Often and in fact more and more continuously, we applaud without shame the effort that is made from independent studies or small groups of people to carry out different games, projects with their own ideas or recovering those that we already knew but do under a changed prism or further from the conventions of the genre. This year we are living it as never before, but it is something that comes from afar and that in a small percentage is able to combine the old and the new perfectly.
Shovel Knight was born in some way as the answer to the absence of the Megaman of Capcom, covering its gap without much difficulty and becoming a true reference for arcade action with classic elements. And seeing the success of this or of so many others, the
big studios sometimes try to get off ‘ to the mud ‘to finance, within the stability that their brands boast, smaller projects or said in some way …’ false indies’.
Ubisoft did it with Child of Light or Valiant Heart, both games of unquestionable quality, and Square Enix has done it this time with I Am Setsuna, the first project of a studio created for the occasion called Tokyo RPG Factory.
Note this introduction as a way to know where to place the project that since its ad has been sold as a return to the origins, a spiritual successor
of Chrono Trigger, which literally quotes with attacks of identical characters and does the same with as many games of the company, as that introduction in which the names of the team appear on the screen with the same camera angle and framing as those of
Final Fantasy VI, composing the plane to pay homage to that masterpiece. Knowing then that it is a work of ‘love’, not so much one that seeks to destroy commercially as to recover that classic spirit, of yesteryear, there is something that seeing the final credits is clear:
that is a good attempt, and that many more people of which seemed to have been involved in its development and other areas such as testing, location, etcetera. However, I Am Setsuna is a game that must be celebrated precisely by putting on the table something that was believed lost, although not everything it does is far from the intended level.
The story starts when our protagonist, after completing a rescue mission, is warned by another character to undertake an even more complicated. Its destiny is to cross the continent, to arrive at a town where a young person lives who is on the verge of reaching the majority of age and … to finish with her. The reasons we know them soon: it is the next person who will make a
pilgrimage to become ‘the sacrifice’, something that he will do in theory to stop the appearance of the monsters in his world. It is easy to think of Final Fantasy X as a starting point and the thing pulls down that path, not only keeping the characters that were there –
or rather, roles of these – as the guardians, the jovial girl and ready to assume their destiny, even a mature and relevant figure in the form of a swordsman who hides a past something mysterious and related to the present. The story works like that more like agreatest hits
as something that feels unique, but it is a subject that could be attributed to countless titles of the genre, so it does not matter too much.
The way of telling it is somewhat vague, yes, without taking advantage of what really made important the games of yesteryear and limited to exposing a lot of texts to make it move forward. The overall script is normal, but there is some inspiration in the personal stories of the characters that we cross in a timely manner in the villages.
