YMMV / Chained Echoes

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Glenn:
    • His decision to give away his immortality can be seen as both selfish and selfless. On one hand, he makes it clear that he considers himself too burnt out to handle the role of an immortal True King, making it seem like he's trying to escape his duty. On the other hand, he seems to be doing so because he sees his past self in Kylian and believes if he can become a better person, so can Kylian.
    • Additionally, his words make it sound like he considers his redemption quest to be a shackle, and the story itself shows that while Glenn's desire for atonement turned him into a better person than Van, it is also treated as an unhealthy obsession that nearly turned him into a hermit or comatose. The Chained Echo boss in his mind also seems to symbolize how his atonement has been twisted into self-imposed chains rather than something positive. His decision to pass on can be seen as a way for him to forgive himself and let go of his obsession before it can consume him again.
    • Some players argue that Glenn isnt a humble introvert but a suicidally depressed boy who was raised in a slave city and turned soldier at young age. He stutters often, is mostly driven by guilt or someone else's dream and he wants to give up fighting multiple times through the story, once having delusions about helping orphans to cope with his failures. Some see his final decision as Glenn simply seeing the perfect opportunity to end his own life.
  • Kylian:
    • While Kylian betrayed the Church in order to join Taryn for being the stronger side, it's also possible that he disapproved of their secret plan to unleash the Harbinger, which would be much worse than Taryn is doing to Valandis.
    • The story implies that Kylian has an Inferiority Superiority Complex towards Glenn. During Act 2 and beyond, Glenn gains his own clan and builds all kinds of connections across Valandis, and even gets several foreign diplomats to visit the base if enough members are collected. Meanwhile, Kylian is stuck being a minion for the Church with little influence and pleasures one of his superiors just to get anywhere in the organization, making it clear that Glenn managed to obtain everything Kylian wanted without the ambitious backstabbing. In the ending, Kylian is quick to kill Gwayn because the latter favors Glenn as the next 8th True King, and then he calls Glenn "nothing," making him come off as jealous rather than genuinely well-intentioned.
  • Frederik:
    • His grand plan is to focus Valandis's hatred against him so that they can form a lasting peace after his death. However, his earlier resentment about being left to run Taryn alone seems to be genuine, so it's possible his extreme plan to maintain peace on Valandis is also a desperate means for him to be free of his burdens. Additionally, right before he dies, he states that he has nightmares about leading people through a cave without knowing where he's going and that he hopes to never dream of that ever again, showing that he was never ready to rule Taryn.
    • He offers to make Kylian a general if the latter detonates the Grand Grimoire in Marylea. While trusting the latter with the Grimoire seems foolish, he's also making Kylian take on an extremely risky task, making this seem like a Uriah Gambit to get rid of an untrustworthy pawn rather than blind trust. Considering how little Frederik actually cares about his generals, this puts his orders to Godfrey in Act 1 in a much darker light.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: Some people who played the game were not too thrilled about how it ends with Glenn’s decision to sacrifice himself to save Kylian and wishing to reincarnate into a bird feeling like an Ass Pull has very little foreshadowing outside of Kylian's implied similarities to Van. The developer's intention is for Glenn to help someone undeserving redeem themselves just like how a priest did the same for his second life, but some thought he was being too trusting by handing the power of the 8th True King to Kylian.
• Awesome Moments:
  • The taste of power you get when you receive your first Sky Armor aboard the Aurora. Your party commandeers an airship to flee the scene, and Glenn is allowed to show the unfortunate soldiers between him and his quarry exactly why he is the best pilot of his generation.
  • The assault on Raminas Tower is an ever-escalating series of awesome moments, one after the other;
    • Alena and Kennrich are put in their place by Gwayn on Frederik's orders after thinking they could take the king on, never realizing he'd already planned for a potential betrayal on their part - if anything, he was expecting it as part of his master plan.
    • The party tears through a small army of enemy sky armors before taking on Maria and her elite guard, finally avenging her murder of Lenne in the previous timeline.
