Chained Echoes is a game I feel very protective about. I backed it thinking that it looked pretty cool, but it was going to be developed by a single person and they weren't even asking for that much. I'm sure they meant well, but I've seen a lot of developers try to pull off a full scale RPG and miss the mark in a variety of ways. I was just hoping for something interesting and fun.

What Matthias Linda has accomplished here is nothing short of incredible. He demonstrates intricate genre literacy, and has clearly thought very hard about the pros and cons of various systems in RPGs over the years. The result is something that is rock solid - damn near bulletproof, and every little thing that I've ever thought was an annoyance in the countless other RPGs I've played has been avoided. The result is something that could only come from examining hundreds of other games, seeing what didn't work, or almost worked, and tweaking until the final product shines.

I love the way that each area has a relatively small number of encounters, and each one (on the default difficulty settings) balanced to make you make heavy use of your toolkit. In exchange, you are fully healed after each battle. Being able to exercise my full knowledge of my characters' abilities often rather than having my time wasted by hundreds of weak enemies feels excellent. The addition of the overdrive gauge brings everything together: each attack raises the overdrive gauge, while swapping characters, defending, and using highlighted abilities lowers it, with your goal being to keep your position in the sweet spot to keep incoming damage minimized and your TP costs lowered. It just feels great. The sky armor combat extends the idea of the regular combat system, but plays with the way the overdrive gauge works in a way that is really interesting and fun.

Speaking of difficulty settings, the game does have three separate settings in the options menu to tweak. "Enemy stats" low/normal/high, "enemy aggressiveness" low/normal/high, and overdrive gauge sweet spot size. The default is to put everything on normal, and as I mentioned above, it feels absolutely perfect to me. But if you are having trouble, you have the ability to adjust to your needs.

The side quests in the game are all meaningful and relate directly to the story. There is not a single fetch quest in the game. I really enjoyed this. They have nice little subplots and satisfying encounters. All completely worth doing, and it ties in well with the in-game reward board which is a checklist of tasks that gives you boosts on money and other resources.

I also feel the need to praise the soundtrack. Eddie Marianukroh did a fantastic job here, and the game truly would not be what it is without his work.

There's a lot more I would love to talk about here, including entire systems that I really enjoyed, but I strongly feel that at least some of them should not be spoiled for the player. They're just that cool. Ultimately, I think that anyone who is a fan of SNES and PSX era RPGs owes it to themselves to check this out. It really is one of the best RPGs I've played in a very long time.

Chained Echoes is a game I feel very protective about. I backed it thinking that it looked pretty cool, but it was going to be developed by a single person and they weren't even asking for that much. I'm sure they meant well, but I've seen a lot of developers try to pull off a full scale RPG and miss the mark in a variety of ways. I was just hoping for something interesting and fun. What Matthias Linda has accomplished here is nothing short of incredible. He demonstrates intricate genre literacy, and has clearly thought very hard about the pros and cons of various systems in RPGs over the years. The result is something that is rock solid - damn near bulletproof, and every little thing that I've ever thought was an annoyance in the countless other RPGs I've played has been avoided. The result is something that could only come from examining hundreds of other games, seeing what didn't work, or almost worked, and tweaking until the final product shines. I love the way that each area has a relatively small number of encounters, and each one (on the default difficulty settings) balanced to make you make heavy use of your toolkit. In exchange, you are fully healed after each battle. Being able to exercise my full knowledge of my characters' abilities often rather than having my time wasted by hundreds of weak enemies feels excellent. The addition of the overdrive gauge brings everything together: each attack raises the overdrive gauge, while swapping characters, defending, and using highlighted abilities lowers it, with your goal being to keep your position in the sweet spot to keep incoming damage minimized and your TP costs lowered. It just feels great. The sky armor combat extends the idea of the regular combat system, but plays with the way the overdrive gauge works in a way that is really interesting and fun. Speaking of difficulty settings, the game does have three separate settings in the options menu to tweak. "Enemy stats" low/normal/high, "enemy aggressiveness" low/normal/high, and overdrive gauge sweet spot size. The default is to put everything on normal, and as I mentioned above, it feels absolutely perfect to me. But if you are having trouble, you have the ability to adjust to your needs. The side quests in the game are all meaningful and relate directly to the story. There is not a single fetch quest in the game. I really enjoyed this. They have nice little subplots and satisfying encounters. All completely worth doing, and it ties in well with the in-game reward board which is a checklist of tasks that gives you boosts on money and other resources. I also feel the need to praise the soundtrack. Eddie Marianukroh did a [b]fantastic[/b] job here, and the game truly would not be what it is without his work. There's a lot more I would love to talk about here, including entire systems that I really enjoyed, but I strongly feel that at least some of them should not be spoiled for the player. They're just that cool. Ultimately, I think that anyone who is a fan of SNES and PSX era RPGs owes it to themselves to check this out. It really is one of the best RPGs I've played in a very long time.