The cherry on top of an exceptional remake.

This could have just been a short asset flip and I would have been satisfied. Instead, we got a tonally varied reintroduction to a beloved character that further fleshed out a world that already feels largely realized. Yes, it's short, but it plays as a sort of beta for what we can expect out of Rebirth. With the rebuilt Fort Condor mini-game, synchronization attacks, and the revealed kit of one of the newly added characters, Intermission serves as a perfect way to gear up for the full release of Rebirth.

Final thoughts: the ending had no right to go that hard or that sad and Scarlet is a certified babe.

Art
Most of the good things I have to say about this game involve the art. I truly believe the best aspect of this game is its art and map design. It's just a really nice game to look at. Unfortunately, that's where most of the praise starts and ends.

Combat (the lock system)
The combat in this game is passable. I don't have much to criticize about it. I've heard a lot of people say the lock system is annoying. I think the only real major flaw with the lock system is that the game introduces locks before it makes sense. On Wraith Island, you start getting poison locks before recruiting the character who does poison damage. I'd imagine this is a design issue, as the enemies themselves have pre-defined locks, and the developers didn't consider or feel like adding different sets of locks depending on what damage types you have access to.

I actually struggled during the early sections of the game to tell what the goal of the lock system was. Intuitively, I assumed the game would only ever give me locks that I could break using the characters I had and the skills they had. However, I would regularly get locks that simply could not be broken. As an example, a lock with 2 fire attacks and a 2 turn timer simply cannot be broken until you get your 4th character, but you regularly see things like that.

Eventually I settled on the idea that not all locks can be broken. You just have to live with the idea of being given a puzzle you can't solve sometimes. It took me about 50% of the game to get comfortable with this idea.

The lock system also kind of forces you to play more conservatively. When there are no locks on the screen, using live mana is generally not a good idea, as you might be throwing away damage types you need for a lock. It's also not advisable to use skills for the same reason.

By the time you get all of your characters, the lock system doesn't introduce much of an obstacle. In fact, using lock-delaying skills, I killed multiple bosses before they got a 2nd or 3rd turn.

Story
The story of this game is embarrassing and disappointing. The plot is occasionally compelling, which is the only reason I ended up finishing the game. However, the game doesn't even deliver on the plot. I can't stress how bad the story ultimately is. The characters in this game are empty husks that occasionally emote as if they aren't, but don't believe them. It's a trick.

The 2 main characters, Zale and Valere, are not 2 distinct characters. They're actually just 1 character. These 2 characters are always doing the same thing at the same time, they never disagree, they don't have different personality traits, they respond to all issues the exact same way. They have nothing going on that distinguishes them as different people.

The first 3 characters in the game, you see every single detail of their existence throughout the course of the game. Essentially from their birth. There's nothing of significance that has happened to any of these 3 major characters off screen. We've seen it all. And it can fill a 1 page book.

A common through-line, all the way up until the end of the game, is that things kinda just happen. The 2 main characters will randomly feel something, or they'll randomly know something, and then they'll win the day. This continues up until the end of the game, resulting in one of the most stupidly disappointing endings I've honestly ever experienced. I don't even know what the ending of this game is, and I don't think anyone else does either. I can't tell if the writers thought we would understand, if it was rushed and they didn't care, or if they're betting on a sequel.

I legitimately can't tell if this game ended on a cliff hanger, because I don't know if the writers think there are questions left to be answered. It doesn't seem like they do, though, considering how much time passes during the ending sequence.

Conclusion
While I enjoyed the game enough to finish it, I genuinely cannot recommend it. Unless you have to play every JRPG, or you need to play a JRPG now and you've played everything else, play something else. I'd recommend I Am Setsuna, an exceptionally mediocre JRPG, over this.

Back at it again only with a more negative take, not that Star Rail got worse but its issues feel more cock abusive. The drip feed of content in live service stuff always annoyed me, a couple of months just for a few hours of story; "just go play something else" only really works if I enjoy the core gameplay. If coming back for the story yeahhhhhh might as well just youtube that shit, less of a hassle. The turn based combat here gets mind-numbing, everything takes too long even in autoplay with max speed. I've complained to a friend about this, misremembering if it really was this bad and got a simple "just play something else in the background while it autoplays", confirming my suspicion that everyone willingly playing this day in day out is engaging in some secret ring of cuckoldry while the youtube story watchers and booru researchers are sharing intimate times with their partners.

But even playing it for the first time this one felt that the combat here was a necessary evil and was more latched onto the world and characters. I've mentioned that the world felt more alive with its attention to detail in the side stuff, but the way you explore it makes me wanna make out with a shotgun. So moronic that you just teleport everywhere, making me wonder if this is the video game adaptation of the classic movie Jumper that so many of us have been clamoring for. Every sidequest you just zoom around - talk - zoom - combat that you can autoplay - cutscene maybe - zoom again for the ending convo. Just running around would've probably been tedious, but I've felt like I finished quests just for engaging with the map, surely there can be some kind of middle ground? For anyone vacuum-headed enough not to notice the issue and utter the classic "just don't use it" retort, I have to applaud you for making it this far (not talking about this jumbled mess of words). The world believability takes another big hit, of course, in its handling of dailies, with the same old man NPC asking you to get his same walking stick and shove it in his same pooper three days in a row, which promptly convinced me never to do them again (Groundhog Day was fun on first watch).

