I Am Setsuna is a JRPG developed by Tokyo RPG Factory, a subsidiary of Square Enix. It deliberately evokes traditional JRPG mechanics but with the quality-of-life features that modern day video games have. In this aspect, the game nails it with its tone, and it truly feels like an updated version of classic JRPGs from the late 1980s to early 1990s. While it’s 3D, the camera is fixed in a top down angle, and the character models are in chibi form (like what you’d expect from 3DS games).
The battle system is the classic Active Time Battle (ATB) system from the early Final Fantasy games. The best thing is that enemies are visible onscreen and getting close to one will trigger a battle. The battle takes place in the same area and that’s when you can see the ATB bar fill up for each character. Once it’s filled, that character can perform actions from attacks, techs and using items.
There are some twists to this formula, such as a secondary gauge depicted as an icon to the right of the character stats. It fills whenever your character waits, attacks or is attacked. Once that is full, you can trigger a “momentum” which adds an additional effect to that action that you’ve done. The most basic of these effects are additional damage to your attack or additional health when healing. While you can’t directly control your character’s movements during battles, the character and enemy positions does have an effect on attacks.
Techs are basically special attacks and magic rolled into one command. They required something called spritnites to be placed into slots for each of the characters in order to use that specific ability. Each character has limited slots, and specific spritnites can only be used by certain characters, so while this does allow some freedom, each character is still very much restricted to their default intended role. Related to this are combo attacks that can be performed by characters, they’re flashy and can be useful, but other times don’t do as much damage as basic attacks.
The story follows the protagonist, a warrior with the default name of Endir. There is a tradition in the land where a sacrifice takes a pilgrimage in order to ward off or weaken the monsters that roam the land. Endir is a mercenary and through his job, he encounters Setsuna, who is the sacrifice for this cycle and about to set off on her pilgrimage. From the very beginning, the game sets a sad and unavoidable fate for the characters. It gives off vibes from Final Fantasy X as that game has a similar premise.
The whole game takes place in a constant snowy world. This suits the bleak tone of the story but does mean that there is no significant change in scenery. Despite the simple graphics, with chibi character models, there are still some nice touches. Characters leave trails in the snow when they walk, and trees shake off their snow every so often. It’s small details like these that make the scenery a bit more interesting, including the world map which makes a return. When coupled with the excellent melancholy music, and it’s a perfect combination.
The game initially feels like it fulfils its promise of a classic JRPG with contemporary quality-of-life benefits. Therefore it is modern in some aspects but aged in others. For example, if you die, you’ll have to reload from the last save point as there is no auto-save. So hopefully you’ll be saving regularly because if you due to a powerful monster on the field, you may lose a lot of progress. Another are the layers and layers of menu which can be confusing, which is not helped by a text heavy tutorial that does a poor job of explaining the mechanics.
For most of the game, it doesn’t require you to grind if you fight all the monsters as you face them. Inactive party members gets a lower portion of the experience points, so while they don’t become completely useless, they will definitely fall behind. This dissuages you from using the new party members as they will most likely come in at a lower level than your current active party.
At around two-thirds of the way in, the game starts to hit you with a higher difficulty. It starts off with a super difficult boss which feels completely unfair. You’ll end up realising you’re not at a high enough level to take those hits, or you’re forced to use a defensive party, whom are probably underleveled as you haven’t been using those characters for a while. This boss hits extremely hard, hits multiple times for each attack, and to make it worse, it is so fast that it gets two turns for every one of your character’s. This ends up becoming a frustrating difficulty spike that feels completely out of place and helps ruin the pacing of the game thus far. However, this is only the beginning as some later bosses continue to evoke this, and it’s a baffling design decision.
Setsuna and Endir’s journey is filled with constant sad scenes. You’ll always meet a NPC or a new party member that has a sad backstory. It keeps the melancholy theme ongoing from the beginning right to the very end. The story doesn’t hold any surprises, it’s basically just pushing forward with the journey to reach the destination, but it does enough to keep you going. So while the game is linear in every aspect, if you are playing it in short bursts and forgot your objective, it can take a little bit to remember it because there’s no record of it. There’s not even a single line in the menu to remind you like in some other JRPGs.
The final dungeon can be tough with enemies that continue to rapidly spike up in difficulty, including the final few bosses. Thankfully, there is a period of freedom right before that where you can fully explore the world if you wish. This allows you to grind your party members up for higher levels and useful items to make the final stretch that much more manageable. That said, when you’re running through older dungeons again and are not able to reliably avoid battles, it can start to slowly grind your gears.
The ending is fine. Reflecting upon the entire game after watching it, you’ll come to the conclusion that the game’s story is filled with predictable moments. It still has its charms though but the samey dungeon design doesn’t help. The game takes around fifteen hours to complete, so it’s a nice short length without overstaying its welcome. There are a lot of sidequests and bonus boss battles unlocked after the ending so it’s still worthwhile to reload your save to explore that content.
Overall, I Am Setsuna is a nice throwback to the classic JRPGs of yore. It adds a lot of quality-of-life features that you’d expect of a game these days, but bafflingly retains a lot of other annoyances. The lack of auto-save and being forced to reload your last save upon dying is a major flaw. The game is beautiful music and it nails the melancholy theme in its design of the world and story, which helps to counter the repetitive environments and dungeons. In the end, I Am Setsuna is still a fun and worthwhile game to play and enjoy despite the obvious low budget.
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