Stop us if you've heard this one before: a fantasy continent divided into three different nations enters a brief respite of peace, only to be dragged back into war by secret machinations-oh, what's that? Square-Enix alone released at least 3-4 games this year with that exact premise?
Yeah, we're ribbing Chained Echoes a little, but once you get past the cliched worldbuilding, this faux-retro JRPG is pretty damn impressive. It's hard to believe one person made such a large, gorgeous game over the course of seven years: some of the pixelated vistas on display are truly breathtaking. It lets you assign secondaries to each party member, meaning that this is the rare turn-based battler where your whole crew is tagging along for every single fight. And choosing the right attacks to keep your "overdrive" meter in the green is just the tactical layer it needs to keep fights interesting!
Even though it's available on Game Pass at launch, we opted to buy it on Steam after seeing a few glowing impressions from folks we trust. 6 hours in, and it seems like that was the right call: we're finding ourselves going out of our way to fight some of the goofy, optional bosses on deck. More than anything else, though, we're happy to support a sprawling passion project like this.