This post will contain spoilers for the game Chained Echoes beginning in paragraph five (the very first sentence of the paragraph is a themaic spoiler and they only get more specific from there).

The older I get, the more I’m aware that everything is about something. Intentionally, unintentionally, and sometimes widely varying based on who is interpreting it. Sure, I learned this truth a long time ago, but it only ever seems to get more and more true as time goes on. I mean, I studied English Literature, always enjoyed reading comprehension tests or assignments in grade school, and though it took me a while to really grasp this idea in high school, I have been leaning into it ever since. This is not a new idea to me or even most people (I hope, though the state of the world makes me question how many people are capable of grasping nuance). I compleely set aside the idea that we aren’t constantly, and frequently unintentionally, showing whatever is on our minds through what we created the time I realized that the story I was writing in high school was about me and the horrible family life I had. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. Even when I redid the story in my last year of college and tried to be more intentional about what the story was about, I still found myself uncovered interpretations and metaphors I hadn’t intentionally written into it. This is why I tend to rewrite rather than revise these days, since it helps me figure out if the underlying issue is actually a part of the story or just something that was weighing heavily on my mind while I was writing. I don’t mind this stuff showing up in my writing, though, since I’m a firm believer in needing to write things out so I can learn what I’m thinking, but I generally try to be aware of it.

All of this is one of the reasons I’ve never had a problem with genre tropes as a concept. Sure, some of them can be incredibly bad (mostly by being lazy or relying on harmful stereotypes), but the ones that are attached to the meaning behind the stories being told are generally there to held us figure out what it all means. Most of the large genre tropes are so broad that they’re basically useless for aiding in more specific comprehension until they’re highly contextualizd, but the smaller subgenre tropes usually offer important pieces of context for the story they’re a part of rather than relying on it. Mech stories are about bodies, power dynamics, and usually fascism of some kind. High Fantasy stories are about good and evil and usually the hero’s journey or someone coming of age. Cyberpunk stories are about inequality, power dynamics, identity, and also usually bodies or personhood. Each of these subgenres is not defined by these tropes, but almost always includes them because of the very nature of the stories told within those frameworks. Understanding these tropes can help us grasp the beating heart of the story being told to us and failing to understand them can not only blind us to the message of the story but lead us entirely astry (the best example here is probably Fight Club and how the people who misunderstand the story have basically gotten the exactly the opposite lesson from it). Furthermore, when you’re dealing with a story that fits into multiple subgenres, understanding these tropes and being able to pick out the ones that are present can help us drill past the individual compononets of the story to get at the story as a whole.

This might seem like an odd preamble for a post that I originally meant to write about the game Chained Echoes (and is still largely about it, even if I’m viewing it through a very specific lense), but I’ve been thinking about this game for half a year now and I’ve only come to appreciate it more as time has passed. It always struck me as an odd combinations of genres, given that it sits at the crossroads between High Fantasy, Mecha, and War stories, but this exact odd combination is what helped me understand the story the game is telling. I wrote in the review with my final thoughts on the game that it had me reflecting on the fact that sometimes a simple message or belief is all you need, and that stories about these simple ideas are valuable, but I think that this game is made stronger by keeping this message simple. After all, the game itself is incredibly complex, seated as it is at the end of a long history of mechanically complex RPGs and at the crossroads of three incredibly disparate subgenres, so a simple message allows the player to focus on those other systems and the subgenre elements so that they can better understand the game as a whole rather than losing sight everything but the complex message the plot and characters are delivering.

It is not often that you can say that the mechanics of a game are tied to the message the story is trying to deliver to you, and I’d argue that it is even less often that you can say that the mechanics are essential to it. Everyone knows that the tropes are an important part of the story being told and the characters telling it, but mechanics in a game have a tendency to fade into the background. I mean, even with how much I loved this game and how deeply I thought about it while playing it, I still missed this idea until fairly recently. Sure, I wrote about how the fight mechanics were built in such a way that being careless against a group of mooks meant I had a more difficult battle than when I fought some of the last few bosses, but I didn’t stop to think about what that meant in the larger context of the game and the story it was telling.

