Wrap Up: I Am Setsuna is a somber yet joyful nostalgia trip The art direction is aided by a lovely, piano-heavy soundtrack that really sells the game's melancholy tone. I Am Setsuna's stylized characters and artsy world design sets it apart from the average, cheap-CGI look that many RPGs share. Still, even when I was exploring a setting I was already overly familiar with, the presentation is gorgeous.

These templates repeat several times, as do the handful of enemy types within them, draining the game of a sense of discovery and wonder. The game boasts a grand total of maybe three or four dungeon 'types' - an icy cavern, a treacherous mountain path, a strange, technologically advanced tower. That's well enough, but this extends to dungeons as well. As previously mentioned, the game's world is covered in snow in all directions, so every town and outdoor field has the same frigid feel. The lack of environmental variety in I Am Setsuna is harder to handwave away. They're also entirely unnecessary to completing or enjoying the game, so I mostly ignored them. These mechanics, and a few others in the game, are confusing at their best. I Am Setsuna has a few underexplained and seemingly undercooked systems, such as momentum, which adds an element of timing to attacks in order to achieve extra damage, and singularities, which are random effects that can trigger for a short amount of time during battles. Other reminders of Square Enix's output over the last 10 years are less welcome. Taking a few cues from the Super Nintendo classic Chrono Trigger, if two characters in your currently active party have compatible spells, they can be combined into super-powerful combo attacks. It uses Square's standard 'active time battle' combat - basically, you watch a bar fill up in real time for each of your party members, and once it's full you can choose to swing your weapon, cast a spell or use an item. Of course, part of my uninterrupted enjoyment of I Am Setsuna is thanks to excellent battle system. Put another way: I was not exhausted and ready to be done by the end of the game, despite an overwhelming earnestness in the writing that could easily have worn thin. For a game so somber and serious, it doesn't allow the gravity of the scenario to create distance between the player and the characters. What impressed me the most is how warm I Am Setsuna felt by the end. I'm used to guessing my fair share of plot twists well in advance in RPGs, but here I found myself surprised by many of the reveals and by the directions the cast went in. Once you get past the fairly generic opening hours, I Am Setsuna's characters grow into a surprisingly intriguing bunch, full of unexpected, secret motivations. As the masked mercenary Endir, you've been tasked to assassinate the sacrifice in question. I Am Setsuna is set in a drab, snow-covered world, where once every 10 years or so, a sacrificial maiden must be sent on a pilgrimage and give her life to temporarily stop the threat of monsters wiping out the remnants of humanity. And that identity is one of an impressive if imperfect debut. This game is packed with plenty of throwbacks to Square's 16-bit glory days, but it also very much has its own identity. To Tokyo RPG Factory's credit, none of that pressure to deliver can be felt in I Am Setsuna. Many have argued that there's a reason the Japanese style of role-playing game has mostly shrunk into a relatively tiny niche audience. When Square Enix revealed developer Tokyo RPG Factory at E3 2015, the publisher made the new team's goal clear: It was created to reclaim the legacy of Japanese role-playing games that had once made Square such a known and beloved name.

I am setsuna game informer review