I wanted to love this one, I really did. Chained Echoes is a modern take on Chrono Trigger. It's one of those games where the dev has clearly put a lot of love and attention into it. I'd like to say that if you love Chrono Trigger you'll love this because it's the same feeling but with some nice modern conveniences (immediate fast travel, for example) and a fun, if innocuous story. The combat's improved too, because turn-based combat allows for the abilities to be more nuanced than CT's area-based spells. However, There are a few things that become annoying over time. None of these are too bad on their own, but after 30 hours it starts to wear one down a little. The game is very eager to be accessible. For example, there are a lot of doors in the city environments, but the ones you can enter are always marked with a red triangle. This is nice, but it means you rarely feel like you're discovering a truly well-hidden secret. Combat is fun, but the overdrive system feels like a blunt instrument. It's meant to encourage you to swap characters and vary your move types, but it punishes you harshly for not doing so. Since enemy actions also impact the gauge, it's easy for mistakes to cascade. There's also the whole second combat system, the sky armors. The actual system is fine, but it's introduced too late. I'd just spend 15 hours building up a team of party members, then the game throws a much more rigid system at me. It doesn't feel like an upgrade. Upgrading gear suffers from a similar problem. The process of forging gear and slotting crystals is novel at first, but the system for moving the crystals is clunky. Since gear has to be fully forged to hold all crystals, this means finding new gear feels like a hassle. Overall it's a soft recommend, especially if you're a fan of the games it's inspired by. You can get through the game without engaging too much with systems you find tiring. I certainly did that for the sky armors.
