2/5 ★ – squidbob's review of Echo Generation.

(review contains spoilers) + The art was the main reason I was interested in this game, it's beautiful. I love how cozy the town is and all the outside areas look distinct from each other while keeping the slightly ominous atmosphere + The music is great, it adds a lot of charm, especially the town theme + There's a fun variety of bosses, they're nicely designed and can actually be a challenge earlier in the game. Some aspects of the battle system are great (a number of the action commands are lifted from Paper Mario/TTYD but made a little more challenging, which I enjoyed) - On paper, I should love this game--the IT/Stranger Things kind of vibe is one of my favourites, but it's not very well executed. The story is barely there and is never more than surface level, like they thought of cool boss ideas and needed an excuse to show them off. The dialogue in this game is awkward and unnatural; characters randomly forgo contractions or state the obvious and it makes them sound robotic. For the small amount of dialogue there is, there are noticeable grammatical errors, including more than one instance of an "its"/"it's" mix-up. After major story events happen (e.g. finding out your principal keeps a kid locked up in his basement and being attacked with a knife) the characters don't really discuss any of it, and never refer to it again. Honestly, it just feels lazy, which is a huge shame - Echo Generation was initially advertised (and still is, on Steam, at least at the time of writing this) as an adventure involving "you and your friends", and you would be able to recruit other kids: "new friends (and pets!)". This was evidently scrapped; your friends get a few lines each in the entire game and despite making plans to film at the cemetery, they don't even show up in the area once you get there. Your party for the entire game consists of you, your little sister, and one of five recruitable pets - The game suffers from some glaring QOL issues, which is strange as a few of these are staples of any RPG. Game/story progression is basically all from fetch quests. However, there is no actual tab that lists these quests. If you forget what any character in any area of the game is looking for, you will have to walk all the way back, no matter how far it is, and talk to them again. This is bad enough but if you don't buy certain items before the story asks for them there is also way too much backtracking, which has to be done on foot... When buying items from a shop or vending machine, there is no counter for how many of that item you already own. There isn't a healing item to revive a party member who has been knocked out, so if that happens (and it's quite possible in the earlier parts of the game), you're stuck with whoever's left until the end of the battle. If you happen to lose the fight, the checkpoint will be right before the boss: except the party's HP is still halved, and if you didn't happen to bring enough items (this can be a problem as you are required to save money for quest items to progress the story) you will have a very long trek back to your house on foot as that's the only place you can heal to full without items. There have already been patches to improve player experience, such as increasing money dropped from some bosses, can't imagine how bad it was before; making players have to grind just to buy items to continue the game is an odd choice - Most of the battle system is a clone of Paper Mario--this isn't necessarily a bad thing, Bug Fables does this really well, and there are times where Echo Generation does too. However, some of the action commands are a little clunky and imbalanced. There are moves earlier on that barely do damage yet are more difficult to pull off reliably than stronger moves found later on. Blocking is also strangely executed. In Paper Mario/Bug Fables it's visual and you are expected to block when the attack is a few frames from hitting you; in Echo Generation the enemies pause awkwardly for a couple of seconds as you wait for a (sometimes very sudden and short) prompt to pop up, entirely based on reaction time - The best strategy is to just use the same couple of moves every time, whatever you have at the moment that does the most damage. There is a large variety of attacks between you, Lily, and the pet of choice, but there isn't any reason to use most of them, as the weaker ones only cost one or two less SP. The game never really gives you a reason to use anything else; as far as I could tell, enemies didn't have resistances or weaknesses that actually mattered enough to use other moves - I did like the idea of having an SP pool, but it makes pets other than the cat (especially the jackalope) useless imo, there's no point in using them when they don't level up alongside the others, they join way too late to grind from level 1 especially as this game doesn't use random encounters and enemies don't respawn very quickly if at all It pains me to give this score, I actually gave it a 3 initially but after further reflection I think it's just lacking too many basic features I expect from an RPG. It makes me sad because from the trailer alone this had the potential to be one of my favourite games, especially with how gorgeous the voxel art is... 😭