The Impact Factor

Cozy Up By The Fireplace

Review

I Am Setsuna, Tokyo RPG Factory (PS4)

Abstract: I Am Setsuna is Tokyo RPG Factory’s attempt to make what was old new again in JRPGs. A freshmen outing, I Am Setsuna is a mixed bag of success and disappointment. A likable cast of characters and beautiful world is hampered by a forgettable narrative and poor dialogue. Unnecessary complexity detracts from a fantastically fun and mechanically engaging battle system. I Am Setsuna evokes your fondest classic JRPG memories while mostly succeeding under a modern critical eye. I Am Setsuna is a warm fireplace in a snow storm, a piping hot plate of comfort food. It’s not perfect, but I Am Setsuna is satisfying and made me hungry for more.

The blips. The bloops. The menus. The music. Old-school Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) constitute a hugely significant part of my gaming lineage. My earliest gaming was defined by quick-fixes and raucous multiplayer, which earned fighting games, arcade racers, and platformers top billing on my ‘favorite genres’ list I kept near my bed. JRPGs uprooted that and redefined the kinds of experiences I wanted out of video games. What started as simply as Pokémon Blue quickly evolved in Tales of Destiny, Final Fantasy IV, and Xenogears. JRPGs were my introduction to the immersive capacity of games—worlds and characters and combat systems I could get lost in.

The transition to full 3D was difficult for JRPGs. That is not to say there haven’t been great JRPGs made after 2000, but in adapting to a new medium they lost something. It felt like every JRPG develop at the time suddenly decided to redefine what a JRPG should be—for better and worse. I’ve kept my JRPG playing up in the years since Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger, but the further we got from classic JRPGs the less I felt attached to those experiences. And I’m not alone.

Enter Tokyo RPG Factory and I Am Setsuna. Square Enix, the most widely known developer of JRPGs, moved their marquee JRPG franchise (Final Fantasy) to the modern era, replete with huge 3D environments and action-game-based combat. The demand for classic JRPGs never went away, though. Tokyo RPG Factory is a Square Enix initiative to make smaller, classic-feeling JRPGs for gamers today. I Am Setsuna is their freshmen outing. I Am Setsuna is a mixed bag, part wonderful and part disappointing, but ultimately it felt like a long lost friend. It was an experience I had been craving for quite some time. I Am Setsuna is JRPG comfort food.

JRPG comfort food through and through.

I Am Setsuna opens as the protagonist Endir, a young and deadly mercenary , is tasked with an assassination. Your target is named Setsuna, an 18-year-old girl who, as it turns out, was just selected to be a ritual sacrifice. Setsuna must journey to the Last Lands and offer herself up. In doing so, the monsters that plague the lands should abate. Endir decides not to kill Setsuna, seeing as she is about to die anyway, but rather join the sacrifice’s guard to ensure she makes the perilous journey in one piece. Over the course of your odyssey you assemble a rag-tag group of boisterous characters, each with their own motivations and combat specialties. I Am Setsuna’s uniqueness stems from its central theme—despair. I Am Setsuna isn’t a happy adventure. Death is everywhere, the line between good and evil blurs, and everything comes back to the tragedy of sacrificing innocence on the altar of compromise. The story isn’t spectacular, even by old-school JRPG standards, but it is functional and moves along at a brisk pace.

Death is a huge part of I Am Setsuna.

Homage to its predecessors or not, I Am Setsuna struggles narratively. The dialogue writing is poor, filled with saccharine professions of feelings and overly dramatic revelations that felt more functional than noteworthy. I Am Setsuna’s characters fall into formulaic molds, too. You have the old warrior who uses crudeness and sarcasm to mask his pain, a plucky youngster whose arcane power comes at a great cost, and the stalwart noblewoman who struggles to follow her royal calling. The worst offender is Setsuna herself, whose naïve cheerful good-to-a-fault personality becomes grating by the end of your journey. Surprisingly though, I found myself really enjoying I Am Setsuna’s cast of characters. They are quirky, memorable, and aesthetically striking. There are some great back and forths between party members and moments of levity that actually had me laughing. Combine this with beautiful hand-drawn art and cute little sprites and I’m sold.

Formulaic or not, I loved my party in I Am Setsuna. The gorgeous art helps with that.

