One of the best jrpg in recent years, Chained Echoes is an ambitious game heavily influenced by timeless classics such as Chrono Trigger and Xenogears that surprisingly manages to really capture and recreate what made those games so great.

While the presentation is top notch and the adventure is compelling and fast paced right from the beginning, I think Chained Echoes' biggest achievement is the ability to surprise the player at every turn, revealing an ever bigger world to explore and a story with a much wider scope that one could imagine. Much like the story, the exploration slowly builds up to create a vast world which is very well put together with lots of interesting ideas. The novelty never wears off because each location might lead to both a new place or an old one in surprising ways; most of the engagement comes from the relevance of what you're discovering and how it contributes to create an interconnected and belivable world.

The joy of exploration is also heightened by the way the rest of the gameplay is structured: no random battles, no annoying enemy respawns, no grinding, Chained Echoes doesn't waste your time and actually wants you to engage with the world it presents, rather than keeping the player on repetition. The combat ranges from fine to good, featuring "tag team" mechanics that allows party members to switch on the fly, expanding tactical options. Each character has his own skillset and fills a unique niche in combat. The only shortcomings I feel like pointing out are the rather limited pool of abilities, which hinders the sense of progression, and the unexciting loot; both these complaints affect the combat on sky armors (mechas) as well, although the fights themselves are not bad at all.

It's not hard to see why Chained Echoes provides such an enjoyable experience: it doesn't strive to tick all possible boxes or to keep the player on the threadmill just for the sake of it, but sticks with its premise of delivering an adventure: it has a story to tell and a world to show, and it does so by raising the stakes in surprising and ambitious twists. While the otherwise excellent presentation might fall a bit short, in specific moments, of the greatness of some of the ideas shown, a few cliffhangers are masterfully executed and probably even measure up to the classics.