This is my "I am so fucking fed up with this game score", maybe in time when I'm cooled off from some of its annoying shite I'll bump it up a bit but for now I'm going with this cause honestly I was just so annoyed so often, especially when finishing it off that I just want to be negative about it for a bit.

Do I think Chained Echoes is awful? No not at all, I just think it has a lot of very annoying elements and while I commend the solo dev for working on this for nearly a decade, you also see the pitfalls of a one person team so many times throughout. Also, it should be pointed out that at the time of writing, nearly 1.8k people have logged this on backloggd and I am one of like 30 people to give it this score so I am definitely in the minority, 4+ is the most common score so theres every chance that if you like the era of jrpgs that inspired this game, you may very well like Chained Echoes. But for me, there were just too many roadblocks and hurdles to really enjoy myself.

Starting off, I actually did enjoy the early hours of the game, but eventually the cracks start to show and by the half way point I was borderline mentally checked out. I don't want to spend forever detailing every small issue so heres just a few bullet points:
- This game felt like a menu simulator at times, there is some badly needed QOL features around the menus, such as telling me what gear I'm wearing when inserting crystals, giving me the option to change gear if I pick up something stronger, saving team loadouts because if a story event fucking swaps around my team loadout one more fucking time I'm going to lose it
- Sky armor fights seem cool at first but honestly after a while I would fucking dread it because the fights just become such a pain in the hole, I don't think the builds work as intended and sometimes it feels like solving a puzzle moreso than anything else when trying to get past certain encounters, especially stuff like 4 Bakis.
- Another thing that seems cool at first is the overdrive gauge, but it soon shows its cracks and along with the fluctuating battle order, sometimes it feels like you can just get fucked over by bad luck or a bad gauge, especially in bigger fights against 4 or 5 enemies.
- This might be the most divisive one, but to me, this story is not good. It has aspects that are good, but it has way way way too many twists and turns. Like, a twist loses all impact when someone has already died and come back, someones a spy, someones a time traveler, someones a god, someones a royal, someone is cursed, someones related to someone else and so many other tropes and cliches, its honestly just cherry picking different twists from other classic jrpgs and putting them in here with doing the proper legwork to make those twists pay off, and having an overindulgence of them. On top of that, I think the majority of the character work is pretty weak bar a small handful of characters and even then they are carried moreso due to the twists involving them than anything else.

Thats what comes to mind for now at least, theres probably more but I'll leave it at that for now, because I do want to end on some good notes. I think the music is fine, I wouldn't say its great but its not bad. I think the art work is really good and actually quite stunning at times, especially background landscapes. Some aspects of the story are interesting and engaging, just ruined at other times as I mentioned earlier, and I think when you can get into a good flow to overcome the gauge (I narrowed it in the settings), the combat is actually decent and kind of enjoyable. But the default setting for the gauge is too aggressive and you'll end up in overdrive way too easily, and even then it will basically always happen in the fucking sky armour.

So TLDR; a lot of things annoyed me personally but its not an awful game and clearly a lot of people like it. To me, a game like Sea of Stars may have been a bit simplistic at times, but that was a purposeful choice, this is a direct quote from the games creative director: "the game was designed and presented, to be very childlike and to appeal to a sense of simplicity. I just wanted to give you sort of a summer vacation with your inner child, if that makes sense." Chained Echoes on the other hand come across like the ramblings of a mad genius who just throws everything at you in the hopes you'll make sense of it, for better or worse.