7. Chained Echoes, dev. Matthias Linda
I've played a JRPG or two in my day. You may have heard this about me.
I'm pretty sure Matthias Linda has played a few as well. In his game, Chained Echoes, he has assembled a Greatest Hits collection of JRPG ideas. There's the Conditional Turn-Based battle system from Final Fantasy X. The enemy encounters play like Chrono Trigger. The mechs are out of Xenogears. The plot feels like a remake of Final Fantasy XII, with character portraits imitating Final Fantasy Tactics, and the final boss sends-up Final Fantasy VI. You get a cool airship in the second half of the game and an island you can populate with NPCs, which is right out of Skies of Arcadia. There's a License Board. There's Limit Breaks. Sure, not all of Chained Echoes works (the Materia-ish Crystal system is frustrating and the Job Classes feel unfinished) but that's a lot of classic JRPG grandeur to fit in one package.
On the most recent episode of the Final Fantasy Wiki Podcast, I made the argument that Chained Echoes was the best Final Fantasy game of 2022. Now Final Fantasy is a huge and varied franchise, so what "a Final Fantasy should be" is a very difficult question. This franchise has sired multiple generations of fans all with very different ideas, often contradictory ones. I've lived this life, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII fans do not get along very easily. We have withered ancient Boomers who still call the SNES games Final Fantasy II and III, and we have tiny adorable babies who joined the story with Noctis. So there's more politics at play here than most Yasumi Matsuno games.
Personally, my gold-standard of Final Fantasy (and therefore, the entire JRPGs genre) is that PS1-PS2 era, where the games were long, the adventures were wild and varied, and there were never too many ideas. Square never said no to anything, and that's how you end up with confusing messes of games like Final Fantasy VIII or Chrono Cross. Just wonderful, wonderful messes, truly glorious piles of self-defeating bullshit. Love them. Chained Echoes by emulating so many other great games feels like it has that same ambition.
There have been a lot of games aiming for the nostalgia of the SNES (Bravely Default, for example), but until Chained Echoes, I have not found many that have aimed for the PS1 era. Mostly because trying to make your own Final Fantasy VII-IX demands a a level of production just beyond an indie team. Chained Echoes was not even made by a team, it was largely made by just one person, only needing a bit of additional help making music and art assets. So you will not get the polygons or FMVs of the late-Nineties. But Chained Echoes, even if made out of pixel art, still looks great. And at thirty hours this is the full experience of being one of these old blockbusters. There's big twists, there's intense act break moments that feel like the dramatic reveals at the end of a PS1 disc, and the major boss encounters are awesome. And I will never not love a pixel art top-down game, especially one that looks this good.
There is an issue where that Chained Echoes is too reliant on being a Greatest Hits collection for its own good. I would prefer that the characters were more original, so that I could not immediately name their inspirations. Glenn is Cloud mixed with Fei Wong, Sienna is a lesbian Balthier, Victor is Citan with a beard, Lenne is Garnet with a spear, Amalia is Eiko with a pet dog, Kylian is Delita but the subtext is text, Robb is a redeemed take on Argath, Ba'Thraz is Kimahri with a Fullmetal Alchemist curse, the cast of evil flunky generals are straight out of the Valuan Empire, and the evil gods are the Occuria. There's even a friggin' Quina, and always hated Quina. Why can't we have a Beatrix or Setzer instead? I love that we jump inside a character's mind to help them through their period of darkness, but we did do that already in Final Fantasy VII. I love that we get a Millennium Parade pastiche, but it is still a pastiche.
If you're wondering what Chained Echoes brings to the table on its own, it isn't a lot. I am happy that this game is very open with explicit LGBT themes where Final Fantasy somehow still isn't. (Vanille and Fang in Final Fantasy XIII were still only "really good friends", wink wink.) There is a late-act twist revealing our hero's identity and has a beautiful montage of his long backstory that I think is unique and special. But moment like that are the exception, not the rule.
I suppose if Chained Echoes does anything it's just reusing all these ideas in a solid package. There are issues: the script could use another pass, the music is below average for this genre, and the Crystal is an awful slog of menus. But I think the general flow of the combat is great. The game uses a system called "Overdrive" where you need to balance your abilities to not overheat your units. There's solid decisions like making every boss vulnerable to most status effects, even the three types of Poison damage. You can stack all sorts of buffs and vulnerabilities for enormous damage. The combat is quite punishing, regular encounters can wipe your team out if you get sloppy. Chained Echoes is a really well-made game that's much better balanced than the Nineties Square games it was inspired by.
Anyway, that's enough nostalgia. The next game in the Top 10 is nothing like anything else I have ever played.
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