It’s almost the end of the year and I want to call you all out for not telling me there’s an indie JRPG called Chained Echoes that is apparently not only pretty good but also has a 15 second turtle race set to explosive, screaming hardcore metal. (If you didn’t know either, I invite you to repeat the shame session here.)
I mean seriously, it’s hysterical and a great green light to try the game. For starters, it shows something JRPGs are often unaware of: a sense of humor. It’s a great moment that begs you to take a moment from what would otherwise be thrown onto the inevitably growing pile of pixelated nostalgia trips.
So shame on all of you fans, players and PR people who absolutely should have led with this in an email. Shame on you that this game has been out for 22 days at the time of writing and I only just found out about the turtle races. (Which you can watch on Youtube (opens in new tab) or embedded above, if you like.)
The shortage of guitar riffs was supplied by irony-poisoned sludgy British metal-and-mathcore band ZILF. “When we were asked to write a 15-second mathcore song for a bunch of turtles racing against each other in a pixel art JRPG game,” ZILF said in a press release, “we responded, ‘That’s the most ZILF thing we’ve ever heard.'”
Chained Echoes art is fun, but the name and description might lead you, like me, to think it’s nothing more than your average indie-inflected JRPG nostalgia trip. You would be wrong. Solo developer Matthias Linda’s game currently sits at a solid 91% positive from 1,250 Steam user reviews.
The only person exempt from my wrath is Andrea Shearon, whose piece here at PC Gamer on Chained Echoes didn’t include any vital details about turtle racing, but rather succinctly describes what’s interesting about it.
She called Chained Echoes’ Overdrive combat system “simple and uniquely immersive” her editorial on its charms (opens in new tab)noting that despite adding an extra layer over the classic JRPG combat, it doesn’t “unnecessarily complicate” things.
“Battles start with the overdrive arrow in orange, which doesn’t bring snazzy buffs. Green rewards the party with optimal damage. My goal is to keep things steady in the middle, so the fun comes from how the arrow rotates between colors. I can’t use Armor Break just because I think a villain must have broken his armor, I have to check the symbol next to the ability to see if it matches my ever-changing overdrive rules, if the symbols match, the arrow goes back “If the symbols don’t match, I’m closer to red. We don’t want to talk about red,” she said.
This has been a great year for indies working in the JRPG space as it started with Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga (opens in new tab) which-title aside (opens in new tab)– was exploding a delicious twist strategic RPG (opens in new tab) formula. I hope for more in 2023.
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