Aeons Echo

It’s not easy being a one-armed cowboy‍

The biggest mistake is to start playing Aeons Echo expecting a standard RPG. You won’t find yourself in a situation where you enter a battle and suddenly win thanks to a perfect reaction or a brilliant sequence of moves. The bulk of the decision-making happens beforehand: who to select, who to buff, which combination to try out. The battle itself then serves more as a demonstration of the results of that preparation. I generally like this format because it creates a different kind of satisfaction. If you get the team composition right, it’s rewarding. If you don’t, you start figuring out exactly where the weak spot is. The problem arises when, instead of suggesting ‘rearrange the heroes in your line-up’, the game offers the one-size-fits-all solution of ‘boost the characters’ power’. That significantly simplifies the whole system. I’d love to delve deeper into synergies, but for that to happen, the different options need to feel genuinely distinct more often, rather than simply being different paths to the same level of power‍

If you enjoy pressing a thousand buttons just to get a single daily bonus — welcome. The game itself is fairly laid-back but the interface somehow manages to turn it into a quest to "find the right tab amongst fifteen tabs" but I got used to it over time‍

The game raised a question‍

Speedrun via skipping dialogue‍

I liked the attacks and the visual effects during the battles. The auto-play feature makes the process rather passive, but at least it’s not boring to watch. That said, after dozens of repetitions, you start to notice the familiar animations more than you actually enjoy them‍