The top-down RPG revival (Chained Echoes, Octopath Traveller II etc)

As a big big big fan of Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, FFVI etc, I'm intrigued. Chained Echoes is £20 on PSN which seems a little steep. Worth it? What else is good?

Sea of Stars is another big upcoming 'indie' one

imo 'revival' is a weird way to put it because these things have been being made straight on through on GBA/DS/3DS for the past two decades. as well as a rich history of rpgmaker games on PC that i dont know a whole lot about but occasionally one gets really big e.g. Omori

Dog Latin if you're coming from an Elden Ring addiction I'd really recommend you trying out some old-school roguelikes (ADOM, ToME, DCSS, Brogue)

Octopath 2 is getting high praise from a lot of places, what're people's thoughts here?

I like it. The combat's satisfying, the music is great and most of the origin stories I've done so far have been engaging enough. The benevolent young merchant with the desire to heal the world with capitalism and the voice of a 55 year old man is a bit of a weird one maybe

Didn't play more than the demo of 1 so I suspect there's more redundancy in terms of mechanics and classes if you have, and there is too much grinding to get your new level 1 characters up to any kind of useful speed because they don't passively level (which should be literally illegal), so I can imagine running out of steam with it eventually because there's so much of it. But not regretting the purchase and it's a great fit for a steam deck

I played the demo of Octo II and it was fun. Not enough to tell yet but some strong FFVII vibes. I hear Chained Echoes is similar to Chrono Trigger?

I wish they'd just re-release Chrono in some form - either just rolling it out on console or a full remake. I think there's some sort of legal reason it can't be, but it's ridiculous at this stage.

I'd heard good things about "Weird West" (not to be confused with "Evil West"), the top-down supernatural western action RPG. They just released a "definitive" edition, which is on sale for $20 for the PS4 version, but upgradable for free to PS5 (the standalone PS5 edition is full-price at twice that amount, though it's anyone's guess why you'd buy that version).

That game does sound pretty cool: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/weird-west-review

https://kotaku.com/ff-tactics-xenogears-vagrant-story-remaster-rpgs-1850621353

Vagrant Story plz!

Chained Echoes is good so far, maybe the closest thing to scratching the itch for me compared to Sea of Stars (nice but repetitive) and Octopath Traveller (a bit ploddy and strangely paced tbh). CE has some lovely graphics and music. It's quite complicated to start with - there are a lot of things going on with builds and upgrades if you like that sort of thing. Sometimes navigation can be a little tricky. But the combat is fun, it's got a rich and complex story, and it just has that good old school feel about it

I adored Chained Echoes

I'm enjoying it. The upgrade system with all the crystals could have been simplified a tad, and I'm saying this as someone who's been playing with Souls builds for the last four or five years. I also seem to spend a lot of my time getting lost in small sections of map. The story also gets you to go back and forth between locations an awful lot, and it can also be hard to keep track of absolutely everything that's happened so far, even near the beginning of the story.

What also makes me laugh is the mix of tones. Sometimes it'll feel like a cute naive throwback to things like Chrono Trigger and FFVI (there's a fun Earthbound-esque moment where a bunch of vegetable monsters combine on a skewer to become a boss called Shashlik, which made me laugh a lot). But then every so often a character will come out of the blue with a line like "We don't give a shit. You fucked us Becker!"

Yeah the crystals system is something I mostly ignored because it was so tedious. I only upgraded each weapon once.

It's a cool system in many ways, and I like the way you can finely tune and spec your weapons and armour in a similar way to Bloodborne, but it just has one too many levels of complexity to make it worthwhile. The menus don't really show all the information you need, so it's often a matter of having to remember all your character stats before applying crystals. I also think the whole thing about combining different types of crystals and making sure there are enough slots for them a real faff. Just give me full crystals that do stuff rather than making me spend ages in menus trying to figure it all out