The narrative explores themes like loss, self-sacrifice, duty and hope, and has a thoughtful and melancholy air. Characters gradually join her group and each has a small and sometimes tragic backstory. Lead character, Setsuna, is a on a pilgrimage with a twist she’s a human sacrifice following a tradition to appease the world’s monster threat. This ambience compliments the story themes nicely.įollowing the brilliant RPG tradition of barging into random people's homes and stealing all their treasure. I Am Setsuna exclusively uses background piano music, and this makes for a beautiful and somewhat sombre atmosphere with some lovely tunes, although again, it can become wearying. It’s minimalistic in content which fits the atmosphere of the game, but feels restrictive. You’d also expect to find side quests, secrets and other locations to explore - but here there’s very little – the world feels small and somewhat lifeless compared to similar games. This landscape creates a nice ambience but it does get boring and you may be crying out for some greenery. You’ll enter snowy forests, snowy villages, icy caves, ancient temples and… that’s about it. However, you’d best like snow because, in a surprising departure from other RPGs, there’s no other settings to experience. The environment is pretty, and the rest of the graphics have a stylised charm. The world of I Am Setsuna is a snowy landscape dotted with mountains, forests, and villages. Annoyingly, your characters walk here instead of running, it makes no difference but, gamer psychology, man! Credit: Square Enix The only addition to the formula worth noting lies in the combat system, which I’ll cover later. All the staples you expect from an old Square JRPG are here, and don’t expect any big surprises. The safety of the world is threatened and it’s up to your heroes to fix it, all to the sound of beautiful, atmospheric music. You battle monsters and level up through combat, learning new moves and spells. You explore via an overworld map, entering settlements and “dungeons” of various forms, following a linear storyline. You control the fate of a small group which grows in number during the course of the game. Unfortunately though, I am Setsuna doesn’t take on the more original ideas, sticking firmly to the traditional formula. Games like Chrono Trigger with its time travelling theme added some welcome originality to the mix. Although the combat quality varied, and the games could get repetitive and predictable, I could overlook that for the epic storylines, memorable characters and rich worlds they contained. As a gamer who also grew up on those classic fantasy JRPGs, I was a fan of Square’s older works.
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