Recent reviews by jbxdavis

Excellent. This is what happens when you elevate smart, rewarding tactical gameplay with great characters, world-building, and writing. Each unit is distinct and serves a unique niche. RPG elements allow you to double down on your favorite tactics. That feeling when you manage to set up the perfect play is touch is immensely satisfying. Dialog is top-notch: hooks you with humor then uses that base to flesh out personality and voice.

Took me just about 30 hours to 100% it, but with player-made maps I imagine there's a lot more meat on the bone.

A top-notch love letter to the SNES-era RPGs that defined the genre. After 70 hours, I've picked up every single achievement. As I watched the epilogue and then the credit roll, I had the same feeling of gratitude I did twenty-something years ago after beating Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. I love this game, and the developers' love is abundantly clear.

Now for some details:
- Characters are simple at face value, but turned out to be surprisingly complex. Each has at least one interesting complication that made me want to learn what happened to them even after the story wrapped up. Side characters are enjoyable and generally add something to the story.
- Story is excellent. The protagonists and antagonists have clear goals that shift as the narrative evolves, and the stakes continually increase. It's complex enough that you constantly have questions swimming in your head about who the big players are and what their motivations could be. But it's never so arcane that you can't keep up or are too fatigued to care.

- Related to the above points, the writing is way better than it has any right to be. I read a lot of fantasy and generally expect video games to be pretty simplistic by comparison. Not only is the story solid, but the dialog between characters is believable, fun, and never over-bearing. Characters say what makes sense for them to say, and the results are often hilarious or poignant.

- The graphics are perfect for the game, and I was amazed at the quality and quantity of character sprites, sprawling landscapes, and little details that the develop could have easily neglected.

- The score is great - I added it on Spotify, which is the highest endorsement I can give of a game's soundtrack! Hearing a series of the tracks during the credits was stirring.

- Mechanics are solid, and there are a lot of systems the developer split time across. Off the top of my head, you have basic combat, sky armor combat, skill progression, skill advancement, crafting, loot collecting, and armor & weapon upgrades. I felt that all of these systems served the game well. My one gripe is that combining crystals became pretty tiresome just because you end up holding so many and having to scroll through menus that reset over and over took way longer than it had to.

- I'll call out combat specifically. It's very unique for the genre in that you begin each fight at full HP/MP, so you can basically go all-out in every fight. There's rarely any reason to use a basic attack. What tempers this is an Overdrive gauge that determines how much damage you give and take, and how quickly you'll burn up all your MP. This is novel and generally fun, but has the drawback of making fights you've done before feel repetitive. "Oh, 3 bandits again. I'll use the same strategy I did against the 3 bandits earlier".

- What really unlocks the combat are the skill combos you can pull off. It's very fun to continually unlock more skills and figure out the best synergies between party members. I'd basically written off one party member in particular until I simply couldn't beat a boss and tried something radical. It worked like a charm, and that became my go-to strategy for single target DPS. It's super satisfying to have experimentation rewarded like that, and there's tons of room to play around with different builds & skill combos.

In conclusion, Chained Echoes is an amazing tribute to the great, genre-defining JRPGs of old that brings a lot of its own ideas to the table, and showcases them alongside a compelling story with great characters. Easy recommendation for fans of the games that inspired it, or anyone looking for a good story.

Thoroughly enjoying it so far. It's thrilling to go through the game knowing that your choices are so drastically different from what another player (or even a future self) would see. The 5E mechanics have been imported in wonderful and creative ways, with a few tweaks for approachability / consistency's sake.

I agree with some negative reviews that the inclusion of exclusively evil (or at best neutral)-aligned origin characters puts a bit of a dour mood on things, but keep in mind this is Act 1 (and early access). Not only will there likely be more origin characters, but I expect they will all drop their grimaces to some extent. Wyll and Gale are pretty friendly from the get-go.

Take EA for what it is: a test-run for the engine and the game's mechanics. From that lens, this is an incredible achievement and I'm excited to see what more Larian has coming down the pipe.

While I haven't yet finished the game, I've been absolutely spellbound from the start. I'm a big fan of the Witcher series (200 hours in W3), and was even inspired to read the books, which I loved. That led me to this game, which does a sort of Rogue One thing where it ties some of the events of the book together.

The fights are executed in Gwent-like card games that will be familiar to anyone who's played Gwent, Hearthstone, Magic, or any of the other card games that are all the rage nowadays. Most fights involve playing executing your strategy while the opponent does the same, but you'll occasionally run into "Puzzle" matches that give you a specific deck you need to figure out the right execution behind. It creates a nice range of challenges that force you to think in different ways, and I find it really invigorating. I'm never bemoaning a fight... I'm always excited for the next one.

The story has been excellent, and well-executed with meaningful choices, great voice-acting, and some nice artwork to bring it together. The setting is grimdark, but with enough purpose and drive to compel you forward.

Highly recommend this game for someone looking for a story-rich experience.

Buy Eon Altar of special for $4, expect a novel concept executed poorly and a decent distraction.

Head over to friend's house, casually mention game. Nothing better to do, let's try it.

4 hours pass. Episode 1 complete. Feverishly go to store page to buy Episodes 2 and 3.

This game is incredible.

So far only 7 hours in, but given the "Mixed" review on the Steam Store, I was reluctant to pick this up on sale for $10.

I'm very happy with it at this point. I played the first 2 hours and despite loving the initial cut scenes (setting the dark tone), wasn't truly hooked until the battle sytem and customization opened up a bit. Now I can't get enough.

The aesthetic is a lot like FF8 in the sense that it's a modern vibe that maintains the typical FF-anime feel. It's set in the same universe as FF13, which was never my favorite, but does a better job providing resources for you to catch up on the lore, should you want to.

You're essentially playing an action RPG with 14 playable characters (not incuding the eidolons that are super fun) that all use different weapons and balances of magic and skills to contribute to the fight. I can't imagine getting bored of the combat, as each of those 14 characters adds skills and spells (or even entire mechanics) to their repitoire every time they level, which is quite frequent. Combine all that with the fact that you're using 3 people at once, and we have a game where no two fights are the same. There are a number of design choices in the game that keep things fresh.

I'll update as I play a bit more, and fully expect this to be another Final Fantasy adventure that I log 50+ hours with.