It's hard to fault a game made by such a small team. And what's even more impressive is that there isn't much to criticise. The world of Vlandis is amazing with a visual style strongly inspired by Chrono Cross and Xenogears, while its open world structure strikes in the same league as the Xenoblade series.
The cast is overall very likeable with their own distinct down to earth personalities and great backstories. There's occasional real-time banters through dungeons and areas which added some nice chemistry and life to the characters.
Exploring and sidequesting was a great time, and while I initially didn't expect to go all out doing everything, the game was so coherent and well designed I felt encouraged to so all the way.
The combat system is divided into two sections for ground combat and Gears both working well and forcing you to make sure how to play optimally and making sure you exploit enemy weakspots be it elemental or raw damage and keeping your stats aligned with buffs and debuffs, while making sure you rationalise your technical points properly. There's always a high stake, until you actually decide to gear up with fully optimised builds and the battles goes by faster and more about bursting out high aoe damage.
The level system is ingenious and lets you add attribute boosts or character skills after beating bosses, which you thereby can level up from normal combats.
The soundtrack is fantastic and really hits it with nods here and there to other classic jrpgs and the sound design is excellent with environmental effects and satisfying footsteps varying sound effects on the different soil you venture through.
The gear optimisation process is really my big nag with this game.
Farming materials for weapon upgrades was unecessarily painful since dungeons don't sport any form of fast travelling and enemies don't respawn unless you're re-entering the entire dungeon. This is a problem since some of the desired enemies are far into dungeons with rare drop materials.
The gem system was a clunky process with a very unintuitive menu interface. And both combining and slotting gems to gears for extra skills or attributes was a tedious process. Although the variety of gears at least wasn't as massive so it was more of a onetime event as I breezed through the last act with fully optimised builds.
The story while having amazing concepts and set pieces had a bit too much going on to really emphasise all of its elements especially towards the last act where some character moments felt a bit underutilised.
The final act throws a lot of the ideas at once without much time for more exposition leaving the ending a bit rough, and I still feel like I'm on the fence about how the game decided to conclude.
Overall though Chained Echoes is a mostly fundamentally stellar and well composed jrpg I'd gladly recommend to anyone who wants something akin to the old classics.
The cast is overall very likeable with their own distinct down to earth personalities and great backstories. There's occasional real-time banters through dungeons and areas which added some nice chemistry and life to the characters.
Exploring and sidequesting was a great time, and while I initially didn't expect to go all out doing everything, the game was so coherent and well designed I felt encouraged to so all the way.
The combat system is divided into two sections for ground combat and Gears both working well and forcing you to make sure how to play optimally and making sure you exploit enemy weakspots be it elemental or raw damage and keeping your stats aligned with buffs and debuffs, while making sure you rationalise your technical points properly. There's always a high stake, until you actually decide to gear up with fully optimised builds and the battles goes by faster and more about bursting out high aoe damage.
The level system is ingenious and lets you add attribute boosts or character skills after beating bosses, which you thereby can level up from normal combats.
The soundtrack is fantastic and really hits it with nods here and there to other classic jrpgs and the sound design is excellent with environmental effects and satisfying footsteps varying sound effects on the different soil you venture through.
The gear optimisation process is really my big nag with this game.
Farming materials for weapon upgrades was unecessarily painful since dungeons don't sport any form of fast travelling and enemies don't respawn unless you're re-entering the entire dungeon. This is a problem since some of the desired enemies are far into dungeons with rare drop materials.
The gem system was a clunky process with a very unintuitive menu interface. And both combining and slotting gems to gears for extra skills or attributes was a tedious process. Although the variety of gears at least wasn't as massive so it was more of a onetime event as I breezed through the last act with fully optimised builds.
The story while having amazing concepts and set pieces had a bit too much going on to really emphasise all of its elements especially towards the last act where some character moments felt a bit underutilised.
The final act throws a lot of the ideas at once without much time for more exposition leaving the ending a bit rough, and I still feel like I'm on the fence about how the game decided to conclude.
Overall though Chained Echoes is a mostly fundamentally stellar and well composed jrpg I'd gladly recommend to anyone who wants something akin to the old classics.