It sounds kind of corny, but most of the game is about having faith in people to do the right thing. We see the protagonist, Glenn, reach out to support and trust people constantly, and though it doesn’t always work out for him, it is generally rewarded. Almost all of the positive change he and his group bring about in the world is because he was willing to take a risk on trusting someone or something that, at best, probably didn’t deserve it. The darkest moments of the story, of Glenn’s character arc and the arcs of the other characters, come when they lose that faith. For Glenn, it’s when he loses faith in himself. For Kylian, one of the first characters you meet, it is when he loses faith in his ability to change the world and the power of this group of characters to actually make an impact. For every villain and monster that seeks to bring ruin to the world, the beginnings of their journey are marked by them losing faith in the people around them or the world as a whole. When redemption comes knocking for anyone, it is because someone has taken the risk of placing their faith in someone else. It is because someone has stopped thinking that they are the only person they can rely on and has allowed themselves to lean on other people. What wins the day, in the end, is teamwork.

Now, setting aside the incredibly obvious fact that this is an RPG and, as a result, every single battle in this game whose primary vehicle for forward plot movement is battles that require a team of characters to fight one or more enemies, there is a mechanical reinforcement behind the theme of teamwork and having faith that other people will do the right thing. If you fight ANY battle as if your characters believe that it is on them alone to win the fight, you will wind up in the Red Zone on the overdrive meter (a key mechanic in all battles that sits on the upper left part of your screen), dealing reduced damage, taking extra damage, and paying more to use your abilities. Every single battle winds up as a careful balance of each character bringing their particular strengths to the battle so that you can still make progress through the battle (via damage dealt, buffs/debuffs applied, and statuses altered) while also keeping your overdrive meter in check. Hell, there’s incentive to keep characters you might consider “useless” around just because they have skills that are great for reducing the overdrive meter while still setting up damage combos or protecting your allies.

There is only one character who can, by themselves, always reduce the overdrive meter, but that comes at the cost of making progress in battle. Glenn, the protagonist, has a move that will lower the overdrive meter a significant amount, but using it will also raise the overdrive meter by a little bit. Trying to rely on this move alone will wind up in you fighting a losing battle against the overdrive bar and, subsequently, against whatever enemies you’re facing. You need a mix of character and their various types of abilities to keep it in check while still winning the fight. Every single battle, if you look at it from the perspective of these characters, is a testament to the faith they have in each other to work toward a common cause. Because you could just chain attacks and maybe, sometimes, that would be enough to take your enemies down before your overdrive meter puts in you in the danger zone but most of the time you will wind up losing a battle you should have easily won. Only by guiding these characters as if they implicitly trust each other can you succeed in battles. And not only will you succeed, but you will thrive as the game actively rewards you for doing balance teamwork in battles rather than spammy burn and run tactics.

When you consider all this through the subgenres attach to the game, it adds a level of nuance and complexity to the fairly simple ideas of teamwork and having faith in people. When we look at it through the High Fantasy lense of good versus evil, we find a story rife with examples of each, but ultimately with a side that does good for reasons that are sometimes selfish and a side that is doing evil for reasons that are arguable selfless. We see the basic form of good and evil built in the first act and then slowly broken down in the second and third acts as it plays on our expectations to make the point that any one of these characters could be a hero or a villain and the result mostly comes down to if they are given and accept the support and faith of the people around them. If we bring in the heroes’ journey steps or try to map it out to a coming of age structure, we see that framework slowly picked apart by the story itself in the third act as the various realities of the situation our protagonists find themselves in reveals that this story is not so easily reduced or mapped. Sure, all the steps of each are present (and some of these definitely apply to the arcs of individual characters), but ultimately this story sidesteps the finals the steps and resolution of each trope to remind us that, sometimes, simple kindness is what can change a life rather than some grand revelation, stirring speech, or mighty final battle. Each of these lenses adds detail and nuance to the story, but eventually fall short of capturing it.