    • King Frederik reveals he has already won by achieving everything he set out to get done by making sure everyone on Valandis hated him before pretending to die at the hands of his sister via committing suicide in front of the party, ensuring that either Lenne or Amalia and the rest of the Crimson Wings would go down in history as the saviors of Valandis and the heroes that finally ended the warfare between the three nations.
    • To top it all off, Gwayn gives the Grand Grimoire back to the party after intentionally tricking the Vaen into summoning their champion, urging the Crimson Wings to strike a major blow against the Vaen and power the Grimoire enough to stand a chance at killing them by having them detonate the Grimoire on the champion. Glenn finally properly takes the role of the party's leader and a Hope Bringer for Valandis besides and leads an epic charge on the champion where he, Ba'Thraz, Victor, and Sienna cut down one of its biggest, nastiest underlings before finally detonating the Grand Grimoire intentionally, killing the beast in an instant.
    • Despite the Vaen then deciding to just blow up the entire world, Gwayn holds back the meteor to give the party time to deal with the Vaen themselves. Sienna even takes a moment to get sarcastic with them!
  • Defeating the mightiest True King, God King Gaemdriel. Though he might have been weakened by his long rest in his prison, Gaemdriel doesn't let that stop him from considering the party worthy opponents, and he's a Graceful Loser in defeat, as by his own Might Makes Right philosophy their victory over him means that he is not worthy to spread discord through Eldrea. When he loses, he points out just what the party accomplished - without their Sky Armors, they just defeated a being of comparable (if not greater) power to a living mountain, a living moon, a massive boar that literally paves continents, and the strongest dragon in existence, and sums it all up for them by giving them a fitting title - 'Slayers of Kings.'
  God King Gaemdriel: This long sleep must have taken its toll on me...You've accomplished what no one else before you was capable of. You have my respect, Slayers of Kings. In this world ruled by the strong, you can walk with your head held high. Fare thee well.
  • Further earning the party their prestige for the previous feat, Kylian gets to make True King Asnadiel buzz off with a few harsh words once he inherits the Will of Lebrodia-Dervinas from Glenn following the final boss fight. For someone who, not minutes before in the game's story chronologically, was reflecting on all the ways he failed as a person leading up to Glenn's decision to give the Will to him, Kylian finally gets to show he might have potential after all.
• Awesome Music: The entire frickin' soundtrack. Special mentions go to the main theme, Fractured Echoes (the boss theme), Champions of the Sky (the Sky Armor boss theme), Rohlan Fields, The Dancing City of Farnsport.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Out of all the ultra moves, Glenn's multi-target damage and debuffs make it the best for random battles and Sienna's high single target damage with free speed and crit rate buff is excellent for boss battles, meaning you'll probably only use those two for most of the game.
  • Due to his abrasive personality and extremely niche skillset, Robb is usually the first character to be benched as soon as you recruit more than 8 characters.
  • Sienna has a variety of moves she can use and skills she can field, but the majority of end-game Sienna builds are going to zero in on two skills and one attack in particular; Agility Up, Crit Damage Up, and Dragon Fang.
  • In the version 1.2 update, the crystal chain system encourages this mindset, since picking one type of crystal from a spawn point increases the chances of that type appearing again, but the chain stops if the player picks something different. This means it's more efficient to farm a single type of Crystal that universally benefits all characters, such as Agi Up, at least until there's enough to properly outfit everyone.
  • Out of all sky armor weapon combos, Great Sword and Bowgun are bound to never leave your team once you realize how strong Energy Flow is. The ability to make your specials shots hit all enemies lets you spread poison, inact, blind or silence to all enemies at once, making every fight much faster and safer. By the endgame, you might even consider having multiple armors with either that or great sword plus ether cannon.
  • While the emblems are supposed to give the player some degree of customization and freedom, Monk's HP Up and Bandit's Agi Up are such universally strong passives you can teach and put on all your units regardless or their job.
