Comment on Hypothesis: Modern retro-inspired indies are much more enjoyable than the retro games themselves
misk@sopuli.xyz 4 days agoWhile Chrono Trigger and FFVI are among my all time favourites, they’re kind of like an prog rock superbands. They’re a pinnacle of the era, impossible to top in their own categories. But if you know where to look there are probably some guys doing stuff as impressive, if not more, out of their garages. Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes come to mind.
Yea. The JRPG genre has a lot of amazing modern titles. It is just that the genre fell out of popularity for a while and the newer titles never got the major marketing that Chrono Trigger and FF received.
Though, good news, the genre does seem to be heading towards a revival.
Shihali@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I’ve tried those.
Sea of Stars looks as pretty as Chrono Trigger, but its writing is noticeably worse and it completely fails at one of Chrono Trigger’s great strengths, pacing. In Sea of Stars’ defense, it is generally better than Chrono Trigger at interesting dungeon design and its battle system has more potential. But those don’t compensate enough for poor writing and especially pacing.
Chained Echoes tries really hard to fit a 32-bit plot into a 16-bit running time, and it doesn’t quite work. Still, it left me interested in more by the same dev team, especially if trends and tech change so that they can switch to doing a game explicitly inspired by Xenogears and its ilk.