Chained Echoes Review: It’s Ok
Console: Nintendo Switch (Also available on Linux, macOS, Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S)
Time Played: 40 hours
After playing (and loving) Sea of Stars, I’ve been a lot more willing to give role-playing-games with a 16-bit-art style a chance. I actually purchased Chained Echoes late last year when it first came out, but after getting only an hour or two into it then, I wasn’t motivated enough to keep playing.
Coming back to it now, I’m glad I gave this RPG more of a try. While it doesn’t come close to achieving the level of perfection of Sea of Stars, there are a lot worse ways to spend your time than exploring the land of Valandis in Chained Echoes.
Chained Echoes is a game that doesn’t get anything quite perfect, but does do a lot of things pretty well. The game does take a couple of hours to really get going. Once your party is more assembled and you aren’t playing with characters doing separate tasks, you can get more a feel for how the majority of the game is going to be played.
I think that the turn-based combat in Chained Echoes is one of its strengths. Character actions raise an overdrive meter on the upper left part of the screen, with the goal being to stay in the green area where attacks and abilities will be more effective.
The overdrive meter can overheat (going into the red area) and will then need to be lowered by executing a certain type of move. There’s enough strategy to make things challenging, but not so much that the combat is ever frustrating. Some harder battles took me multiple attempts, and there’s a learning curve to fighting, but everything always still felt doable.
I enjoyed the character customization aspects of the game for the most part. Building out a party is always one of my favorite aspects of any RPG and there’s a bunch of characters to choose from and multiple builds you can pursue for each of them. In contrast, upgrading weapons and armor is sort of confusing to start with and could definitely have been made simpler.
A good portion of the game is played fighting primarily one way and then towards the latter third of the game you need to do battles in “Sky Armor,” which uses a somewhat different system of battling. I wasn’t crazy about fights with the Sky Armor, and honestly wish the game had just maintained the same fighting rules for battles throughout.
The story of Chained Echoes is pretty standard and just fine. There are a ton of characters and there’s a lot going on with each of them. I was never really drawn in by most of it, though there were a few plot twists later on that I enjoyed. Overall, I think the game could’ve benefited from a more concise and focused plot.
The style of the game’s art didn’t really bother me, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy the look of the game either. It neither enhanced nor detracted from my experience overall. Gamers with more nostalgia for this type of 1990s Japanese RPG inspired look might appreciate it more.
Chained Echoes, for me, met the bare minimum requirement for a game that I was willing to play all the way through. I completed the main story and the major side missions and I didn’t get bored. I might never have loved any of it, but I liked it just fine.
Grade: 7/10