• Complete Monster:
  • The three Vaen are an ancient and powerful race that once helped defeat and seal away the evil Harbinger, before their power went to their heads and began to see themselves as gods over humanity. To strengthen the Harbinger's prison, the Vaen would periodically release the destructive Grand Grimoire in the world so that it could cause mass devastation to reset human progress and use their souls to reinforce the prison. When the Grand Grimoire is stolen from them, the Vaen are only enraged that someone would dare steal from them, and send their giant champion to kill the thief. When the Crimson Wings kill it, the Vaen create a giant fireball to kill everyone in Valandis with as punishment, showing that despite their claims, they only truly care about maintaining their own power and superiority over mankind.
  • Daimbert is a scientist from Tormund interested in transferring souls from one being to another and was exiled over wanting to try human experimentation. Founding the White Rose Inn, Daimbert would pose as a normal innkeeper to abduct passing travelers and experiment on them, such as transferring their souls into another person, which would drive them insane before they killed themselves, or trap their souls inside flowers with them still fully conscious and aware. Abducting Lenne when the party is passing through, Daimbert used her to try to capture the entire party to experiment on them, only to run away when they got free. When confronted by the heroes, Daimbert has the only survivor of his experiments, the little girl Arlette, and orders her to kill them, threatening to beat her if she doesn't.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Enemies from the Flower Fields of Perpetua are a major reason why Perpetua is That One Level;
    • The Scorpions have a poison attack that shaves off nearly forty percent of the character's HP and still hit like a thrown brick to the face otherwise, making them a major hassle to deal with, and they serve to support King Owls by forcing the party to heal constantly from their assaults.
    • The King Owls are even worse. If the Owls are feeling spiteful, they have a wind attack they can use to two-shot anyone in the party who isn't Ba'Thraz or Victor, and they always travel in pairs or with a Sporeman. Expect the annoyances to zero in on your hard-hitters like Sienna and Lenne and continually knock them down while you continue to throw Angel Feathers in the vain hope the assault will relent. They're also vicious damage sponges, basically necessitating gang-up tactics to stop them from causing problems for the party.
    • Return later with Sky Armors to access other parts of Perpetua, and you'll run into Cobwebtadies. Nasty spider-frogs with a ton of health, attacks that inflict poison, and upon death they explode damaging your entire party! Woe is the player that tried to take them out all at once instead of one-by-one!
  • Hana Dolls are a late-game enemy with a weird mechanic that they start with 5000 "stored" damage that they will unleash on their first turn and then perish. In a game where your party might have 300 HP at best, this is a full party wipe. The only way to mitigate this attack is to deal enough damage to that Hana Doll before it can move as every point of damage lowers their stored attack strength. 5000 is still a pretty high number though even with their low defense, and you also need enough agility to move before the Hana Doll can. And may the True Kings protect you if you're fighting more than one!
  • The golems in the optional part of Raminas Tower have offensive stats surpassing 1000 along with powerful AOE skills, making them difficult to survive against even with tier 6 Sky Armor equipment.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Stacking generic offensive passives like ATK Up and multiplicative ones like weapon mastery, combined with crit increases and battle buffs ends up making anyone hit extremely hard and can easily be achieved with some lucky crystals or learned off of Class Emblems. These often have more benefits than taking more specific passives like Fire Resistance or extra damage on specific enemies, and of the stats two in particular stand out:
    • Agility is the most useful stat in the game, to the point stacking it with crystals and buffs lets your whole team get multiple turns before the enemy can react. It was so strong the game was patched to put an agility cap of 50 before battle buffs.
    • Second only to agility is HP. Simply put, Chained Echoes is a low-numbers game that works off stat multipliers to give you your statistics. Because of this, defense and mind can be depressingly small without a lot of investment, but HP, which is naturally high to start with and routinely gets the biggest incremental bonuses, can make you nigh-immortal. With even a little investment, it's possible to give Amalia, the frailest party member by a country mile, enough health to utterly wall God King Gaemdriel's most powerful attack, which says a lot about how this makes the other characters unstoppable with HP investment.
