“JRPG” is a contentious term, steeped in casual early aughts racism and pedestal placing weaboos alike. There’s been so much derision, praise, and everything in between focused on such a specific output of a specific country that it’s pretty difficult to discuss one of my favorite genres online, that being RPGs, J or otherwise. So let’s lay some ground rules to allow us to talk about Chained Echoes, a great little game riffing heavily on JRPG tropes, like adults.
First of all, yes I think Japanese RPG, JRPG, is a legitimate subgenre. There’s just no other term that so quickly and easily communicates the types of RPGs I specifically enjoy. In short, I consider the term to describe story driven linear narratives with mechanical experimentation and progression. Obviously I have nothing against the Fallouts and Mass Effects of the world, and I’m sure the Baldur’s Gate titles deserve every bit of their accolades, but just saying “RPG” in 2024 could be describing anything from the new God of War to the latest live service game battle pass. To just drop the subgenre classification from our common language would be like trying to drop terms like B-Movie, Slasher, Found Footage, etc. from the Horror movie lexicon.
Second, I acknowledge that it’s not good that the subgenre is by nature associated with a specific country, Japan, obviously. I think Japanese devs can make RPGs that aren’t JRPGs, and I think Germans can make RPGs that are JRPGs, but until there’s a better term to describe the kinds of games JRPGs are we’re just kind of stuck with the term.
With all that out of the way, yes Chained Echoes is a JRPG. Cool, first question answered, now onto the more salient (and fun) one. Is it good?
By the standards of the subgenre, I’d say Chained Echoes is quite good, delivering on just about all the aspects I look for in a good JRPG with a few modest missteps here and there, but what I think makes it a special game worth playing is the ways it reinterprets and remixes genre conventions without any malice or notions that it is somehow “fixing” the genre, something Western games constantly do. CE is a remarkably well done first attempt by the mostly solo dev, Matthias Linda, and it falters in ways that are unsurprising for someone’s first major work, but its creator’s earnestness and passion constantly shine through and make for a really wonderful experience.
Let’s talk aesthetics first, because it’s easily the most striking aspect of CE, it’s gorgeous pixel art and it’s pretty good OST. Just about every character, environment, enemy, mecha, and what have you are rendered with just sublime art and animation. Big story beats are also accompanied by setpiece artwork that occasionally left my jaw on the floor, ambitious doesn’t even begin to cut it. Battle animations are suitably punchy, accompanied by gratifying sfx, which also litters exploration activity and pushes a few more mental buttons during those portions.
The music of Chained Echoes is a little too orchestral for my tastes, though I acknowledge the talent and skill behind all these tracks. There’s still a good number of catchy tracks with unique instrumentation that give a lot of character to scenes and settings. There weren’t really any tracks that I immediately clocked as a banger, but the BGM is always solid and occasionally had me humming along even after a given session.
Now let’s talk mechanics. CE is a turn-based RPG that centers its combat around an Overdrive bar, with every battle starting in a yellow section before your characters start ramping up and enter the green zone, which grants defensive benefits and halves the cost of skills. Eventually you’ll be put in danger of entering a red zone, which obviously reverses the benefits of the green zone. It’s a nice system that tends to keep the player from defaulting back to an optimal strategy, as repeating the same set of actions in one case can easily tip the bar into the red. It also encourages swapping characters mid battle, since it’s a free action that reduces the bar and grants strategic flexibility. It’s a simple enough concept that adds a lot to the combat through reigned in randomness and consequences that grant weight to otherwise rote combat approaches.
A mechanic that works a little less for me is the leveling system, which gates level ups behind items called Grimoire Shards rather than experience points. Usually you get these items from bosses, but there are a few fun tricksy ways to pursue specific side objectives and amass early levels, tasks I would describe as less “grindy” than your average JRPG level grind, but still not quite exciting. Where this system goes a bit amiss is in its stat handling, where a level up is usually used for a new skill, active or passive, and sometimes a single specific stat, occasionally the game has to just surprise you with random stat ups at (I think) pre-determined intervals to keep levels feeling meaningful. The arbitrary nature of these “bonus” stats always made me feel like I was just grabbing skills I didn’t necessarily care for just to hit that goal and get the free permanent stats.
