I am Setsuna markets itself as a throwback but also feels like a cheaply made game; a (literally) pale simulacrum of the older games it is trying to invoke. This sense of cheapness is dispersed through every aspect of the game, with the exception of the combat system, which is complex and polished enough to feel legitimately “old-school” instead of “old-school, but shoddier.” That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, I very much enjoyed it overall and would recommend it to others with some caveats, but it feels, in terms of production values, more like a proof of concept than a completed retail product. It’s like one of those real-estate model homes where you go in and at first it looks like a finished house but none of the plumbing works and all the fruit is wax and you realize this is just a cheap façade to try to demonstrate the idea of something more expensive and complete.

So why is it still a good game despite all that?

Because it has heart.

Tokyo RPG Factory may have a name that implies soullessness, but their first game is anything but. It is clearly a labor of love, made by people who really wanted to make a new JRPG in the old style and weren’t going to let budget limits or anything else stand in their way. They may have been restricted to one relatively small main land-mass covered in snow and been forced to recycle their assets throughout their game, but they were still making the kind of game they wanted to and it definitely shows. Not at first perhaps; the first five or ten hours of the game feel sparse to the point where I was worried I wasn’t going to like it, but as the story and the game unfurl they show a steady hand, and the moments of flash and spectacle are saved for the points in the story where they matter most. By the time I got to the end of the game I didn’t want it to be over, and characters who started off as dry clichés had become…somewhat charming clichés. It’s a JRPG. You’re not going to get Garrus Vakarian or Nadine Ross here.

I Am Setsuna may not have the budget of a fully featured RPG but damn it the developers were going to try their best regardless, and the fact that they actually care about what they’re making shows through in every aspect of the game.

Every RPG needs a premise, and I am Setsuna’s seems like a reasonably good one. The world is overrun by monsters, humans are practicing ritual sacrifice to try and keep them at bay, and you’re a mercenary hired to kill the chosen sacrifice prior to her completing the ritual. Within the opening hour you have, of course, been roped into protecting the sacrifice rather than killing her, and off you go on your great journey, fighting through monster-infested environments and meeting “colorful” NPCs along the way, as you power up your party with levels and equipment and learn the secrets behind what’s really going on in the world.

At first this seems like a legitimate throw-back to old school RPG storytelling, but if you actually think about the great RPGs that stand out from the 16 and 32 bit eras, there was always a lot more to them than this. JRPGs are known for their convoluted and silly stories, and people complained about them, but they added a lot of character and spectacle to the game. By the time the Playstation rolled around the Final Fantasy games had absolutely bonkers nutso stories involving time travel and amnesia and all kinds of weirdness. Chrono Trigger (on the SNES) is the game that I am Setsuna is explicitly trying to reference with both its marketing and its combat system and is all about time travel. It has all kinds of paradoxes and butterfly effects woven into its story, which also takes you throughout wildly different time periods and features weird characters like a damn frog knight, and many possible endings. Sure, you had your Plain Jane hero’s quest RPGs, but those tended to be more B-level games; often seen as filler between the big meaningful releases. I Am Setsuna is much simpler than the games from the heyday of JRPGs.

I am Setsuna’s simple story told in a straightforward manner feels both like a stripped back “acoustic” version of the great JRPGs of the past and a way to avoid the expense that comes with telling a super complicated crazy story. In Final Fantasy VIII, a game I detest but that may represent a high watermark in JRPG bonkers storytelling, the opening sequences take you to a “test” facility to fight a giant robot boss, a huge special forces base where you train and adventure, and then all over the place. It is bursting with diverse places, people to see, systems (including a complex trading card game scattered throughout the main game) and so very many secrets. It has lots of CG cut scenes, unique character models you don’t see again, and wild environments.

