Have you ever seen an obnoxious movie or TV show where the entire script sounds like one person bouncing terrible one-liners off themselves, with every character using the exact same limited vocabulary and snappy speech patterns and cutesy turns of phrase and stolen jokes and empty platitudes over and over for the entire runtime because it's painfully clear it's written by a single smug douche who thinks they're some kind of genius? That's Chained Echoes - the biggest pile of self-indulgent sitcom-caliber slop this side of the Big Bang Theory. I'm just surprised they didn't leave in long pauses after every line expecting a laugh track; that's about the only way it could be any more self-fellating. Characters are just dropped into the narrative with a 3x5 card of flat explosion 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 characters and their motives in Final Fantasy VI 28 years ago, and it remains so today. The game's not any fun to play either, just cribbing elements from games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy and Xenogears while sparing no thought for their mechanical cohesiveness, strategic bent or pacing whatsoever. There are tons of time wasting click-on-everything-to-find-the-arbitrary-plot-flag segments, obnoxiously boring and drawn-out dungeons, and huge labyrinthine towns with nobody and nothing interesting to interact with; just the same old bland NPCs who wander randomly and repeat inanities forever. Battles move fast yet still feel drawn-out and tedious, with your options constantly restricted at the whim of an incomprehensible meter and every single battle pitting you against damage-sponge enemies that take dozens of special move hits to kill, which is clearly by design since you get healed to full between fights.
Basically, this is yet another "homage game" that just uses that label as a free license to waste your time with dated design tropes and steal characterizations and plot points wholesale while contributing nothing worthwhile of its own. And that's the key word - steal. There's no layers of depth or fresh twists to anything it does, and none of its elements are approached in a self-aware manner to mock its derivativeness or even genre clichés as a whole; it's just theft. Theft perpetrated not out of any genuine reverence for classic RPGs, but solely to skim a quick buck off gamers nostalgic for an earlier era while propping up the author's own lackluster writing and design skills in the process. So instead of rewarding yet more plagiarism with a topping of personal vanity by someone whose love of classic RPGs only stretches as far as they can exploit your memories of them for personal gain, just save your money for a few of the games it's blatantly lifting from; nearly all of which are available today for well under this game's $30 price point. Or if you want some fun, strongly written, well-paced indie RPGs that pay tribute to the classics while setting 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 smug mediocrity and a plot that's a faint echo of several scripts from much better games.
Publisher: Deck13 Spotlight
Platform: PS4, PS5, PC, Linux, Max OS, XBox One, XBox Series, Switch
Released: 2022