Rounding this all out there’s something of a materia/equipment upgrading system, which is probably the weakest aspect of the game to me. Players can check glowing red crystals strewn about dungeons and environments to get randomly generated crystals that do everything from increase stats, to granting a chance for additional drops. This is a fine idea, but the implementation is clunky and has a knock effect of generally ruining loot drops. I would frequently spend a few minutes upgrading a new weapon and kitting it out with carefully chosen crystals to suit a given character, but these changes can only be made at anvils, specific fixtures that are rarely close by in hostile environments, resulting in the excitement of finding new gear being spoiled when I compare it to the current piece, only to find it either objectively worse or granting 1-2 measly extra points in the relevant stat. Removing and adding crystals is also just clunky, you can only add one crystal at a time but have to remove all crystals at once, and there’s no good way to just transfer a setup or compare things. This is further exacerbated by the fact that there are TWELVE weapon types, with virtually no crossover between characters. Managing these items starts to quickly feel like busywork, and eventually I would just rework my combat approaches so I didn’t have to mess with this system.
Finally, there’s actually an entirely separate combat style, giant robots! The Sky Armor battles revolve around a totally separate set of stats and (much more easily managed) gear. There’s even a good variety of different models and color palettes, with lovely sprite art, though in general they’re management is a much more simple affair. Still, there’s a nice dovetail between movement and exploration benefits granted by Sky Armors, and the way dungeons cleverly grant and revoke their use keeps the late game fresh, even if you’ve already more or less “solved” all potential combat encounters with them.
Between combat encounters there’s quite a lot of exploration to be done, with huge field maps littered with items and enemies and even the occasional unique enemy. Though much of the game is steeped in Final Fantasy influences, the exploration springs from somewhere I wasn’t expecting, the Xenoblade series. In those games you’re also given expansive field maps with plenty of hidden paths and corners, picking up weird sounding collectibles to sell and trade. CE also adapts the full heal after every battle approach, allowing for victory by razor thin margins as long as at least one party member is standing at the end of a battle. Pushing against the soft limits of encounter stats and slowly expanding what enemies I can conquer and areas I can explore is a huge highlight of Xeno games to me and that satisfaction is present in CE, though lighter than I would prefer. Granted, this full heal approach removes a lot of resource management from the equation, but I think the tradeoff was calculated to accommodate a quicker pace.
Speaking of pacing, we arrive now at one of the more important elements of any JRPG worth its salt, the plot and its characters. In my opinion, Chained Echoes does a great job of wearing its influences proudly without either cribbing too closely or flaunting convention for the sake of it. There’s a good sense that the writer has played (and likely enjoyed) many JRPGs, but has ideas and concepts for their own story. CE takes place on the continent of Valandis, a landmass split among three kingdoms that has been consumed by war for generations with no real tipping point until the opening of the game sees the birth of a kind of magical weapon of mass destruction. What follows is a fairly twisty tale of a fairly typical ragtag band of heroes coming together to face and defeat the injustices of the world, some older than the world itself and some newly arisen as the plot unfolds.
I’m going to start talking about specific plot and character details now, so if you’d like to go into the story COMPLETELY blind, you can stop reading here.
Throughout Chained Echoes there are plenty of little plot elements that veteran JRPG players will instantly recognize. You’ve got your princess in disguise and on the run, a citywide festival with all manner of silly games and opportunities for mischief, masked inquisitors clad in full body armor, and so on. I haven’t played every single Final Fantasy, but it’s easy to spot influences from FF4, 7, 8, 9, and 12 throughout the plot. Thankfully none of these details seem lifted without purpose or creativity, making them all feel more like knowing homage than crass theft.