Heavens forbid something happens to these characters, I like them still (bastard OG Honkai doomers have no power here). Though will probably follow their ventures on YT from now on, gaming too hard can take toll on the neck area (careful doing headtilts in the future fellow gamers).

The influences and homages this game does to 90s (and 2000s, there's FFXII all over this) JRPGs are painfully obvious - some might call that "generic" or "unoriginal", to me it was comfy. I knew exactly what to expect, and sure enough it hit all those notes - but not in a "ugh, this is so overdone...", but more in a "HA, I knew this would happen". Your mileage may vary of course.

Good cast of characters that sort of remind me of Radiant Historia - fairly one-dimensional, but with enough well done characterization and interactions between them to have a good cast, with good enough motivations, and a couple of fairly interesting backstories sprinkled.

The story itself goes crazy in a very JRPG way, and I'm all in for it. That being said, this game would clearly benefit from an actual dev team rather than just a single guy - the world building is sort of insane, but not in a good way. Very overwhelming, the game throws MANY names at you, and it's incredibly difficult to keep up. I think there's a whole unexplored world that was hinted at, but I'll be damned if I know the details.

I have some criticism with the combat: regular battles can take too long (I found myself turning it down to Easy during exploration), level ups happening only after bosses robs the game of that gratifying JRPG loop of getting incrementally stronger with every battle, switching party members around is a core mechanic, so buffs not affecting those in reserve feels like an oversight, and there are too many playable characters - should have been just eight characters instead of TWELVE - clearly, the dev is a fan of FFVI's huge cast of playable characters, for reasons that elude me, and was adamant in having that in his game.

That being said, I loved that every character is very distinct - though I'm not sure of the difference between the two tanks, and the tank role itself with the hate mechanic feels fairly tacked on, like the dev REALLY wanted to have tanks, no matter what. Sky Armor fights also became meh and same-y after not too long.

The crystals thing also felt tacked on, as you swap weapons around ALL the time, and most bonuses feel more like small perks than anything. You'll end up not bothering at all.

Regarding exploration though, I have virtually no criticism? Fucking hell I loved it, and it's the most impressive thing about this game, especially considering it was mostly just one person doing it.

Not sure if this is "92 on Metacritic" good, but yeah. Had a great time.

Chained Echoes is a pizza with too many toppings

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.

I like the idea of what the systems are trying to do, but I feel that the implementation is sloppy and dated. It's an incredibly complex game, but you must dive deep into the warren report to discover that, removing all sense of casualness from the game. At first, I thought the level cap was a neat idea, but even without grinding I ended up spending multiple battles at the cap, constantly fighting an uphill battle against opponents that were perpetually stronger and better equipped than my rag-tag army. To me, this comes across as a lazy attempt at raising the difficulty that subsequently forces me into a box of playing the 'right' solution, suppressing creativity in one's approach as you rely more on exploiting the AI, creating a much more stagnant, repetitive and aggravating experience that becomes an entirely different kind of grind. What I saw of the story was intriguing, but it's nowhere near enough to make me want to slog through the rest. The grind has a certain uniqueness that allows tiny incremental gains even at the level cap, but I can't shake the feeling that this just isn't respecting my time. Otherwise, it looks and sounds great. If you're looking for a tactical RPG that you can just pick up and play casually, this certainly isn't it, but if you're up for a challenge and have the time to spare, then I'd still say you should give it a go.

Much of Matsuno's work as a writer situates the player as a man in desperately over his head, fighting despite impossible odds through an impenetrable spiderweb of antagonists, all to achieve a less-than-ideal outcome. His later games gave these inscrutable struggles meaning through clearer human moments: take Ramza's hard lesson about noble versus commoner morality via the death of Teta, or the surrealist nightmare assassination of Ashley Riot's wife and son. Catiua is meant to serve that role here but, at least in the Chaos route, is not well-written enough to work as the emotional counterweight that this very dense narrative needs. The entirety of her personality is that she's angry at Denam for... ignoring her? As if he doesn't have more pressing matters to attend to. It only takes one tantrum of several to realize that she's static, not a character so much as bait to move Denam through the plot with some measure of uncertainty about what he's doing. Maybe she is more compelling in the other routes, but frankly, I was so burned out on all of the filler fights and tedious side content past hour 60 or so that it'll be a long time before I World back into them to see.

It's impossible to miss what a barnstormer this must have been in 1995, but by Chapter 4 it reveals itself as deeply flawed on many fronts. Unless you're a capital-O obsessive, you'll enjoy it more if you skip over the Shrines, Palace of the Dead, etc.