Board 8 > Chained Echoes

(+) Yeah! (+)

Anybody here pick it up? Was only kind of on my radar but it's getting a ton of buzz and praise and seems right up B8's alley.

https://opencritic.com/game/14102/chained-echoes

91 on opencritic, best JRPG of the year?

Never even heard of it

I just saw this yesterday and was intrigued. I'd definitely be interested to hear some early impressions!

It's too bad "love letter to (retro genre)" has become a term of mockery, because I suppose people do want to see good new works like this.

It is on Game Pass

I don't dig the aesthetic of this at all aside from the mechs, but that's a pretty high amount of consensus.

I'll wait to hear more about the story because the review industry barely factors that in at all for jRPGs nowadays, as can be seen with hot garbage Octopath sitting at a cool 84.

paperwarior posted...

It's too bad "love letter to (retro genre)" has become a term of mockery, because I suppose people do want to see good new works like this.

I mean, people liked Omori.

KCF0107 posted...

It is on Game Pass

oh snap

I went ahead and bought it, so I'll be the guinea pig. Prologue was cool enough, definitely has some promise. I'll drop some impressions in here as I go for anyone who's interested.

eh, don't really care - wait, it's got like some kind of cool bird? nevermind, I'm in

I played about 2 hours on game pass and I'm liking it so far!

The combat does seem a little on the basic side for a turn based game but there's some interesting stuff. You have a party of 4 but each character can have a partner to swap. Swapping doesn't take up an action so it's really like you have a party of 8.

There's also an overdrive meter where every action you do raises or lowers your overdrive. You're trying to balance staying in a green section of the bar instead of overloading to take double damage. It's a fun little strategy element but also seems a little too forgiving or easy to manage. But sometimes you have to decide whether you want to use a skill to put you in overdrive or use a different skill to keep you in the green.

Staying in the green raises your damage, lowers damage taken, and cuts cost of spells in half.

6 hours in and I can confidently say this game is good. Definitely a recommend to anyone on the fence.

Oh shit I kickstarted this. Knee deep into Marvel Midnight Suns though so I don't know when I'll get around to playing it.

Yeah, I'm ~7 hours in, and this seems good. There's way more to explore than I expected.

I'm also starting to trust the progression system? Like, I just got to a miniboss (the second class emblem) that crushed me the first time. At first I thought I wasn't ready for it yet, but then I figured I'd change up my team composition a bit before giving up, and I won. The balance seems solid.

Can't help but notice nobody praising it has mentioned the story or characters yet!

The characters and story are surprisingly good so far! It's pretty typical kingdoms at war, political backstabbing and shadowy governments stuff but it's been done well so far. Some of the dialogue is very well written and they've done a good job of establishing character motivations, backstory, and interactions for the party.

I'm usually pretty hard on JRPG stories but nothing has offended me so far, even if it's not exactly doing anything new with the plot.

I'm guessing it's gonna be more plot-driven than character-driven. Like, I wish it had party chat to squeeze some more character interactions in. But I don't feel like I'm that far in, either. We'll see.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Can't help but notice nobody praising it has mentioned the story or characters yet!

I've watched and read at least a half dozen reviews outside of this topic and every one has praised the story and characters as some of the better parts of the game.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Can't help but notice nobody praising it has mentioned the story or characters yet!

The writing is pretty bad and the characters are quite generic and lacking in personality. The dialogue is quite stilted, they don't really speak like real people.

Everything else (gameplay, graphics, music) is pretty good so far though.

I despise the term "love letter to _____". Every reviewer somehow thinks it's a cute play of words.

MacArrowny posted...

https://opencritic.com/game/14102/chained-echoes

91 on opencritic, best JRPG of the year?

Dude chill, it has 7 reviews. Let's see if it holds when it has 30+, if it even gets to that many.

wow, the first field area is way bigger than i expected. i didn't think the SNES games this was emulating had such big open maps. feels xenoblade 2d almost. and the optional miniboss in the farm town absolutely wrecked me lmao, i had to use up half of my angel wings on revives.

am i meant to be able to get the rewards for beating the big bounty monsters yet? i'm assuming no but the fact that the rewards for them (and for the beating a crab solo entry) are the same low-rank stuff as for beating common enemies makes me wonder? it'd be a bit underwhelming to return later in the story just for a few coins and some weathered bones

oh nvm i guess it is doable lmao i just beat "leaping the frog" (the second bounty enemy) without even realizing it was a bounty, i just thought it was a random encounter and killed it in one go. and now that i have the warrior stone i put it on glenn and killed crabs solo too. i was dumb and forgot i could get the class stone with the reward board chain, would've helped me kill the vegetables better

I think the main thing with the reward board is chaining rewards. So yeah the rewards for beating bounty monsters isn't great individually but it will increase your chain to give you bigger chain rewards. So there's still a value in coming back to do it later.

I finished chapter 1 last night and I'm hooked! I still have a few smaller critiques but I'm having a great time so far.

I also finished what I assume wed call the end of Chapter 1. Im into it. The plot might be good!