The most important plot point is hinted at early on but slowly unraveled over the course of the game, CE’s send up of FF7’s Lifestream, the Maelstrom, where every person in the world has an Echo that, upon death, either disperses back into the Maelstrom or is born again in a new body. I’m sure you see where this is going. Though this concept doesn’t really lead to or resolve any direct conflicts, it’s a huge source of melodrama for the ostensible protagonists, Glenn and Lenne. Personally, I found CE’s interpretation of reincarnation and rebirth to be a bit trite, pedantic even, as it painstakingly drags out a central message of people being defined by more than just their memories or their legacy, but their actions. It’s a nice message and there are some interesting gameplay flourishes deployed in its delivery, but the way it really only serves to drill into a single character while leaving the rest of the party out to dry for an extended period soured me on it somewhat. After all, the game’s title is drawn from this notion that a person can be “chained” by their cycles of rebirth, but characters undergoing a reincarnation are treated with kid gloves, warned that even knowing too much about past lives can give them (no joke) brain damage. So the traumatic episodes that ensue when they’re reminded that a past life, functionally a different person, did bad things, rings incredibly hollow to me.
There are bigger forces at play than character trauma of course, with hidden gods and alternate dimensions and doomsday balls of fire, so thankfully the main plot does escalate to more cathartic and impactful heights, but I found it doing so in spite of its cast more than because of it. Chained Echoes has a few instantly recognizable character archetypes making up its surprisingly large party members. The aforementioned Glenn and Lenne are pretty standard protagonists, starry eyed and hopeful, uncompromising in manners of truth and justice, and so on and so forth. Victor is the staple “old man” party member, though here ACTUALLY an old man, being from a race of beings that can live for multiple centuries. He reminds me of Trails in the Sky’s Olivier, a playful bard with secrets aplenty, but with far less charisma. Robb accompanies and protects the princess-on-the-run Lenne, but if Victor lacks charisma Robb is an absolute charisma vacuum. There’s the lizard person Ba’Thraz who uses collective pronouns (ex: “we” instead of “I”) and can magically control metal, but who’s personality comes to be more fleshed out by their relationship to Victor and another character suffering from the same mysterious curse that they are. The core cast as I see it ends with Sienna, my personal favorite both in plot and mechanics, she’s a capable rogue and a woman of action who can just deal outrageous amounts of damage in combat.
What’s truly outrageous is that Chained Echoes has 12 recruitable party members, most of which are added in the back half of the game, and some of which are entirely optional. Unfortunately I didn’t find many of these other characters satisfying mechanically or interesting narratively, they’re given so little room to breathe and there aren’t many incidental scenes to build much of a report with other characters. The closest one rises to main cast status is the required character Amalia, a healer with some decent utility who is best defined by two traits: they have a dog, and they are a tsundere. One of the few prolonged “fun” scenes unrelated to the politics of the plot is driven by her and it’s certainly welcome in the midst of the relentless apocalyptic melodrama you get from the main quest.
For me the most notable divergence Chained Echoes makes from the JRPG formula is its overall plotting structure, which could trace back to its German origins, which eschews typical episodic arcs in favor of a growing number of concurrent plot threads. There are of course setpieces with build up, raising stakes, and climaxes, but the events within blend together more than they punctuate a given plotline. Perhaps a better way to put it is that I would walk away from the events following a big boss fight in CE thinking “well I know that now” whereas in most JRPGs I would be thinking “now that’s been dealt with”. Though these thankfully never get too overwhelming, it would have been nice to have small character summaries or plot notes in the journal section.
From a zoomed out perspective the plot structure sorta resembles FF4, if you squint, there’s a virtually on-rails section introducing everything, and a slowly widening set of open world options that culminate in doomsday threat. But Chained Echoes widens up quite early on, and its plot is mostly concerned with battles against a certain corrupt king while slowly unraveling the cosmic mysteries underpinning the workings of the Maelstrom. To be clear, I quite liked this progression, and I was engaged in the story to the very end, but there is a noticeable lack of big memorable moments since things happen at steady clip rather than over a set of contained arcs.
Ultimately, I don’t think Chained Echoes is as good as (and yes, this is unfair), say, Chrono Trigger, but I think it’s incredibly impressive that I can entertain that conversation. More importantly, I get the feeling Chained Echoes doesn’t WANT to be better than Chrono Trigger, or any JRPG that is so clearly reveres. Developer Matthias Linda clearly set out to make THEIR idea of a great JRPG, and their passion and creativity shines through in so much of the result. If this is the kind of game they can make on their first outing then I eagerly await what they have in store next, either direct sequel or something totally different, but regardless the fact that CE can come out and do so well underscores the kind of amazing era of gaming we find ourselves in, one that stands on the shoulders of the titanic titles that laid so solid a foundation for the Japanese RPG.
