're encouraged to use all your best skills to quickly end battles; that it becomes harder to keep yourself from Overheating as battles wear on also contributes to this need for expediency.
Outside of battle, the game has several carrots on sticks to keep you occupied: there's the relatively in-depth gear upgrading system that requires specific crafting materials and gems you can slot into gear for additional effects; there's a Rewards Board which works like a mini achievement system with its own set of prizes; and there are character-specific skill trees that offer active skills to incorporate into your limited repertoire in combinations that make the most sense for that character's role in the party, passive boosts that grow stronger as the game continues or have conditional uses that also have a limited number of slots in which they can be equipped, and straight stat boosts that take permanent effect immediately. The game also has countless minor novel features that all contribute to a certain philosophy behind its approach. One such idea is removing XP from the game: instead, you can level up characters using "grimoire shards" that are doled out sparingly and usually only after story critical boss fights or other significant targets. This makes grinding and the concomitant anxiety around not being levelled enough (or perhaps too overlevelled if you've been running around side-questin') for the next serious encounter a non-issue, though the game still has plenty of farming for drops if you really want to fall into that rabbit hole.
I suppose we need to talk about the Yiazmat in the room: Chained Echoes rather cheekily takes after Final Fantasy XII in more ways than I can chalk up to simple coincidence alone. For one, both games start with a tutorial-heavy prologue which involves a military operation in a foreign city that goes disastrously awry, only to jump ahead in time and space to a bustling and relatively peaceful trade hub city where a ragtag group find themselves working together out of necessity while snooping around the royal palace and its treasury. Your resulting party after these early scenes includes the following: an incognito princess, two airship mercs with one being the older mentor of the other, a self-reliant female rogue with a mysterious past, an old bearded guy who knows more the current fragile political climate than he lets on, and a comparatively unimportant blond hanger-on whom I can't seem to shake. The similarities aren't just narrative in nature either as the game uses FFXII's loot system, the only other game to do so as far as I'm aware, where hocking all your vendor trash at a merchant has the possibility of opening up new items to purchase depending on the type of items and their quantities: by taking a few notes while in the shop interface, you can work towards some promising "deals" as they're called by aiming for drops from certain enemies while out in the field. There's also the "Rewards Board" that offers prizes for filling its grid of nodes, most of which involve fighting monsters and bosses, locating treasure and hidden caches, completing side-quests, and exploring areas in full. That this Rewards Board resembles a board game in much the same way the License Grid does is probably not a coincidence either. Yet I can't stay mad at a plucky 16-bit throwback that has chosen to liberally borrow from one of the better Final Fantasy games out there, especially given one of that game's themes was audacious thefts, so it's done nothing but endear itself to me further.
I'm going to have to play a lot more of Chained Echoes before I can form a more learned take—I hear it even gets kinda Suikoden-y later on with recruitable NPCs and your own base of operations, and we all know how much Giant Bomb loves Suikoden—but so far it's been nothing short of impressive. I imagine it'll keep me company for much of February to follow, but its tentative placing on my final (for now) 2022 GOTY list will have to be more a leap of faith than anything concrete. One thing is certain even after this amount of progress: this Matthias Linda guy, who clearly poured so much of himself into this game over some seven years of development, evidently knows his way around this genre. For that reason and more I imagine my faith will not be misplaced.
Current GOTY
- Elden Ring
- Tinykin
- Hardspace: Shipbreaker
- PowerWash Simulator
- Vampire Survivors
- Chained Echoes
- Norco
- Citizen Sleeper
- Tunic
- Signalis
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge
- Return to Monkey Island
- HoloCure
- Nobody Saves the World
- Escape Academy
- Beacon Pines
- Ghost Song
- Infernax
- Super Kiwi 64
- Immortality
At any rate, that's going to have to be the end of Go! Go! GOTY! for another year, or at least until December 2023 when I do all this again with another free Game Pass trial. I'll get busy putting together my final GOTY list but in the meantime I offer my thanks to anyone who read any of these, provided feedback in the comments, or—dare I even toot my own horn by saying this—felt compelled to seek out any of these games to add them to their own tardy Games of the Year lists after registering my effusive praise for what has proven to be a pretty solid year for the ol' vidya. Here's hoping 2023 is even better (and I'll for sure remember to try some Hi-Fi Rush next month to see if we're off to a good start).
Log in to comment