The same is true of the other subgenres. This story has plenty to say about bodies, as the Mecha elements imply, from Glenn’s declaration that he feels the most himself when he’s in his mech (called a Sky Armor in this game) to Ba’Thraz’s magical limbs being one of the reasons they can fit in one of the relatively cramped Sky Armors. Throw in the fact that some of the major elements of the story have to do with reincarnation, the separation of the body from the self, and the use of Sky Armors (and other weapons of war) against people without those enhanced bodies, and it starts to look like we’ve got our first perfect fit. While I’d definitely argue that this thematic element fits the best out of all of them, it still falls short because we see the core of the story dealing with these characters outside of their suits. We even move outside of bodies all together at points, as they are transcended entirely in moments of the game (most of the crux of my arguement about this theme fitting the entire story is that leaving a body behind or transcending it still puts the story into a specific context in relation to bodies rather than entirely without them), showing us that what really connects us is the bonds we form and the faith we place in each other. Which is frequently an aspect of stories about bodies, but the missing element here is the focus on harm to bodies and what that means for each person. Except in the case of Ba’Thraz, but that’s more of a backstory element than one explored in the story of Chained Echoes itself.

War is perhaps the most obvious and simplistic of the bunch, since the elements of War stories serve to enhance and add context to the other subgenre elements and the story as a whole. War is also about bodies and the way they are frequently damaged or lost, adding a context to the Mecha subgrene. The waging of war is the primary vehicle for displays of good and evil in the game, giving us a final means of deciding if something or someone is good or evil because of the way their actions either reflect the war happening around the characters or serve to extend or shorten the war. War stories are often about comraderie as well, about the trials of constant conflict, the betrayals of allies, and the slow wearing away of an individual who cannot escape the fires of conflict that will eventually burn them down to nothing. This trope is what are characters are fighting, it is the true villain of this story as it is played out in the character who seems like the ultimate villain but who is also acting this way to stop what might be the true ultimate villains, who also became this type of ultimate villain because they were trying to prevent the return of yet one further ultimate villain. The story looks like it is going to wrap this all up in a neat little bow at the end, eventually arguing that hope and life are good while losing sight of these things is bad, but it side steps it at the last minute.

Yes, this string of villains convinced they’re acting for the greater good are bad, but were any of them actually wrong to do what they did? The characters in the game make the argument that the second tier of ultimate villains are the worst, but the story ends before we get the chance to see if they were correct. The final, potentially worst villain is still out there somewhere and we have nothing but the character’s faith in each other and the world as a whole that they will figure out a way to stop this primary villain now that the secondary and teriary villains have been vanquished. We might never know because the game isn’t interested in that quesion. Yes, it asks it, but it asks it in way that emphasises the idea that, sometimes, what we need to do is just have faith in each other and give people a chance to be the good person we believe them to be. That’s what redeems Glenn in his second life (a reminder that this game sits at what seems to be the conclusion of a reincarnation cycle) and that’s what Glenn believes will redeem Kylian in the end. We might never know if it is true, but the common refrain throughout the entire story is that all a person needs to be the best version of themselves is someone who supports them, who cares about them, and who has faith in them.

It might seem like a bit of a nonsensical message in the face of the vast array of themes, tropes, and mechanics this game brings to bear through it’s relatively small runtime (relative to a lot of other major games I’ve played this year, anyway, since fourty to sixty hours is still pretty substantial), but the game’s creators certainly didn’t think so. I certainly don’t believe it, either. I didn’t want to agree, initially. I wanted to write it off as naive or cliché (something I owned up to in my post after I finished the game), but the game steadily convinced me that this message was important. That this idea was important. Honestly, given the complexity of how this is all interwoven, I can only believe that the game’s creators placed a great deal of faith in their future players to look beyond the surface and dig through the various elements of the story to get to this ultimate conclusion, which is just another point in the story’s favor. Sometimes, all you need is a little faith in other people and little bit of other people’s faith in you to make some pretty significant changes in your life and in the world around you. A little bit of faith in other people can change the course of a life.