Have yall engaged with the crystal/gem system or whatever its called? It kinda seemed like were incentivized not to socket things in, because were penalized for unsocketing them. But maybe we keep finding higher rarity crystals as we progress, so being penalized wont matter that much? Im not sure.

i tried to break out of my "wait until a time when you really need it" mentality and just started slotting stuff in immediately but it's just felt bad so far to use up gems and then unsocket them 10 minutes later when i get new gear so idk. i read some other comments online about ignoring gems so you're probably not the only one.

checking this out today. also 84 sounds about right for octopath if you ask me!

i've played enough of this (six hours) to declare that this is pretty good

a much better "love letter" than anything tokyo rpg factory ever put out (i am setsuna... the other ones). reminds me of wargroove in how it is wears its inspirations on its sleeve but does enough new to warrant its existence.

with a couple patches this could be really nice.

What needs patching?

Played for a couple hours, I like it quite a bit but it still feels like it's missing something. The combat is nice but it feels like a bunch of gimmicks to "fix" the shallowness of FFX's combat, as opposed to a combat system that is genuinely deep. It still feels shallow because it seems like there is a right way to play, and you just have to do it. Not very expressive.

The writing is great though, and the plot is already interesting. Extremely snappy and energetic for this kind of game, strong momentum. I also played an hour of Eastward which was right before it on Game Pass and it's soooooo slow in comparison.

Yeah I had to drop Eastward because it's WAY too slow.

I think most games fall closer to the Eastward side of the spectrum, unfortunately

MacArrowny posted...

What needs patching?

this is all extremely picky stuff related to my experience

• run speed (it's too fast imo) / enable button-press run
• some freezes due to autosave
• some difficulty rebalancing could help the experience feel less railroady
• some other autosave issues (it's apparently bad for steamdeck players)

Just fought a boss that is super easy except it can randomly do 8x damage in one turn and if that happens you basically auto-lose

I've played up a little past the end of Act 2 and I'm definitely ready to call this a pretty great RPG.

The characters are probably the weakest aspect but I'd still call them good - the main two especially are super solid. The story and worldbuilding are good enough to make up for a little bit of weakness there anyway.

this game is honestly shocking. I would never expect that one person could make a full on JRPG and do it as well as anything that's come out in the last several years, but here we are.

Yeah I'm about 25 hours in so far and still enjoying it!

My biggest criticism is that the plot has a few moments where it gets VERY dark and it's a little jarring compared to the overall tone.

Kylian's backstory (5 hour spoilers) is his younger sister getting sexually assaulted into a coma by a gang of street ruffians.

And moments like that tend to keep popping up and feel like they come out of nowhere. I'm not against dark stuff in games but it feels so random and out of place in this one.

its random cursing is pretty hilarious (and bad). it reminds me of the 90s SNES JRPG fan translations where they just threw in f bombs because they could.

I just got to the start of act 2. the game keeps layering on more stuff and it's way more expansive than I originally thought. the first 2 hours kinda do the game a disservice.

Yeah the only big miss in the actual gameplay is the crafting/gems system. I've just completely ignored both because I have a pet peeve of upgrading weapons/armor and then immediately finding or buying new stuff that's just better in every way an hour later.

The gems are maybe something if there's difficult post game content but I haven't really struggled with any bosses so far so it's been fine ignoring them.

Oh also it's a little hard to see which abilities you get from changing weapons in your Sky Armor. The menus around Sky Armors and class skills could be handled a lot better.

yeah I don't care for the gems either. I feel like they're a rare resource and I don't want to waste them, and then whenever I slot the I find a new sword a few minutes later. feels like it should have used a Suikoden-ish weapon upgrade system so you never have to juggle crystals.

skullbone posted...

Yeah I'm about 25 hours in so far and still enjoying it!

My biggest criticism is that the plot has a few moments where it gets VERY dark and it's a little jarring compared to the overall tone.

Kylian's backstory (5 hour spoilers) is his younger sister getting sexually assaulted into a coma by a gang of street ruffians.

And moments like that tend to keep popping up and feel like they come out of nowhere. I'm not against dark stuff in games but it feels so random and out of place in this one.

As much as I like the story, I do agree with this. I think Kylian's motivations are interesting and he's one of the stronger characters overall, but it's a good example of the weirder trauma porn kind of moments.

I just heard of this game yesterday and am now intrigued further after seeing it mentioned positively here on the board.

40 hour long old school looking RPG? Right up my alley.

(5 hour spoilers)

I think I hit this fairly recently and I'm at the 15 hour mark. How long is my playtime going to bee...

Hmm maybe at the most it was like 7 or 8 hours but yeah what are you even doing?

You can't really grind in this game and exploring doesn't really open up until you get Sky Armors.

That's not a knock I genuinely don't know what you could be doing to raise your playtime that much lol.

I play pretty slow too. Reward Board is crack.

That's fair I've been doing a lot of reward board stuff too but a lot of it does seem to be soft gated by your level and story progress.

Game beated, final playtime 32 hours.

There's some postgame stuff I don't have the motivation to do so that could be longer.

Great game!

Can you just sell old weapons/armor or is it worth keeping for anything?

I'm not sure how I like plot based stat progression in RPGs. I didn't like it in Chrono Cross. Another thing is that since HP/TP are restored every battle the game can be balanced around tough normal monsters. In the end it works nicely because you can avoid most encounters. Dungeons are set in a way to have a handful of battles before the boss. It'd be nice if enemy's drop loot at at 100% rate and not rely on that "80%" steal ability. Also the game just randomly drops F bombs out of left field and from characters I wouldn't suspect to just swear a bunch. I don't like it.

It sucks that Sea of Stars got delayed to summer 2023 because it looks so much better than Chained Echoes.