I Am Setsuna, in contrast, sets you trudging through the snow from tiny village to tiny village, fighting a dozen or so simple monsters and tossing a moderate boss out from time to time to keep things from getting too stale. It doesn’t have any stunning FMV or even big in-engine set pieces. It doesn’t have a bunch of minigames and alternate modes. It doesn’t even have a lot of areas that aren’t required for main story progression, and the ones it does have are rather small and barren. Each village has a few houses you can enter and a handful of NPCs to talk to, with maybe 2 to 3 who actually feature into the game in any meaningful way. The sidequests and exploration are concentrated at the end of the game and are very missable (which is a shame, since they do a lot to flesh out the world and the characters) and there are no minigames to play. All the merchants cluster together in each town, and they all have the same character models and names, with no unique dialog or flavor. It’s a sparse and pared back world.

That goes for the visuals and the music too. The aesthetic could be described as “high res PS2 game” with relatively low poly counts and not very detailed textures. The characters themselves are pseudo-chibi style, with big heads that verge on being ugly to me, and, for some reason, no feet. If you told me this game came out in 2003 I would believe you. The game also takes place in a snow-covered landscape so there isn’t much variety to the visuals. There’s a forest environment, a mountain environment, a beach environment, and a cave environment and they repeat throughout, with a couple more areas thrown in. The towns are somewhat visually distinct but with lots of clearly re-used assets and not a ton of character. It is a cheap looking game. Character and monster models repeat in different colored variations, and much earlier than you expect. Also, I repeat, the characters have no feet. That’s really weird and off-putting to me. At least there’s a coherent visual style that shows that whoever made this game’s visuals did have a vision and worked hard to achieve it, which does help significantly. It looks cheap, but it also looks like someone cared about it and had an aesthetic they were going for, and I can appreciate that.

The music fares better. The entire soundtrack is piano focused, as opposed to orchestrated, but it’s good, enjoyable, music and it matches the visual aesthetic well, even though the choice to focus on a single instrument was almost certainly driven by limited budget. The music gets intense during fight scenes, and wistful during emotional moments in the story, and while it’s not one of the best soundtracks in an RPG it’s not bad and is at least distinctive. The choice to set the game in a snow-covered sparsely populated world makes everything fit a bit better than if we were looking at lush green environments. Spartan works in a story about the frozen wastes.

I Am Setsuna’s writing starts out not great, but improves as the game goes, and the characters may be stereotypes but they are at least distinct and got off a few lines here and there that successfully made me chuckle or manipulated my emotions. Dialog choices aren’t meaningful but they do the trick of letting you feel like you have some agency over the main character. You go through the various RPG tropes you’ve seen a million times but they’re well-worn for a reason, and for someone who hasn’t played a JRPG in years (like me) it’s kind of nice to see the old stories retold, and there are some late twists and character shading that make I Am Setsuna’s story above average compares to the era of games it’s referencing.

In addition to a good story and some very enjoyable music, I Am Setsuna also features an excellent combat system. It’s clearly modeled after Chrono Trigger, with an active time battle system (that can pause or not as you select commands) and combo attacks, as well as some variety to character and party builds. It’s nothing super special, but it’s polished and fun and I enjoyed fights from the start of the game to the end. As in Chrono Trigger enemies are visible on the screen and can be avoided in most scenarios, which is nice when you’re low on items towards the beginning of the game.

The combat system also benefits from the game being fairly difficult. I don’t know if I’d call it a hard game (I finished it without TOO much frustration) but your characters are never more than a few blows away from death when facing an appropriately leveled enemy. Healing is essential and I never found a character build where I could reliably tank enemies for more than a turn or two. Bosses can be downright challenging, and I had to retry a few more than once before I found a strategy that worked. Having a fun combat system that also has battles that actually feel dangerous shows that the game was carefully balanced and made by people who actually cared about the players having fun. Also, grinding is unnecessary. I did a little bit of grinding (mostly in the form of tracking down optional chests or little sidequesty things) but I never felt I had to, and I definitely never spent hours fighting the same enemies over and over to get appropriately leveled. Experience is also shared with the whole party, which is both good and bad. Good because you don’t need to grind up individual characters, and bad because it means that you can more or less ignore certain characters if you want to. It’s a nod to modern game design and shows that while I Am Setsuna is a conscious throwback it isn’t always stuck in the past.

