Have you ever read a shitty fanfic where every bit of prose is incredibly terse to hide the writer's limited vocabulary and every line of dialog tries to jam in cutesy turns of phrase and one-liners and clichés 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 tarpit of smug hackery 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 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 ascends beyond its stock characters and storyline on the merits of its brisk filler-light game design, 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 try. Likewise, the whole script is a copy-pasted 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, drawn-out dungeons that only exist to pad the runtime with tedious overlong corridors rather than provide any decent puzzles or interesting battles, 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 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.
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 forgettable low-effort outing that just apes all its ideas from better games. It never once satirizes, subverts or even shows self-awareness about any of the tropes it retreads, just copies, leeching off nostalgia while propping up the author's lackluster writing skills in the process. Hm, there's a word for using someone else's ideas without permission or even attribution, what was it again? Oh yeah... theft. So instead of rewarding more plagiarism by yet another self-proclaimed messiah who thinks 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 the title is apt for a game with design sensibilities chained to the worst kind of arrogant 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