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Tokyo RPG Factory's debut is flat as fresh-fallen snow, empty as a snow angel.
At times I Am Setsuna is truly beautiful.
That means you know going in that you're in for a top-down, turn-based JRPG where time ticks down actively during battles, and you can see your foes on-screen before facing them. There are no surprise encounters here—save the ones scripted into the story.
The story follows the titular Setsuna through the perspective of Endir, your masked, silent cipher of a protagonist. Setsuna has been selected as a sacrifice—like her aunt, mother, and many other women before them—on the theory that sacrificing one girl every few decades will cause the monsters that inhabit the world to leave them in peace.
By the time Endir enters the picture (on his own quest to kill Setsuna for unrelated reasons), monster activity is on the rise, and these beasts seem to be more organized than ever. Cue a fateful meeting between our hero and heroine where he decides against cold-blooded murder, and suddenly a journey ensues that pulls a growing cast of party members in its wake.
I've been here before...
The tale of a girl with a tragic destiny and her always encouraging entourage isn't the most original backbone for a JRPG. The greater problem with I Am Setsuna, though, is that it sprints through these clichés and archetypes without even letting them take root. Believe me, I’m not against the familiar tropes of airships, evil kings, and haggard swordsmen. In this game, however, there’s not enough to justify cleaving to those oh-so-traditional RPG elements so tightly.
You'll have to sell each new crafting material individually.
This game sure does love penguins...
She is Setsuna.
No adventure is complete without a sea monster.
Setsuna is case in point. She takes an immediate shine to Endir despite the fact he barely speaks and attempts to chop off her head at their first meeting. Of course, he promises to become her bodyguard until she reaches her place of sacrifice in the aptly named "Last Lands." It's as if the developers at Tokyo RPG Factory decided believable personal motivations weren’t important. Instead, they had to hit predictable story beats dictated by the structure of games from over 20 years ago.
Keep the momentum going
The first is Momentum. When a character's turn comes up, they start filling up a second ATB-style bar representing their Momentum. When your momentum is high, you can augment spells and attacks with a properly timed button press: a fireball might do more magical damage, or a healing spell could cure status effects as well as hit points. It's up to you to decide if the bonus is worth the wait, or if you should act immediately.Once you get the rhythm of this give-and-take down, Momentum makes ATB fights feel altogether a little more "active." It reminds me of Nintendo's Super Mario RPG series, where timing also plays a role in battles.
At first that's exactly what I thought I Am Setsuna was trying to be—a casual JRPG. The game is pretty linear from the outset, and not just in the sense that you only have one path to walk. The game doesn't have many peaks and valleys in content. You'll hit the overworld, bounce on through a cave or forest filled with monsters, and stop at the next town for a lengthy story vignette. Maybe there will be a boss fight or two in between.
Left at that, I Am Setsuna could have been a slim and slightly dull diversion. Yet it goes so, so much farther—and in so many wildly different directions with wildly varying levels of success.
Whenever you perform a skill with Momentum, for instance, there's a random chance that “Fluxation” will occur. Yet to understand Fluxation, you need to know about “Spritnite.”
Spritnite determines which skills your party members can perform—equip the "Fire" Spritnite to gain the Fire spell, for example. When Momentum-linked Fluxation happens, that individual piece of Spritnite will be imbued with a bonus from their equipped Talisman.
Oh, right. Talismans. These accessories give bonuses but not directly—they can only add attributes to specific pieces of Spritnite through random Fluxation. That’s awfully annoying when you have to wait for a lucky break of Fluxation to boost an ability that you just wish would upgrade more easily.
Not to worry, though, because certain Singularities—equally random events that occur during battle—can boost the odds that Momentum will cause Fluxation to give your Spritnite a bonus from your Talisman. Got all that?
If you'd say all that sounds like the ravings of a crazy person, it's because that's exactly what it sounds like. Yet this is my best understanding of the under-explained progression system in I Am Setsuna after several hours spent just trying to puzzle it out. Except for Momentum, none of these systems are ever directly demonstrated. Instead, you can consult otherwise mute shopkeepers for "advice," which looks like scans from a nonexistent and badly written instruction manual.
I barely understand what I just wrote
It's not that important to understand everything, anyway. I Am Setsuna isn't terribly difficult, for the most part. Enemy encounters and placement are preset and thus not nearly as annoying as the usual random encounter grind-fest. What "challenge" there is mostly comes from what a hassle the game can be to play.I Am Setsuna misses many quality-of-life tweaks that even games from 1995 knew to include. When buffing or healing allies in combat, for instance, the game highlights their character models but not their portraits at the bottom of the screen. Since I Am Setsuna is a game mostly played in the menus, you have to retrain your eyes to look up and pick your desired target out in a crowd.
Meanwhile, back in town, the only way to acquire new Spritnite (Spritnites?) is by selling material stolen from monsters. Yet there's no "sell all" option, meaning you need to crawl down a list of sometimes dozens of ingredients to sell them one, by one, by one.
While the list of annoyances goes on, for me the most egregious example is that you can’t heal your party by sleeping at an inn in I Am Setsuna. When your party is hurt, tired, or disabled, the only way to restore them all at once is to leave town then bust out a tent—that you bought from a shopkeepers found inside a town—to restore health and mana.
For a game that’s all about RPG tropes, this is an odd one to ignore. But you’ll want to hit the overworld anyway, since you’re not allowed to save your game inside city limits for no apparent reason.
Nostalgia over understanding
I am Setsuna certainly capture elements of ‘90s JRPGs, but it does so sporadically. It’s as if the developers chose to pull elements from that era of games from the very top of their memories rather than from research or deep understanding as to why those things were the way they were.In many cases, that research would have revealed ‘90s RPGs were the way they were because of hardware limitations, or simply because no one had thought of a better way to do things yet. Today, technology and design have come up with better solutions to many problems that I Am Setsuna desperately clings to seemingly out of a sense of nostalgia.
Square Enix (the parent company of developer Tokyo RPG Factory) has had similar problems with its Bravely Default games—which treat the symptoms of random encounter design by letting you tweak their frequency and difficulty instead of looking for a better kind of battle system. Here once I climbed the pile of mechanics and nonsense words, I did eventually fall into I Am Setsuna's awkward rhythm.
I'm just not sure that "slight and sullen" are worthy narrative rewards for overcoming the game’s many obstacles. The Momentum-driven combat is a treat on its own merits, though, and I'd like to see it survive. If not in a direct sequel, it should at least appear in another game from the same developers
With Setsuna, there's something here—it's just buried beneath the ice.
The good
- "Momentum" is a great tweak to Active Time Battle combat.
- The snow-covered world is a nice change of pace, and looks great to boot.
- Love it or hate it, there's a lot of unexpected depth to character progression.
The bad
- A clichéd story that cleaves to the past, without the same energy or endearment.
- Unexpected, poorly explained, and incredibly complicated progression.
- Missing quality of life tweaks that could make it much, much smoother.
- A very linear and predictable journey.
The ugly
- Trying to keep Singularities, Spritnite, Fluxations, and Momentum straight in my head.
I Am Setsuna skims the surface of games long past without always understanding what made them memorable. Try it if you just want a game that looks the part or to see its admittedly cool combat.
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