Game details Developer: Tokyo RPG Factory

Publisher: Square Enix

Platform: PS4 (reviewed), Vita, Windows

Release Date: July 19, 2016

ESRB Rating: M for Mature

Price: $40 / £30

Links: Steam | Official website Tokyo RPG Factory: Square Enix: PS4 (reviewed), Vita, WindowsJuly 19, 2016M for Mature: $40 / £30

I Am Setsuna wears its influences on its sleeve—also on its pants, shirt, shoes, and company branded baseball cap. The game pulls heavily from SquareSoft’s SNES classic RPG Chrono Trigger to the extent that the inspiration is mentioned by name on the front page of the game's website

That means you know going in that you're in for a top-down, turn-based JRPG where time ticks down actively during battles, and you can see your foes on-screen before facing them. There are no surprise encounters here—save the ones scripted into the story.

The story follows the titular Setsuna through the perspective of Endir, your masked, silent cipher of a protagonist. Setsuna has been selected as a sacrifice—like her aunt, mother, and many other women before them—on the theory that sacrificing one girl every few decades will cause the monsters that inhabit the world to leave them in peace.

By the time Endir enters the picture (on his own quest to kill Setsuna for unrelated reasons), monster activity is on the rise, and these beasts seem to be more organized than ever. Cue a fateful meeting between our hero and heroine where he decides against cold-blooded murder, and suddenly a journey ensues that pulls a growing cast of party members in its wake.

I've been here before...

The tale of a girl with a tragic destiny and her always encouraging entourage isn't the most original backbone for a JRPG. The greater problem with I Am Setsuna, though, is that it sprints through these clichés and archetypes without even letting them take root. Believe me, I’m not against the familiar tropes of airships, evil kings, and haggard swordsmen. In this game, however, there’s not enough to justify cleaving to those oh-so-traditional RPG elements so tightly.

Setsuna is a case in point. She takes an immediate shine to Endir despite the fact he barely speaks and attempts to chop off her head at their first meeting. Of course, he promises to become her bodyguard until she reaches her place of sacrifice in the aptly named "Last Lands." It's as if the developers at Tokyo RPG Factory decided believable personal motivations weren’t important. Instead, they had to hit predictable story beats dictated by the structure of games from over 20 years ago.























Characters aside, everyone should be able to appreciate how pretty the game looks in a dour sort of way. Nearly the entire tale is washed out with snow and ice. Being a North Dakota resident, I know ice from snow, and this is a pretty good representation (even if it does blend with the game's just-shy-of-bleak tone for a one-note emotional ride).

But aside from the characters and setting, I Am Setsuna is filled with concepts that are only half-explained. The game tends to dump dense instructions on your party without demonstration, but at least the Active Time Battle (ATB) system won’t need explanation for an entire generation of 16-bit RPG players. The system throws out the predetermined turn order in favor of “action bars” for characters and monsters, and these bars continue to fill even while you putter around in menus. The first action bar to fill gets the next move, just like in those games of yore.

While that’s not the most straightforward way of doing things, ATB should be recognizable (or at least easily understood) to nearly anyone who's played a JRPG by now. There are more than a few wrinkles that add to the complexity, though.