Sometimes it is, though. I am Setsuna features several annoyances that shouldn’t be in a 2016 game. There are places where there is way too much distance between save spots, moving the game from “exciting combat where you could actually die” to “feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach because you don’t want to lose your progress.” These come close to the end of the game and aren’t SO bad, but they shouldn’t exist in 2016. You simply can’t ask players to go 45 minutes or an hour between saves. It’s not okay.

There are also some unfair bits where enemies or optional bosses you’ve never fought before will just tear you up quick-like, and there’s no real way to know beforehand how to deal with these guys. You have to just watch their attacks as they smash your party up, and then figure out a new load out to bring with you next time. The game also has a bunch of cool sidequests, sort of like loyalty missions from Mass Effect, that it saves until the VERY END when you’re kind of done and just want to kill the boss and move on. The missions feature some of the best writing in the game and offer real insight into both characters and the world, but they’re both only accessible at the end AND hidden behind very specific criteria (talk to person X with person Y in your party with no hint.) This may be a reference to the secret characters and other stuff from those old PlaysStation RPGs but it is an awful decision. In a game where there isn’t a lot of optional content hiding the best of it in this manner is just the worst parts of old-school transported into the present. Thumbs down on that (though thumbs up on the quests themselves.)

So who is I Am Setsuna for? Well for an old man who used to play JRPGs in the paleolithic era like me it’s a nice retro-feeling game that features some modern conveniences and is a reasonable length (probably 20-25 hours, as opposed to the 80 hour behemoths most JRPGs are today.) You get a satisfying, digestible, not too frustrating experience and if you can deal with its kind of ugly graphics and other flaws I’d recommend it for that person if they have a particular JRPG craving. It definitely reminded me of Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, with the victory music sounding VERY FF and the game playing like Chrono Trigger (and making a very specific reference to that game in the dialog.)

For someone who wants a lengthy game experience on the Switch (where I played; it has decent performance though I did see some screen tearing, which shouldn’t happen in an RPG and especially not an RPG with simple graphics like these) it fits the bill fine if you like JRPGs. It’s a JPRG-ass JRPG, though, and if that’s not your genre then you will not like this game.

If you’re a JRPG newcomer I’m tempted to recommend I Am Setsuna to you…but I don’t think I can. While I was playing I kept thinking of that old Final Fantasy Mystic Quest game, AKA Babby’s 1^st RPG. I Am Setsuna is linear and simple to understand, without any of the baroque bullcrap that has infested the genre. It has clear systems and a manageable length. Unlike Mystic Quest it actually is somewhat challenging and has a good story and moments that will make you smile or feel a little sad.

It would be perfect, except…It’s just a little too sparse. JRPGs have long relied on graphical spectacle and sheer amount of stuff to draw players in and I Am Setsuna just doesn’t have enough of that stuff. The map doesn’t open up until very late, and even when it does there isn’t much to do. The game never qualifies as eye candy, even in its weirder areas. Exploration isn’t rewarded and the game is a little bit inaccessible because of it. Playing I Am Setsuna as your first RPG would be like listening to Bon Iver as your first pop music. You need to know what the sparse, stripped back version is referencing to fully appreciate it.

Still, I enjoyed I Am Setsuna. It’s a cheaply made game but it was made by people who care about their craft. I can’t give it a full-throated recommendation but if it’s something you have been tempted to play but haven’t quite gotten to yet, I recommend making the time for it. It’s an enjoyable, melancholy tale and a solid new entry into a genre that’s been on life-support (or changed beyond recognition) for a long time. I’m looking forward to this studio’s recently announced second game, and I hope they can make something with just as much love but a little bit more resources behind it.