First of all, yes I think Japanese RPG, JRPG, is a legitimate subgenre. There’s just no other term that so quickly and easily communicates the types of RPGs I specifically enjoy. In short, I consider the term to describe story driven linear narratives with mechanical experimentation and progression. Obviously I have nothing against the Fallouts and Mass Effects of the world, and I’m sure the Baldur’s Gate titles deserve every bit of their accolades, but just saying “RPG” in 2024 could be describing anything from the new God of War to the latest live service game battle pass. To just drop the subgenre classification from our common language would be like trying to drop terms like B-Movie, Slasher, Found Footage, etc. from the Horror movie lexicon.
Second, I acknowledge that it’s not good that the subgenre is by nature associated with a specific country, Japan, obviously. I think Japanese devs can make RPGs that aren’t JRPGs, and I think Germans can make RPGs that are JRPGs, but until there’s a better term to describe the kinds of games JRPGs are we’re just kind of stuck with the term.
With all that out of the way, yes Chained Echoes is a JRPG. Cool, first question answered, now onto the more salient (and fun) one. Is it good?
By the standards of the subgenre, I’d say Chained Echoes is quite good, delivering on just about all the aspects I look for in a good JRPG with a few modest missteps here and there, but what I think makes it a special game worth playing is the ways it reinterprets and remixes genre conventions without any malice or notions that it is somehow “fixing” the genre, something Western games constantly do. CE is a remarkably well done first attempt by the mostly solo dev, Matthias Linda, and it falters in ways that are unsurprising for someone’s first major work, but its creator’s earnestness and passion constantly shine through and make for a really wonderful experience.
Let’s talk aesthetics first, because it’s easily the most striking aspect of CE, it’s gorgeous pixel art and it’s pretty good OST. Just about every character, environment, enemy, mecha, and what have you are rendered with just sublime art and animation. Big story beats are also accompanied by setpiece artwork that occasionally left my jaw on the floor, ambitious doesn’t even begin to cut it. Battle animations are suitably punchy, accompanied by gratifying sfx, which also litters exploration activity and pushes a few more mental buttons during those portions.
The music of Chained Echoes is a little too orchestral for my tastes, though I acknowledge the talent and skill behind all these tracks. There’s still a good number of catchy tracks with unique instrumentation that give a lot of character to scenes and settings. There weren’t really any tracks that I immediately clocked as a banger, but the BGM is always solid and occasionally had me humming along even after a given session.
Now let’s talk mechanics. CE is a turn-based RPG that centers its combat around an Overdrive bar, with every battle starting in a yellow section before your characters start ramping up and enter the green zone, which grants defensive benefits and halves the cost of skills. Eventually you’ll be put in danger of entering a red zone, which obviously reverses the benefits of the green zone. It’s a nice system that tends to keep the player from defaulting back to an optimal strategy, as repeating the same set of actions in one case can easily tip the bar into the red. It also encourages swapping characters mid battle, since it’s a free action that reduces the bar and grants strategic flexibility. It’s a simple enough concept that adds a lot to the combat through reigned in randomness and consequences that grant weight to otherwise rote combat approaches.
A mechanic that works a little less for me is the leveling system, which gates level ups behind items called Grimoire Shards rather than experience points. Usually you get these items from bosses, but there are a few fun tricksy ways to pursue specific side objectives and amass early levels, tasks I would describe as less “grindy” than your average JRPG level grind, but still not quite exciting. Where this system goes a bit amiss is in its stat handling, where a level up is usually used for a new skill, active or passive, and sometimes a single specific stat, occasionally the game has to just surprise you with random stat ups at (I think) pre-determined intervals to keep levels feeling meaningful. The arbitrary nature of these “bonus” stats always made me feel like I was just grabbing skills I didn’t necessarily care for just to hit that goal and get the free permanent stats.