  • Lenne eventually gets Elemental Pact, a personal buff that makes her next three spells do double damage at it's max skill level. It comes at a high cost of draining all her TP, but by the time you unlock it you should have multiple means of TP recovery through items or party member skills. What makes it nuts is that it stacks with her other personal magic buff, Third Eye, and Heaven's Tear (a spell that changes it's element to the enemy's weakness) resulting in pure magical carnage.
  • Sienna is a natural Lightning Bruiser, but what puts her here is Dragon Fang. This skill deals more hits the higher her agility is, and with some attack and critical hit buffs can do some brutal damage. And as mentioned above, agility is already a god stat, allowing Sienna to spam 2 or 3 of these before the enemy can even move!
  • Out of all sky armor gear, the Inact RAM acessory is easily the most game breaking, doubling the amount of times an enemy will be inactive. Even if the enemy resists the second cast, the third will hit, meaning you can effectively make a boss skip 4 turns in a row.
  • The HP Drain passive is extremely strong as it allows any attacker to heal themselves for free. The only character who learns this naturally is Glenn and makes him near immortal, everyone else has to use crystals.
• Goddamned Boss: Maria and her Valkyries are scripted to recast Mirror Images on themselves to allow them to dodge attacks. This requires the player to time their strongest attacks well, but the Valkyries' high speed makes that difficult, especially on the highest difficulty settings.
• Good Bad Bugs: Magnolia is the beneficiary of a powerful bug in one of her buffing moves - Wild Card. Wild Card is supposed to double the power of the next card move Magnolia and cancels Magnolia's ability to draw a 1 and do nothing. What it doesn't tell you is that it actually lasts for two turns, letting you use two card spells at double power with no chance of failure (a roughly 33% increase in strength over just attacking three times un-buffed).
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Part of the way into act 3, Amalia realizes the party is feeling confused, scared, and just overall down in the dumps after the revelations in the Empyrean Ruins. Amalia, who can never manage to say the right thing, who spent much of her life as a Shrinking Violet, takes it upon herself to brighten the mood for everyone that night. Not only is she given the option to talk with everyone, she comes to the conclusion that one thing that could really lift the tension is a wonderful meal, since much of the party is complaining or thinking about food and drink. Thus, she cooks an entire three-course meal (with some help from the chef, granted, but she goes out of the way to get the recipes herself and aids in the cooking and baking) for the party, all of whom thank her profusely for thinking about them and putting the effort in. The party members even bring up the fact, when Amalia once again flubs what she's trying to say, that they know deep down she's the heart of the team and just has a bit of trouble finding the right words. Even Mikah and Tomke are there if you recruited them, and share the sentiment that Amalia truly is a wonderful person.
  • Egyl's influence on Robb. Though Robb softens fairly quickly after his Establishing Character Moment where he tortures some bandits and almost kills one that is unconscious, he never really loses his sharp tongue, tends to belittle people around him, and always advocates for the pragamatic option. However, after meeting Egyl and learning the Sova is a member of an organization of powerful knights, Robb begins to confide in the knight about how he has only ever felt bitterness and hatred and wishes he could start being a better person. Egyl's refusal to hold all of Marylea, the seat of the Church's power, responsible for the communal suicide of his people for breaking a blood oath they were tricked into making, shocks Robb into putting a conscious effort into being a better person and taking actions that are heroic instead of pragmatic - paying off halfway into the dungeon in Marylea where, despite being on the clock and needing to get to a hangar posthaste to avoid falling with the collapsing city, Robb refuses to take a step further towards safety until some innocent people being hassled by monsters have been saved. It's clear as day Egyl is beaming with pride over Robb's decision.
  • The culmination of the opening quest of act four, Chained Echoes. Having learned all of the wonderful things Glenn has done in his past lives, the doubts in his head still scream about what a terrible person he had been as Van and how horrible he was for failing to stop the Grand Grimoire twice. Despite all of this, his friends break through the manifestations of all of his self-hatred, and confront the manifestation of Glenn himself. When he asks why they would try to cheer him up and help him after everything he's done, Victor responds with one of the most touching lines in the game.
