I Am Setsuna Is A Poor Man's Final Fantasy X

Just play that instead

Today I want to talk about a JRPG in which you escort a young woman on a pilgrimage across the world to reach the ruins of an ancient civilization so she can sacrifice herself to buy a decade of peace before someone else needs to make the same pilgrimage. What? Final Fantasy X? No this is a review for I Am Setsuna.

The best description for I Am Setsuna is an uninspired RPG Maker game. Developed by a splinter studio at Square Enix with employees who worked on earlier classics like Chrono Trigger, I Am Setsuna released to lackluster reviews, but many of them faulted the asking price of the game on release. I bought the game on sale, thinking it might be palatable at a lower price point.

Friends, I was very wrong.

Almost every aspect of the game is underwhelming. The main plot of the game is a worse version of Final Fantasy X if you cut out most of the narrative development of your party members. The main character you play as, Endin, rarely talks and has a mysterious background that is never discussed or contemplated. Each of the other characters has thin characterization and feels like you've seen a better version of them in a past game. For example, one character looks like Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX but without being super OP. Another party member is a tanky fighter who carries a giant two handed sword on his back and wears large robes with flowy sleeves and went on a previous pilgrimage, so he's basically budget Auron from FFX. You travel through a variety of forgettable towns with no visual distinction between them, lifeless NPCs to talk to, and paper-thin stories to resolve before moving to the next stop on your journey. 

The graphics aren't great either. Characters are drawn in a quasi-chibi art style with large heads, oversized arms, and then legs shaped like toothpicks, all of which have low graphical fidelity. Environments are boring: the game world is covered in snow, not for plot reasons, just because I get, so I hope you don't like colors. When you aren't in samey-looking towns, you will travel though a series of identical looking mountain paths and fields. You will walk through snowy paths, flanked by snow-covered trees (and a visual overlay of blowing snow, just in case your characters provided too much on-screen color, and you will not remember the names of any of the places you travel through. Building interiors have a bit more color, but there isn't much variety other than those two settings. The soundtrack is the only good thing about the presentation: most tracks are piano-only or piano with light instrumental accompaniment, and it creates a haunting atmosphere that the game's writing and visuals do nothing to match.

The gameplay is the best part of the game, which doesn't say much. The battle system is largely a turn-based ATB system, with an added wrinkle that you can idle after your turn is up and build up charges that can be used to strengthen or add extra effects to your moves each turn. This system is poorly explained, and I had to Google it before I knew what was happening. The same is true for most other gameplay systems: getting gear/equipment is a convoluted system where monster drop like 15 monster parts that have to be sold to a merchant who then lets you buy crystals with new moves once you sell the right number of specific monster parts, but you need slots for those crystals which is influenced by a relic you can equip, but also the relic changes what random effects happen when you build charges in the battle system from idling when you turn is up. Basically the menu screen has 5 different rows to change equipping slightly different items and it doesn't help much. Plus there are several points in the game where the boss is dramatically overpowered compared to nearby enemies, so you will have to spend about 60-90 minutes of your playthrough grinding experience. Do you like puzzles? Many dungeons have a mechanic where you flip a switch to change the orientation of a path. That's it, no more puzzles for you.

Also save points are spread out very rarely, and if you die in battle you have to load an old save. There is no grace period for misjudging a battle, which is a shame because the game also has a mechanic where overpowered versions of normal enemies are put throughout various maps, with little visual distinction from normal enemies, so when you go into a normal fight and get wrecked, you'll have to redo 20 minutes of gameplay to get back where you were. 

There are lots of callbacks to old JRPG classics. In battle, special moves are called techs and you can do special moves with other party members if you have the right combination of techs on each character. Also like Chrono Trigger, your final party member is a scythe-wielding antagonist who joins right before the final boss for...reasons? The plot apes Final Fantasy X, but there is a FF6-style overworld where you can run around in map areas, but when you get to the overworld you walk comically slow into a cluster of 2 houses that represents a town. Plus you get an airship near the end of the game. 

Ultimately I Am Setsuna is the "we have XX at home" meme of JRPG-style games. It's like being a kid and asking your parents to buy Dr. Pepper at the store and they come back with "Dr. Shasta" and you're like "what is this and why does it taste like bad root beer?" Anything that I Am Setsuna does right (as well as everything it tries to do well but executes poorly) is done better by another, often older, game. If you want to go on a pilgrimage with a young girl who wants to sacrifice herself to save the world, just play Final Fantasy X, which has cool summons and voice acting (this game only has voice acting when characters make quips in battle, and then only in Japanese). Do you want a stupid overcomplicated gear system? Play a game in the Tales series because at least those have skits that flesh out the character personalities. Do you want an RPG that feels like it hews closely to old-school conventions from the 90s? Play Dragon Quest XI; that series is stubborn about change but also gives you way more for your money. Plus the Definitive Edition lets you marry/"be best friends who live together" with any of your party members regardless of gender. You are better off replaying any of the classic games this game was inspired by than actually playing this game. You'll enjoy them more and not be mad at yourself.

I played the original Breath of Fire as part of my sub to the Nintendo Switch online service, and it was similar to this game in unfortunate ways. The plot was thin, leaving you wondering why there was a giant humanoid robot made of stone that you need to use to move a giant rock (before it dies). Characters were defined by a few sentences of backstory, and they joined your party for reasons that made no sense (Gobi was the greedy fish merchant, he had no reason to follow you to fight a bunch of evil dragon people). But Breath of Fire came out in 1993, so for a 30-year old game you can forgive them for maybe not having the space on an NES cartridge to recreate Lord of the Rings. Also you could turn into a dragon, and if you could do that in I Am Setsuna I think I would have liked it more. 

If you are like me and wishlisted this game on Steam, thinking one day it might be fun to play: don't. Go replay a classic game like Breath of Fire 3 or the criminally underappreciated Final Fantasy 8, and consider yourself better off.

If you're still here, here are other things that I didn't like:

• The game has no inns. None. Do you want to heal your entire party up for cheap? Buy a tent, and walk out of a town to use it. Also despite JRPG conventions, the tent only "partially" heals you, so you'd have to buy a "cabin" to be fully healed. That seems to apply for people who do postgame/endgame stuff because it wasn't an issue for me, but why the fuck would you make an RPG with no inns?

• The main character is named Endir. I assume it's a play on "ender." Your budget-Auron party member is named "Ndir." So enjoy playing the game "I Am Setsuna" with your 3-person battle party of Setsuna, Endir, and Ndir. 

• The only good thing about the game being an entire snow world is that then went through the trouble of making it so that when you walk through the snow, you leave a trail in the snow where you pushed it aside to get through. 

• The game has voice acting, but it's only for short phrases in battle and only in Japanese. So you'll hear your characters yelling "owari da!" but that's about it.

• Budget Beatrix is the leader of an order of knights that lives in a town that looks like every other town (even though the town is supposed to be mostly a town of knights) but also she is a descendant of the royal family who ruled in the fallen civilization where the pilgrimage ends. This happened like a thousand years ago. I really doubt a thousand years later the descendant of the royal family would be running an order of ineffective knights, but I guess we needed a monk/dragoon character to fill out the party so this is what we got.

• The game does the classic JPRG thing where each character has these really detailed 2D portraits that are shown when they talk, but then the 3D version of them onscreen is basically Mr. Potato Head. It's very weird.