Chained Echoes

It saddens me a little to give this game a negative review since it has a lot of potential to be a great game. But, unfortunately, after 6 hours of gameplay, just a quick reflection told me I really hadn’t had any fun with the game yet so I'm calling it quits and providing my thoughts. To start off with the good: the game has a simple but pleasing pixel art ascetic, plenty of nice sound effects and music, an engaging story and a variety of interesting battle mechanics. If the game gets you going, I can fully see all the reasons you'd end up playing all the way through. For me, though, the game lacked an interesting gameplay loop. I think the core 'overdrive' mechanic was intended to be that sort of special sauce that was suppose to keep the combat interesting and more engaging by making combat choices have more impact. Unfortunately, I found it more frustrating than fun by way of reducing my agency of choice rather than increasing it. I was often required to make boring or sub-optimal choices rather than doing what would otherwise be the 'correct' option if I wasn’t trying to balance the bar. When you cycle around and come up to a point where you either have to use a steal action on an opponent with nothing to steal or take an extra 3 hits worth of damage from the opponents, it just felt very meh. The game doesn't carry any damage or effects on after battle, with the exception of items used. This means every fight is an isolated capsule of an almost mini-game like feel. Since there are basically no consequence for preforming poorly and, if you lose, you just jump back to right before starting the fight, there is very little sense of danger. It makes the game feel very incoherent, like I was just hopping from activity island to activity island. The reward for victory also doesn't equate to the effort you often have to put in: a little popup of '+3' that goes into a hidden pool and maybe an extra crafting material or something. No fanfare, no watching your exp bar creep ever closer to greater strength. Heck, you just watch your downed party members hop back up like they just finished with their power nap. You're also going to lose a lot. Enemies in the same area can go from cakewalk to party wipe with no notion of which is which until you try the fight (and not the unique creatures either). There's a rose enemy and a frog enemy in the early zones that will wipe the floor with you right after you come out of a fight with some wooly turtles you can basically just hold X to win against. It just had me thinking '[i]so, is this going to be a reasonable fight or a dumb fight this time?[/i]' every time I started to see a new sprite on screen. The game also has a lot of complicated systems that don’t read well and each time one of the systems is introduced, the game hits you with a 5-page tutorial to read and you're expected to understand and memorize because it'll be important for the rest of the game. The overdrive system, for example, has actions that push the meter forward and push the meter back. Yellow actions push the meter back so you can keep it in balance but these are actions with yellow colored [i]text[/i], not actions with yellow colored [i]icons[/i]. Which actions are 'yellow' changes each round and, if you forget that next time you sit down to play, you're very likely to lose your next fight and need to go back to the menu to refresh your memory. Same with the gem system: they have a size and a purity and you can combine them but you can only combine them in a specific way and you only get bonuses if they hit a certain threshold and if you combine a bigger gem with a smaller gem, it size category changes but not if you combine two gems of the same size and they can only be slotted into a specific type of equipment but you can upgrade equipment so you'll have more slots, but be careful not to upgrade too much cause it uses up your rare crafting materials which, by the way, you'll probably need to sell some of to merchants to unlock special deals! Oh, and did I mention the primary way you get gems has a special boost function you need to remember about too? The game has [i]'depth'[/i] but the depth felt… shallow? Like systems and complexity were added to things for complexity's sake, not because it made the game better. I quite liked the ability to 4 person parties with a tag-team system so each member could swap out at will but it didn’t help that it was connected to the overdrive system so swapping became part of the mental gymnastics of what you need to think about for overdrive. You certainly wouldn’t be wrong for picking Chained Echoes up and giving it a try, I just have no will to keep going so can't recommend.

I tried. I really did. This is my third time trying to get through this game and I cannot bring myself to give the slightest damn about anything that is happening in the game.