Rounding this all out there’s something of a materia/equipment upgrading system, which is probably the weakest aspect of the game to me. Players can check glowing red crystals strewn about dungeons and environments to get randomly generated crystals that do everything from increase stats, to granting a chance for additional drops. This is a fine idea, but the implementation is clunky and has a knock effect of generally ruining loot drops. I would frequently spend a few minutes upgrading a new weapon and kitting it out with carefully chosen crystals to suit a given character, but these changes can only be made at anvils, specific fixtures that are rarely close by in hostile environments, resulting in the excitement of finding new gear being spoiled when I compare it to the current piece, only to find it either objectively worse or granting 1-2 measly extra points in the relevant stat. Removing and adding crystals is also just clunky, you can only add one crystal at a time but have to remove all crystals at once, and there’s no good way to just transfer a setup or compare things. This is further exacerbated by the fact that there are TWELVE weapon types, with virtually no crossover between characters. Managing these items starts to quickly feel like busywork, and eventually I would just rework my combat approaches so I didn’t have to mess with this system.
Finally, there’s actually an entirely separate combat style, giant robots! The Sky Armor battles revolve around a totally separate set of stats and (much more easily managed) gear. There’s even a good variety of different models and color palettes, with lovely sprite art, though in general they’re management is a much more simple affair. Still, there’s a nice dovetail between movement and exploration benefits granted by Sky Armors, and the way dungeons cleverly grant and revoke their use keeps the late game fresh, even if you’ve already more or less “solved” all potential combat encounters with them.
Between combat encounters there’s quite a lot of exploration to be done, with huge field maps littered with items and enemies and even the occasional unique enemy. Though much of the game is steeped in Final Fantasy influences, the exploration springs from somewhere I wasn’t expecting, the Xenoblade series. In those games you’re also given expansive field maps with plenty of hidden paths and corners, picking up weird sounding collectibles to sell and trade. CE also adapts the full heal after every battle approach, allowing for victory by razor thin margins as long as at least one party member is standing at the end of a battle. Pushing against the soft limits of encounter stats and slowly expanding what enemies I can conquer and areas I can explore is a huge highlight of Xeno games to me and that satisfaction is present in CE, though lighter than I would prefer. Granted, this full heal approach removes a lot of resource management from the equation, but I think the tradeoff was calculated to accommodate a quicker pace.
Speaking of pacing, we arrive now at one of the more important elements of any JRPG worth its salt, the plot and its characters. In my opinion, Chained Echoes does a great job of wearing its influences proudly without either cribbing too closely or flaunting convention for the sake of it. There’s a good sense that the writer has played (and likely enjoyed) many JRPGs, but has ideas and concepts for their own story. CE takes place on the continent of Valandis, a landmass split among three kingdoms that has been consumed by war for generations with no real tipping point until the opening of the game sees the birth of a kind of magical weapon of mass destruction. What follows is a fairly twisty tale of a fairly typical ragtag band of heroes coming together to face and defeat the injustices of the world, some older than the world itself and some newly arisen as the plot unfolds.
I’m going to start talking about specific plot and character details now, so if you’d like to go into the story COMPLETELY blind, you can stop reading here.
Throughout Chained Echoes there are plenty of little plot elements that veteran JRPG players will instantly recognize. You’ve got your princess in disguise and on the run, a citywide festival with all manner of silly games and opportunities for mischief, masked inquisitors clad in full body armor, and so on. I haven’t played every single Final Fantasy, but it’s easy to spot influences from FF4, 7, 8, 9, and 12 throughout the plot. Thankfully none of these details seem lifted without purpose or creativity, making them all feel more like knowing homage than crass theft.
The most important plot point is hinted at early on but slowly unraveled over the course of the game, CE’s send up of FF7’s Lifestream, the Maelstrom, where every person in the world has an Echo that, upon death, either disperses back into the Maelstrom or is born again in a new body. I’m sure you see where this is going. Though this concept doesn’t really lead to or resolve any direct conflicts, it’s a huge source of melodrama for the ostensible protagonists, Glenn and Lenne. Personally, I found CE’s interpretation of reincarnation and rebirth to be a bit trite, pedantic even, as it painstakingly drags out a central message of people being defined by more than just their memories or their legacy, but their actions. It’s a nice message and there are some interesting gameplay flourishes deployed in its delivery, but the way it really only serves to drill into a single character while leaving the rest of the party out to dry for an extended period soured me on it somewhat. After all, the game’s title is drawn from this notion that a person can be “chained” by their cycles of rebirth, but characters undergoing a reincarnation are treated with kid gloves, warned that even knowing too much about past lives can give them (no joke) brain damage. So the traumatic episodes that ensue when they’re reminded that a past life, functionally a different person, did bad things, rings incredibly hollow to me.
