Chained Echoes - A classic 2D RPG with Swords, Magic and Mechs

[Grunker]

Also, whoever thought it was it a great idea not to allow reloads/restarts in combat needs to be shot. If you are for sure going to lose a battle, you can either ALT-F4 or skip turns until your team dies. Is this 1991 or wtf

 

[Rean]

Also, whoever thought it was it a great idea not to allow reloads/restarts in combat needs to be shot. If you are for sure going to lose a battle, you can either ALT-F4 or skip turns until your team dies. Is this 1991 or wtf

You wouldn't last long in a tabletop game.

 

[Morgoth]

At a first glance, this is the only jrpg besides Lost Odyssey that doesn't offend my eyes. I wonder if it's just as good as the latter though...

 

[HedgeGizard]

I played and beat this game over the last week, I am struck with the urge to go throttle the writer and travel back in time and prevent myself from playing it. The story is massively disjointed, being a crude "Best of..." version of FFXII with some superficial Xenogears references (robots, reincarnating ginger women), but with no pacing, build up or humanization of the characters.
There are several major story points that involve sexuality and cuckolding, as well as m'lady tier chick worship - the scent of virginity wafts off it.
The combat system is decent but gets extremely broken if you use the crystal upgrade system (just stack Agi+ bro).
Hard skip and please alter cauality so I skip it too.

 

[Rafidur]

AFAIK there's 2 ways to bend over the combat system, either agi stacking or weakness stacking combined with element crystals and charged attacks.

 

[Tigranes]

Story's milquetoast 'good old school JRPGs' fanfiction. You have to be a giant snowflake to be offended by it, the PC's a classic insecure guilt-ridden Chosen One saved by FRIENDSHIP. Forgettable.

It captured a sense of exploration quite well and that's the highlight - the combat's reasonably functional. I don't think I'd ever replay it, though.

 

[HedgeGizard]

Story's milquetoast 'good old school JRPGs' fanfiction.

It is satanic inversion.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Necro incoming

This game didn't go anywhere on the codex. That's a little bit strange to me because having put about 6 hours in I would say that it's quite close to the codex's wheelhouse.

The game is ostensibly a JRPG in the Final Fantasy/Chrono Trigger tradition. But it's actually a lot better than the most of the golden era (~IV-IX) FF and there's certainly levels on which it's better the Chrono Trigger.

First of all, the combat presents some level of challenge. Even the main story bosses and mobs are not a complete walkover. And optional bosses are genuinely tricky. The combat system works pretty well and the skill-based system (there are no levels) takes levelling concepts from the western tradition and makes them fit in a light way. You reheal fully between combat and there are no random battles and the numbers of trash mobs are kept to a minimum.

Second, the art direction is very nice. The pixel art is of a consistently high standard so far (I'm in Kortara) and the music is great too. There are some great parallax scenes and just some cool views.

The story is...well...it's a JRPG plot where you can't really remember who the fuck each side is and what they're going on about. I am not paying a huge amount of attention to where the fuck it's going but I can say that the moment to moment dialogue is well done and fairly minimal.

I dunno, I haven't gotten to anything about sexuality so far (?) so fuck knows really what that 18 post account from last year was on about. I rate it. It's weird to play a JRPG that respects my time.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I put a couple hours into it and found it to be incredibly shallow and unsatisfying mechanics wise. The crux of the problem is that the combat system revolves around matching your action to the randomly assigned flavour wheel to keep a slider in the right spot on a bar. However, since these flavours are split between attack, healing, support, it means that during a fight you may well be forced into a situation where the boss does massive damage and prevents you from healing without fucking up the bar and dooming yourself. And since you've got so few skill slots on each character, it also means your moves are basically chosen for you most of the time- I often found myself doing something like healing people at full hp just to manipulate the bar. The net result is that the difficulty is mostly in the form of randomness. You can change it on the fly but this feels like changing the odds on a slot machine. Or more accurately a claw machine, which oblivious people might mistake for a game of skill.

