Have you ever seen an obnoxious movie or TV show where every character uses the exact same limited vocabulary and rapid-fire speech pattern and they all try to jam as many cutesy turns of phrase and one-liners and clichés and references as they can into every line of dialog because it's painfully clear it's all written by a single guy who thinks they're God's gift to the art of writing? That's Chained Echoes - the biggest tarpit of smug hack writing this side of the Big Bang Theory. I'm just surprised they didn't leave in long pauses after every line expecting you to laugh or gasp or cheer; that's about the only way it could be any more self-fellating. Don't expect any decent characterization either, 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 transcended its stock characters and storyline on the merits of its brisk filler-light gameplay, top-notch presentation and having moments of ingenious atmosphere and cinematography, whereas Echoes just labels itself as a 'tribute' or 'callback' to justify never attempting to have any ideas of its own. The whole script is a copy-pasted mishmash 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 fill time rather than provide 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 ideas from better games to turn a quick profit. It never once satirizes, subverts or even shows self-awareness about any of the tropes it's retreading, just copies and pastes, leeching off nostalgia while propping up the author's lackluster writing and design skills in the process. So instead of rewarding more plagiarism by yet another self-proclaimed prodigy, just play some of the games it's blatantly lifting 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 themselves apart too, play Symphony of War, Ikenfell, Deltarune, Sea of Stars or Horizon's Gate 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