Tunic is a game that I experienced almost entirely by watching my partner play it, with a hefty dose of being the minion reading the game wiki so we could figure out what to do next. Magos Sockbert: Some people would tell you that to truly lose yourself in a game, you have to play the game yourself.
Do you get a big smile on your face when you walk into the battlefield, boutiquely rendered, and there’s an enemy attacking you called a Boxfly, and he’s a cartoon fly with big frowny eyebrows, two noodle arms hanging below him, and those arms end in boxing gloves? Do you go “I knew it!” when you walk into his aggro radius and those noodle arms come up and those boxing gloves, bigger than the cartoon fly’s body, start punching you for 2 damage, ten times? Are these the jokes you like? Do you want to hang out with a smart princess, a stupid valet, an untrustworthy revolutionary, a sultry thief, and a bard that’s secretly Gandalf? Do you want to get angry about how badly all of them are treated by the way the world works? Get in on Chained Echoes. Vibes are purely personal and, when it comes to nostalgic JRPGs, they kind of depend on time served.
That’s not a great selling point, I know. The thing that’s so great about it is less the mechanics and more the vibe. You always need a guy who goes Har har har! You know that thing about how you’d pilot your mech in combat in Xenogears? You will be piloting your ‘Sky Armor’ in combat. The battle schema is tight, with an Overdrive system that forces you to play inside of its parameters, and the advancement systems are pulled from the greatest games in this tradition, from Final Fantasy 12 to Final Fantasy 9 to Chrono Cross to the three titles mentioned before. Everything about this title is the way JRPGs should be. Chained Echoes is a name that actually makes sense once you get 10 hours into its run time but until then you’re playing a title that sounds like Kingdom Hearts DLC and, instead of being that, is serving you the best stuff front to finish from every game you played - here, you are currently 35 years old - when you were gaining your sealeags with Japanese RPGs. The boys hit the toys and we snap to a princess and her snarly manservant, and the game just runs out from there. The game opens with a Chrono Trigger homage, then an FF8 homage, then a Xenogears homage, then - we’re not outside of the first prologue, mind you. Jonathan Bernhardt: Speaking about the righteousness of a singular obsessive, this game was essentially made by one Matthias Linda - and he’s played every single Square Enix RPG from the NES era through the late Playstation 2 era at the very least.
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