Chained Echoes Review – Take the Old With the New

It was only a little while ago that I first saw a trailer for Chained Echoes and was instantly hooked on both the style of the game and the presentation of the graphics. Getting the chance to play the game early and to test the mechanics of this game was a true delight!

Game Name: Chained Echoes
Platform(s): Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC (Reviewed)
Publisher(s): Deck13
Developer(s): Matthias Linda
Release Date: December 7th, 2022
Price: $24.99

Chained Echoes made me reminisce about some of my favorite moments in various video games, all in the SNES era of games. This game seems heavily inspired by the likes of Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Romancing Saga, and probably even more that I am missing from the list. It has some in-depth mechanics and a battle system that makes you have to strategize greatly.

As you begin the game, you play the role of Glenn, who has been hired by a famed pirate leader known as Kylian to be a sky armor pilot to grab a crystal from a kingdom. Everyone aside from you and Kylian is instantly killed when you grab it. You eventually see several perspectives surrounding the event, which turns into an adventure to protect the world from those who would want to use this crystal to take over the world. A bit basic in premise, but Chained Echoes does a good job of having a variety of characters that help make the world feel important.

Overdrive

You will have a lot of freedom in Chained Echoes once you finish a few narrative stories. These will help you understand the best way to get into the game’s battle system. You will not get experience in the normal way during battle. You will get stars that are called Grimoire Points that will let you decide where you want to put your progression. You can use it to learn new skills, new passive abilities, or just flat-out increase your stats. Once you reach a certain threshold of Grimoire Points you will get access to new skills, passives, and stats to increase with any new ones. Grimoire Points are given to you after certain story beats in the game. Each fight will give you SP to use on skills, money, or items. Grinding in this game is more about getting money for gear which is fine. I do appreciate knowing I don’t need to kill 50 goblins to get a level.

In battle, you will have up to eight party members you can utilize. Four that will be in the back lines, and four on reserve that can be switched out if you need someone else. This usually meant I would have a starting party of Debuffers, and a back line of strong attack units to switch into once the enemies get debuffed. Each encounter lets you have full HP and TP so you don’t have to make yourself keep your character resources conserved. Special moves and skills utilize TP or Technical Points. You can defend to gain more TP if you are low or just use items to refill them. Since encounters give you a reset on your HP and TP, you can treat every encounter as a spectacle. Use all your AoE Skills or do strong powerful moves to kill individual units. This is great, but it also is an incentive to not fear going after side bosses as you won’t use up too much of your resources to beat them.

When you get into a battle you have a meter called Overdrive. Your place in the overdrive meter is shown by an arrow at the top of it. When you perform actions, you can move your arrow along the meter. You start on the orange color bar in the meter and want to focus on keeping that arrow in the green color bar. If your arrow is in the green, it increases the amount of damage you can deal, as well as decrease the amount of damage your enemy can dish out. You can defend by moving the bar backward because if you move too far to the green bar, you can run into the red bar. This bar reduces your damage and increases the damage of your enemies. You will be playing a lot of risk and reward as skills move your arrow pretty far along the Overdrive meter.

SNES

As advertised on the steam page and trailers, Chained Echoes is heavily influenced by 16-bit games, including the looks and sounds. It uses 16-bit type graphics well when it comes to certain scenes. There is a story in the game that is horrifying and is enhanced by the graphical presentation of the flowers and characters as they walk over them. Once the story helps give you an understanding of these flowers, it provides a whole new perspective on the inn you were staying at, and how it affects the main cast.

I don’t want to give any spoilers at this moment, but it got dark fast. It also shows how jaded some of the older members are to the world, as some of the main cast is more fazed by the story than others. The graphical presentation gives you a great sense of scale. Later on in Chained Echoes, you will get access to Sky Armor. A mechanized set of armor that lets the users fly and add effects and skills. They look much bigger than the normal character sprites, and the battles show how beautiful the big 16-bit sprites can be with explosions and various movements.

Adventure

Honestly, Chained Echoes is an amazing game with a lot of inspiration that can be felt from the game’s story, appearance, and passion. The characters are fantastical and have a layer of depth to them that adds to the adventure. The fights can be challenging and, at times, will give you a bit of a headache if you aren’t using all your characters as much as you should, but it makes the success that much more satisfying. This game performs perfectly on Steam Deck and fits as a wonderful travel JRPG if you don’t want to spend long hours on the PC. I played the entirety of my time with the game on the Steam Deck. No dropped frames or weird configuration issues.

Chained Echoes is Available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.