JRPG’s live and die by their battle systems. After all, it’s what you’re doing for the vast majority of your time while playing. I Am Setsuna’s is fantastic. You choose a party of three characters. Monster encounters are always by choice, as you see them wandering around the dungeon. Walking into the monster triggers the fight. Actions are determined by a bar that fills up in real time, called an active-time battle (ATB) gauge. Once it fills you can attack, use a tech (spells and special attack moves), or use an item. I Am Setsuna adopts so much of what made old-school JRPG battle systems so much fun. It’s tactical but fast, as enemies can attack as you’re planning your move. Fights balance healing and damage dealing well, as low health on both player and monster keeps fights tense and prevents them from lasting too long. Useful abilities, like healing, are spread among all characters so players aren’t forced into a set party composition. On paper, and while playing, the battles are simple but plenty customization options exist to offer players opportunities to optimize.

I Am Setsuna adds new wrinkles to classic JRPG combat, too. The most successful of which is the game’s Momentum system. While your ATB bar is full, but you haven’t selected an action, your Momentum meter will fill. It can be filled up to three charges. Momentum is a resource that powers up any of the player’s actions. By pressing the square button at the right moment, and with at least one charge of Momentum stored, your attack will have bonus effect. Sometimes it’s extra physical damage, sometimes it adds status boosts like ‘attack up’ or ‘affects all enemies’. Momentum creates a brilliant balance of risk and reward. Waiting to fill up your Momentum meter exposes your party to enemy attack since monster ATB gauges don’t stop. Do you push for that extra damage or go for the quick kill? In some instances it can be even more challenging. For example, you need to wait to use Momentum on your heal spell because it gives auto-revive to your party. I love risk vs. reward systems in video games, and Momentum is one done very well.

I Am Setsuna's combat is fun & rewarding throughout. Momentum is a great
addition to a classic foundation.

While combat is great, preparing for it is not without its problems. Many of these issues come back to the same root: unnecessary complexity. Spritnite, gems you equip to give characters new abilities (techs), is a host to most of these problems. Every time to you kill a monster you receive raw materials. These materials can be sold to a NPC. Depending on what materials you’ve sold, and in what quantity, certain Spritnite become available to purchase. Spritnite come in two flavors: command (techs you can use in combat) and support (passive abilities). The whole system is just a mess. Command Spritnite are specific to each character whereas support can be used by all. Spritnite can also undergo the poorly explained ‘fluxation,’ in which they gain boosts from your equipped armor. Getting the materials for specific Spritnite is also a challenge as the game never communicates where or how to get them. For instance, certain materials will only drop from monsters when they are killed in a specific way, like with water-elemental damage or overkill. On top of that, despite the limited number of monsters you’ll encounter, there are what feels like hundreds of different materials. And dozens and dozens of Spritnite. It’s immediately overwhelming and doesn’t get much better by the game’s end. With poor instructions and even poorer menu navigation, dealing with Spritnite is a pain. The Spritnite situation is unruly, especially for an ostensibly simple game like I Am Setsuna.

Spritnite, Fluxation, and Singularty are unnecessarily convoluted. You'll get a grip
on it eventually, but the process of getting there isn't fun.

Fortunately, you won’t have to worry too much about the Spritnite headache. I Am Setsuna is an easy game, and I mean that in the best possible way. Winning encounters is straightforward and bosses can be beaten even with suboptimal Spritnite equipped. I Am Setsuna wants to replicate your fondest memories with classic JRPGs, not the hours of frustrated grinding you spent because certain bosses were unfairly powerful. The “fond memory” design philosophy can be seen throughout I Am Setsuna. The game decided to trim the often tasty, but sometimes unpalatable, fat from the classic JRPG. Character stats are totally dependent on the weapon and amor you have equipped. You can finish I Am Setsuna in 15-20 hours. There are a small handful sidequests, but they only become available near the end of the game. The judicious use of Tokyo RPG Factory’s design scalpel sometimes goes a bit too far, however. I Am Setsuna has only a few monster types that are recolored and repeated frequently. Bosses aren’t memorable and are few and far between. Somewhere in the trimming process I Am Setsuna must have lost its cartographer, as it annoyingly lacks any form of in-game map. I Am Setsuna’s piano-only score is great at first, but becomes tiresome over time.

Problems aside, I couldn’t help but be enamored by I Am Setsuna. I loved getting lost in its tranquil snowy world. Playing felt like cozying up to a warm fireplace in a log cabin as snow falls gently outside. I Am Setsuna was comforting and transportative. I was brought back to my quietly humming CRT, PlayStation One controller in hand, on the floor of my basement. That I Am Setsuna can evoke such fond memories while still passing critical scrutiny of today is worth commending. I Am Setsuna isn’t perfect, but comfort food never is. It sure was delicious though.

I Am Setsuna
3/5