  Victor: You are my master, my son and my closest friend. I repeat myself, but my life is yours.
  • At the end of the journey, steps from the final confrontation, you can find the shopkeeper with a mohawk one last time. He admits that he lied about having a family and that he became wealthy off the party's funds before then admitting that, feeling guilty about the lie, he decided to stick with the journey to the bitter end for the party's sake.
  • Just at the final bridge to the end of the game, the party can run into June. Despite getting off on the wrong foot with the party and despite delighting in messing with everyone around her normally, she cuts straight to business and is honest with her feelings about Gwayn to the party, and asks them to take care of him in his final moments.
  • Much of the final cutscene of the game is spent watching Amalia's fifteenth birthday party. Her only friends not in attendance to wish her happy birthday are Glenn and Ba'Thraz, the latter because he's already off searching for a way in less than two years to get rid of their curses. Ba'Thraz cites the reason being that he feels indebted to Amalia after she saved him in Reina's tomb, but it's clear the group, especially Ba'Thraz, grew on Amalia and vice-versa throughout the game. Amalia's reduced to blubbering out 'thank yous' to everyone who attended, because she's finally surrounded by friends who care about her, not politicians wishing for her ascension to the throne. After years of dealing with a Deadly Decadent Court, having to fight for Escanya as a rebel leader during the unification war, and fighting near-literal gods, Amalia finally just gets to be a teenager enjoying her birthday - her happiness assured because she knows, somewhere out there, Ba'Thraz is doing everything he can to give Amalia back the time she lost.
  • During the credits, we get to see Glenn's reincarnation fly over Valandis, seeing all his friends. Highlights include Eva and Sienna together again, Raphael more or less adopting Arlette, and Kylian's sister waking up - with Kylian there to witness what he wanted most in the world actually happening. Magnolia even spends some time flying with her 'beloved Glenn,' implying she's aware what really went down between him and Kylian in the end but still happy he got to experience the freedom he always wanted.
• Ho Yay: Glenn and Kylian's relationship at the start of the game, with Kylian's teasing compliments and Glenn's stuttering responses, can easily be mistaken for romantic tension. It also doesn't matter how much they oppose each other, Glenn always sees Kylian as someone with the true willpower to follow his dream and respects him. This seems to be intentional as even the game points it out.
  Kylian: Hahaha, looks like we'll have to put up with each other for a little longer!
  Glenn: If we survive this...
  Kylian: Haha, what could go wrong with our ace pilot, right?
  Mercenary: All right, you two. That's enough romantic talk. You're ready to go!
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Robb is generally considered underwhelming compared to other characters due to his focus on single target status ailments in a game where random encounters have many enemies and resist ailments the more you use them. He is still useful thanks to poison doing great damage and spreading via Pandemic but he doesn't evolve much beyond that, with his other best skills being a second poison (Toxic) and a speed debuff. Even his late game spells are curiously weak, with Nature's Call and Soul Parasite being much weaker than Victor's final buffs and debuffs, a multi-target physical attack that is weaker than others and a sleep powder that, at best, can buy you some time on boss fights. Even his ultra move is argueably the most situational in the game, simply curing status ailments, giving resistances while removing enemy ailment resistances, which sounds nice but most enemies don't use ailments anyway and if they do, you can just use items.
  • Egyl is the first true tank character recruited in the last third of the game, which is way too late to be introducing enemy aggro mechanics. He doesn't contribute much outside of his tanking niche, and most players forgo tanks altogether using defensive buffs or just more unrelenting offense. After all, they did manage over half the game without one.
• Narm: The casual swearing will probably catch you off guard and cause some good laughs, especially given the bright colors and 90s JRPG aesthetic that was usually pretty kid friendly about this sort of thing.
  Sienna: We don't give a shit. You fucked us, Becker!