Exploration felt similarly shallow and meaningless, because the things you find have incredibly low impacts. We're talking shit like equipment that lets you deal 12% more damage to sleeping enemies or increasing your damage by like 10% with a better weapon for 3 fights before the game just sells you one. Even if you use the best equipment it won't change the result of the fight pretty much ever, even by making it shorter by a single turn.

The old jrpgs were much better about letting exploration reward the player. Getting a gauntlet or genji glove in FF6 wasn't a minor boost; it was 50% more attack power. The right elemental weapon did double damage or more in those older games. And that's just early game stuff, never mind late game stuff that reduces MP costs by 75% or gives you a free auto-revive buff every combat. Yeah that tends to kill the difficulty but it feels earned after finding the best hidden loot or killing optional bosses.

I'll say this for it: The game is pretty. If you want to turn the difficulty to low, turn your brain off and watch the pretty scenery and characters bop each other, it's probably a good time. I saw a cute interaction with an enemy where you could cast a water spell on it to put out the coals in it's body (was a furnace golem kinda thing) and the game never even hinted at me to do such a thing, which made it cool to discover. The game has some nice stuff like that, it was just clearly made by people without any understanding of how to balance anything.

 

[FreshCorpse]

I think after a couple of hours you have very few skills and very few characters so that probably exacerbates the issue of the overdrive bar. It hasn't been a significant issue for the last 4-6 hours (I've done about 9?). I wouldn't say that overdrive is the "crux" of the battle system, just that it features. I will say that momentum is too big a factor in battles - once you're on the back foot you are dead.

I find it strange that you compare the difficulty, unfavourably, to FF6, a game that I've played fairly recently and found incredibly easy. I was playing a fan re-translation casually with save states and not remembering too much meta-knowledge (I was very into it as a kid) and wiped the floor with everything for the entire time that I've played. I don't think I loaded a state a single time except when starting the game up.

I don't know if I take your point on exploration being low reward. Some of the balancing choices are for sure quite sawyery - ie in the vein of "+1 percentage point to hit" which seem small but do add up - but on the other hand exploration is the only way to find classmarks (for the job system) which are pretty significant equippable items. If you're talking about crystals though - yeah, those are extremely low value unless you're going to meta-out the crafting system.

 

[Grunker]

I dunno mang. I really tried to like this one but combat felt incredibly… constrained, for lack of a better word. I liked the visuals and a lot of the ideas, but in practice stuff like the overheat bar felt more like an annoyance than a fun mechanic, and making it more lenient made the game too easy.

 

[HansDampf]

I wouldn't say that overdrive is the "crux" of the battle system

It is when you play hard mode. But that was also the game's biggest strength for me, at least in the first half where the balance is almost perfect. The challenge is to equip the right skills that are useful in combat but also maximize your control of the overdrive (and then make good decisions during combat, thinking ahead, switch characters at the right time, ...). There are other ways to cool the overdrive down. But it does happen sometimes that your best move is to (for example) heal when you're already at full health just to appease the overdrive. You have to accept the arbitrary nature of the system to enjoy the game. It's like an omnipresent enemy that you're always fighting against. There are even items that do nothing except bring down the overdrive. The system works as long as the fights are sufficiently challenging. Even "trash mobs" can kill you if you aren't prepared.
It all falls apart after you get the mechs and the game becomes non-linear. Until then, the game knows more or less what level you are and what equipment is available to you, so the fights can be balanced accordingly. But the second half is open world, and combat gets easier until you can almost ignore the overdrive. Then it becomes more and more tedious.
The story takes a nosedive, too, going from political drama about fantasy nukes to typical JRPG tropes with chosen ones vs. ancient evil gods.

The game is also too long and a perfect example of feature creep. It's like during the 30 year long development the guy kept adding more and more stuff without anyone telling him to stop. Mech combat is far less complex and interesting than regular combat. And the crystals should be removed entirely. Found new weapons? They will only be more powerful than your current weapons if you transfer the crystals, which gets more time consuming as your collection grows thanks to the abysmal menu UI.