Review - Chained Echoes

(originally posted Mar 29, 2023)

First: I enjoyed Chained Echoes. It's an incredibly well-made, polished product considering the small team. The battle system feels good, the systems are balanced to prevent a need for level-grinding, and it didn't start to drag until I started pursuing the optional superboss stuff in the endgame. If this came out five years ago, I'd probably be singing its praises.

The dev has echoed a common sentiment with many of these retro-inspired indie games, which is that they want to recreate how those games are in your memories - how they made you feel - rather than how they actually were. If Chained Echoes succeeds in this, it's only partially, because it reminded me of other games constantly.

It's got a pretty standard JRPG narrative, but I have nothing inherently against that (unlike G4). The cast is full of the broad archetypes you might expect - hesitant hero, rebellious princess, self-interested thief - doing the sorts of things you might expect. Monsters roam the countryside, the empire controls dangerous magic, and the Pope's inquisitors make cryptic statements to each other about Gods' true intention. I think there's plenty of room for another retro-inspired indie JRPG out there, but there might be such a thing as too inspired.

Literally from the moment I hit New Game up until the middle of the end credits, I found myself thinking, "Oh, this is just that thing from that other thing." It reads almost like an extended X-meets-Y marketing copy: WHAT IF... the plot from Xenogears, the party dynamics from FFVI, the geopolitics of the Ivalice Alliance, the event scripting from Chrono Trigger, the Giant of Babil from FFIV, the Mana Fortress from Secret of Mana, the final act from FFVII, the introductory missions from Wild ARMs, the Yevon church from FFX, the home base from Skies of Arcadia, plus a special mixture of secret herbs and spices... were all in the same game?? Any individual identity Chained Echoes has is subsumed by slavish adherence to its inspirations.

To clarify, I definitely wouldn't say any of this is plagiarism or anything, and they usually aren't tiresome "hey, remember X?" direct references. It's that the whole thing feels like like every Squaresoft RPG from the 1990s was pureed in a blender and poured into a SNES-shaped mold, kitbashed into some kind of Franken-game.

Sometimes, I take my mother to a chain restaurant called "Pieology", which is basically an assembly-line style (Subway, Chipotle, etc) fast food place for pizza. She puts every single topping she likes on the same pizza without considering why you might use a specific ingredient. If you separately enjoy parmesan, ricotta, mozzarella, pineapple, corn, cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic, cilantro, artichokes, olives, peppers... putting all of them together should be even better, right?

But you get something underbaked. It tastes like everything and thus tastes like nothing in particular. It's still recognizably pizza, and you like the pizza genre as a whole... but "it's pizza!" feels like the only intention behind it.

For example, Chained Echoes has mecha, which stand out next to the usual JRPG airship fare in its otherwise Ivalicean setting. Xenogears has mecha. But Xenogears (for all its faults) also has a sci-fi plot about the intersection of man, god, and machine; mecha are a deliberate narrative device to buoy those themes. Why does Chained Echoes have mecha? Because mecha were in Xenogears.

It's that feeling, every 20 minutes, for 35 hours.

I genuinely believe there isn't anything inherently wrong with being an imitative work. Something like Signalis wears its aesthetic inspirations on its sleeve, but makes use of them for its own thematic goals. Crystal Project is transparently a FFV-style job system battle simulator that doesn't pretend to have any lofty narrative ambitions. And Chained Echoes is a perfectly good indie JRPG... but I wish it were a bit more than that.