Chained Echoes

Chained Echoes was an exercise in trying to pick diamonds from poop for me the entire way through. It's like a constant yoyo of fun and tedious, easy and hard, or bland and exciting. There is a lot to like here if you're a fan of retro games or are just looking for an old-school experience, but the things it does to modernize itself either only briefly shine, or fall completely flat. Luckily the story and characters are amazing and keep you coming back for more, with some great twists along the way. As the game's systems weighed heavier and heavier on me, the story was sometimes the only thing keeping me going. It was so good it covered for everything bad about the gameplay (which was nearly, well, everything). The number one thing that kept wheeling from "annoying" to "completely unmanageable" for me is the game's base difficulty. Because you don't level up traditionally, and grinding does literally nothing for you other than make money, there isn't really a way to "power through" bosses or enemies that give you trouble. You can kind of boost your stats by getting better gear, but that's as far as you can take it. Instead, every fight is treated as a razor-thin puzzle, where one or two mistakes costs you the entire battle. Always, every time, whether it's against a gigantic genie or a group of three dogs. This is exciting...until it isn't. This mainly happens during the bosses. One case in point is one of the bosses you will face at the beginning of act 2, who has an AOE attack that will take away about half your health. And then he casts a spell on himself that lets him move twice. One half plus one half equals...? What should be an exciting narrative moment turns into an exercise in avoiding RNG since there is literally zero mitigation you can do that is strong enough, other than hoping he doesn't do it twice in a row, since when your characters die you cannot switch to the ones in reserve (???). I almost dropped the game at this moment. Then I turned down the difficulty, and it became babymode easy. There is no middle ground between brainless and scorchingly difficult. The game is simply an exercise in patience and hoping you get lucky. This leads to a lot of other problems that make the "open world" much smaller than it should be. Since you are always straddling the line between winning and losing, naturally you will want to bring your strongest characters. This means if you ever want to win, you do not have a choice in how you build your party. Sienna and Amalia are mandatory because they are the best damage dealer and healer respectively, which leaves two slots for you to try fun things with. Why give us eight characters if we only ever actually need two? You can't explore where you want once you get the option to freely fly around because your gear will not be strong enough and there is nothing you can do to level up to get strong enough. The game's "overdrive" system forces you to do suboptimal moves like buff twice in a row or change characters in order to fulfill its arbitrary requirements and it ruins your combos and makes it so you are forced into playing a certain way. Nothing about this game feels as open or expressive as it thinks it is under any amount of scrutiny. But what really did it for me and made me quit altogether was the amateurish dungeon design. Every dungeon is a slog with forced fights, tons of dead ends, staircases with no actual logic behind where they spit you out, and worst of all is that every "puzzle element" takes AGES to finish its animations and whatever. So when you're moving orbs or taking memory pieces or moving platforms, you wait forever to watch pixels glacially slide back and forth every time you mess up. It turns something annoying and cranks it to absolutely infuriating. In fact, the dungeon at the beginning of Act 4 was SO bad that it made me quit the game altogether and change this review from positive to negative. The end of this game is ten hours too long, with twice as many dungeons as it needs, every single shred of it is absolutely tedious and drawn out and pointless and it crashes like a meteor into everything that could have been salvagable about this experience. Do not buy this game, just watch a playthrough. If this dude writes a book, I would probably buy it. But I will never buy another one of his games.