  • At one point, Glenn will use a sky armor to fly high in the sky to recover the grand grimoire, beating many other sky armors by himself on the way, only to be ambushed out of nowhere by valkyries, who can seemingly fly around without assistance and start to beat him easily. Lenne says valkyries specialize in defeating sky armor and only valkyries can beat valkyries so she... jumps between them and deflects them easily. Even if the valkyries are super human, the idea that a few women with spears are too much for a sky armor sounds too absurd to take seriously. It doesn't help that Lenne is no better than any other character against sky armors, so this comes across as bizarrely forced.
  • The scene where we see Kylian and the bishop were sleeping together, and he leaves the bedroom shirtless. While it's clearly meant to show how far Kylian is willing to go for power, it can come across as a bad attempt at shock value and completely unnecessary as it was already implied in a previous scene.
  • The lack different expressions on portraits can cause some unintentional comedy, like Kylian telling Glenn a very dark and sad story about his sister... while his portrait is smiling.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The story has been criticized for its clunky script, punctuated with laughable swearing, its uneven and often jarring tone, and the sheer density of the script that leaves many of its characters short-changed in their development. The gameplay, on the other hand, has seen nothing but praise. The turn-based combat offers its own spin on the formula, the progression-system grants a strong degree of customization with minimal grinding, the reward-board encourages exploration while the Sky Armors add a new level to traversal, and both the music and graphics are top-notch.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The overdrive bar is this for some players. While it's clearly a balanced mechanic with many ways to play around it, some argue it doesn't add anything to the combat other than randomly forcing the player to pick spells they don't want to use just to lower the bar. This is especially frustrating if the only option is a spell that won't help at all, like a long duration buff you used on previous turn. Additionally, AOE attacks from the enemy move the bar more than single-target attacks, which can make it nigh-impossible to avoid overheat in some situations.
• That One Attack: Twisting Winds is a pain to deal with as it messes with your Overdrive bar, making it insanely easy to go into Overheat.
• That One Boss: The Kortara Kondor is considered a particularly brutal boss, due to how the party can't leave Mount Rydell, which prevents any kind of grinding for the Sky Armor proficiencies. The Kondor can also act twice to make it both very hard to outheal its DPS and hard to manage the Overdrive gauge, all while spamming powerful AOE attacks. Its advantages only get exacerbated on max difficulty settings, where it'll be even stronger and faster.
• That One Level: If the player has been brute-forcing their way through the game up to the Flower Fields of Perpetua, they'll find that Perpetua basically demands returning to previous areas to fill out the reward board for the chain bonuses to get Grimoire Shards. The enemies in Perpetua receive a major spike in damage output and HP as compared to the Fiorwoods, and half of them rely on status ailments to really bring the pain to the party. Scorpions in particular can set up poison effects that do upwards of 40% of a character's HP. If the player hasn't kenned to a particular strategy regarding their characters and mostly forces their way through encounters, they're going to get stomped, hard.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Kylian wants to "make the the world a better place" and he will sacrifice whatever it takes to achieve that. He is meant to be seen as a Well-Intentioned Extremist with impressive determination, as shown by how much his words inspire Glenn to grow as a brave leader, but in the end he looks more like a hypocritical Knight Templar who uses The Needs of the Many as a convenient excuse over and over while never really accomplishing anything positive for anyone other than himself. While the game does present him as a Big Bad Wannabe who gets a Karmic Death at the hands of the Vaen, it also treats him as worthy of forgiveness and a second chance at life. He does help the party in the final phase of the Final Boss fight, but many players felt it wasn't enough to justify Glenn handing the True King's power to him. Ironically, Kylian himself points out that he's being Easily Forgiven and that he can't be trusted to avoid making the same mistakes.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Chained Echoes looks on the covers to be a typical RPG like that of early Final Fantasy games with a setting that looks saccharine and has a combat system that does has little to no blood shed. However, the game is actually rated M for mature for suggestive themes and strong language. Profanity is used often, and rape and sexual promiscuity is mentioned in multiple scenes. Several characters are also shown committing suicide and characters mention other characters dying in gory and graphic detail. The themes and tone are very dark with the themes covering war and the devastation it brings.

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