Alright. Chained Echoes is done and dusted. This is an epic JRPG adventure with a sweeping story where your party tries to prevent an apocalypse while also trying to stop a civil war, helping civilians and solving other mysteries along the way. There is soooo much content, and yet somehow, the download is only 800mb lol. Anyway, it took me about fourty three hours to complete the story and the majority of content.

You will have four active characters at a time, but you’ll end up with quite a few party members by the end of the game. Additionally, at some point, you’ll earn a base, where your party members can chill, and where you will also invite a variety of NPCs that passive boosts, extra items, storefronts, and so on. And, you’ll also be given an airship at that point, making travel around the world much easier and giving you access to new areas. Prior to that, you have to rely exclusively on a fast travel system with teleport points opening up as you find waypoint crystals.

This is a loot heavy RPG, and so you’ll be leveling up your party members (who thankfully all level up together), unlocking new abilities and buffs. You’ll also earn SP, which is used to level up the abilities you know. You will also level up your weapons and armor via use of anvils and materials found or purchased, and can use special crystals found throughout the game to buff your weapons and armor with a variety of abilities and stat boosts.

Additionally, you can find secret locations throughout the world that, after proving yourself in battle at these locations, can each offer what is essentially an equip-able secondary class with special abilities and boosts.

Battles are turn based, and there are thankfully no random encounters. You might trigger an encounter by entering an area, but for the mist part, you can see exactly what you’re going to fight ahead of time.

Early on, you’ll join an Adventurers Guild, and via a rewards board, you earn cash and other stuff by meeting benchmarks, such as finding a certain amount of chests, defeating “x” amount of an enemy type, etc…and will also be rewarded for killing unique monsters that inhabit the world and are functionally optional boss fights.

So, with some gameplay specifics out of the way, and as mentioned earlier, this story is truly epic in my opinion. Navigating political intrigue while also dealing with day to day life and several types of apocalypses is a lot to keep track of and this game never loses focus, never forgets where it is, and never writes itself into narrative corners. It was very impressive.

The sights and sounds in this game are no less impressive. There are numerous unique locations, impressive representations of abilities and spells in combat, cool music catering to the moments in the game, and just overall vibrancy and life breathed into the setting both graphically and from an audio perspective.

It was a seamless experience on the Steam Deck out of the box, and generous with battery life running at about four hours for me.

Recency bias aside, this might genuinely be one of the greatest JRPGs ever made, and certainly the top one in recent memory, which includes contemporaries such as Sea of Stars. This was given to me as a gift, but there is no question it earns its asking price. And did I mention that this game was the vision of one person and the majority of work on it seems to have been handled by like three people? Impressive. Give it a look for sure.