There are bigger forces at play than character trauma of course, with hidden gods and alternate dimensions and doomsday balls of fire, so thankfully the main plot does escalate to more cathartic and impactful heights, but I found it doing so in spite of its cast more than because of it. Chained Echoes has a few instantly recognizable character archetypes making up its surprisingly large party members. The aforementioned Glenn and Lenne are pretty standard protagonists, starry eyed and hopeful, uncompromising in manners of truth and justice, and so on and so forth. Victor is the staple “old man” party member, though here ACTUALLY an old man, being from a race of beings that can live for multiple centuries. He reminds me of Trails in the Sky’s Olivier, a playful bard with secrets aplenty, but with far less charisma. Robb accompanies and protects the princess-on-the-run Lenne, but if Victor lacks charisma Robb is an absolute charisma vacuum. There’s the lizard person Ba’Thraz who uses collective pronouns (ex: “we” instead of “I”) and can magically control metal, but who’s personality comes to be more fleshed out by their relationship to Victor and another character suffering from the same mysterious curse that they are. The core cast as I see it ends with Sienna, my personal favorite both in plot and mechanics, she’s a capable rogue and a woman of action who can just deal outrageous amounts of damage in combat.
What’s truly outrageous is that Chained Echoes has 12 recruitable party members, most of which are added in the back half of the game, and some of which are entirely optional. Unfortunately I didn’t find many of these other characters satisfying mechanically or interesting narratively, they’re given so little room to breathe and there aren’t many incidental scenes to build much of a report with other characters. The closest one rises to main cast status is the required character Amalia, a healer with some decent utility who is best defined by two traits: they have a dog, and they are a tsundere. One of the few prolonged “fun” scenes unrelated to the politics of the plot is driven by her and it’s certainly welcome in the midst of the relentless apocalyptic melodrama you get from the main quest.
For me the most notable divergence Chained Echoes makes from the JRPG formula is its overall plotting structure, which could trace back to its German origins, which eschews typical episodic arcs in favor of a growing number of concurrent plot threads. There are of course setpieces with build up, raising stakes, and climaxes, but the events within blend together more than they punctuate a given plotline. Perhaps a better way to put it is that I would walk away from the events following a big boss fight in CE thinking “well I know that now” whereas in most JRPGs I would be thinking “now that’s been dealt with”. Though these thankfully never get too overwhelming, it would have been nice to have small character summaries or plot notes in the journal section.
From a zoomed out perspective the plot structure sorta resembles FF4, if you squint, there’s a virtually on-rails section introducing everything, and a slowly widening set of open world options that culminate in doomsday threat. But Chained Echoes widens up quite early on, and its plot is mostly concerned with battles against a certain corrupt king while slowly unraveling the cosmic mysteries underpinning the workings of the Maelstrom. To be clear, I quite liked this progression, and I was engaged in the story to the very end, but there is a noticeable lack of big memorable moments since things happen at steady clip rather than over a set of contained arcs.
Ultimately, I don’t think Chained Echoes is as good as (and yes, this is unfair), say, Chrono Trigger, but I think it’s incredibly impressive that I can entertain that conversation. More importantly, I get the feeling Chained Echoes doesn’t WANT to be better than Chrono Trigger, or any JRPG that is so clearly reveres. Developer Matthias Linda clearly set out to make THEIR idea of a great JRPG, and their passion and creativity shines through in so much of the result. If this is the kind of game they can make on their first outing then I eagerly await what they have in store next, either direct sequel or something totally different, but regardless the fact that CE can come out and do so well underscores the kind of amazing era of gaming we find ourselves in, one that stands on the shoulders of the titanic titles that laid so solid a foundation for the Japanese RPG.