Chained Echoes is a 2.5D party-based, turn-based RPG. You will traverse a variety of differing landscapes spread across a vast continent, all rendered in pixelated graphics.
While your final party will ultimately include approximately a dozen characters, you are limited to 8 combatants in any one battle. Even here, only four members may fight at a given time, with each member ‘linked’ (by you prior to battle) to another character. You are free to swap between these two characters as you wish. Each character has access to a variety of skills in the usual fare (buff, debuffs, single target attacks, AOE), with the available skills increasing as you progress in the game. Each skill may also be upgraded twice, but only a set amount of skills may be equipped at once, somewhat muting progression.
The overworld is littered with monsters, treasure chests (containing gear or things to upgrade your gear), and various secrets, most of the 2.5d “How do I get there from here kind?”. The overworld is a strange mix of open-world and stage-gated progression, the latter of which is often enforced by your characters simply (and annoyingly) telling you that they don’t want go in that direction.
In addition to the on-foot battles and overworld travel, some sort of flying suits (called power armor) are also available for both modes. These suits are orders of magnitude more powerful (both in battle and navigation), but for some reason are mysteriously unavailable in most areas.
The battles (both on foot and in power-suits) are governed by an “overdrive” bar which goes up or down based on certain “featured” actions. These featured actions change throughout the battle and the game within the battle is to keep the bar within a certain zone to maximize efficiency (damage done and taken) by sometimes choosing the current featured action, even though said action wouldn’t normally be your first choice to execute.
There are other aspects as well, such as equipment upgrades, class emblems, the reward board, crystals, hidden treasures, hidden caves and so forth; there is certainly no shortage of systems.
Pros:
+ Large roster to select from, though the motivation to swap characters in or out is somewhat low, meaning you will likely ignore a handful characters.
+ Equipment, which was largely stage-gated by the story, was OK. There were no special effects to speak of, just simple stat boosts.
+ On balance, I liked the idea of the overdrive system.
++ Reward board was interesting and often encouraged winning battles in challenging ways.
++ Story was pretty good if that sort of thing means a lot to you (which it doesn’t really to me).
++ Skill system and character progression was interesting, with a large selection of active and passive skills to choose from.
++ Health and mana replenished after every battle, which was appreciated in a game like this.
YMMV:
+/-: The 2.5D experience is always a mixed bag. Navigation is uncomplicated, but movement is frustrating as it may take your party dozens of hours to get around what appears to be a knee-high fence or stack of logs. Secrets are often implemented via intentional overhangs or misleading illustrations, why I find more irritating then clever in 2026.
Cons:
- Game was about 33% longer than it needed to be.
- I have no issue with story based limitations on my over world exploration, but constantly enforcing said restriction via my party telling me that "We shouldn't go that way" or some other such nonsense grew tiresome and seemed lazy.
-- The “linking” of characters is a good thought, but ultimately came off as half-baked. Since the links are chosen by the player and may be altered at any time, it was never clear why half of your roster sat idly, waiting to be swapped in. Beyond that, the motivation to swap is low since you spend much of the battle applying party-wide buffs, which don’t apply to idle characters. Finally, if one of the linked characters is knocked out, the other can’t participate in the rest of the battle either for some reason.
-- Menu based interface was often tedious.
--- Implementation of crystals (which may be socketed in equipment) was far too complicated and ultimately overwhelming as I was swamped by useless crystals to have to navigate past in the UI.
--- Power armor was superfluous, uninteresting, and poorly implemented. I could go on and on with gripes here, but won’t for brevity’s sake.
Summary: Chained Echoes is an OK entry for this sort of game. It has a lot of systems, some of which hit, other which don’t. There is some depth here, but not enough to support the game’s length. I finished the game on Normal setting, though I couldn’t bear to 100% it. I don’t regret my time with it, but was glad when it was over.
Overall: 6.5/10
