Kill system and crafting spritnites So I mentioned you need to craft sprinites. In I Am Setsuna you don't see that, you have to guess which monsters will be hit. In Chrono Trigger you could always see in red which monsters the skills and combos would hit. One thing they didn't copy from Chrono Trigger very well is the AoE effects. Turning I Am Setsuna into a game where 50% of the playtime is menu browsing. But since you want to switch characters around you have to do this OFTEN. You can write those down on a piece of paper and then use that info to equip the right sprinites. Here you can see which sprinites combos are needed. The only thing you can do it open the compendium, which is HUGE and find the section that lists the combos. There's no visual information on what other characters and sprinites you need. UI options that would make it more comfortable like "Equip all sprinites needed for this combo" are completely missing.
The problem with having to equip spells is that it makes it super hard to even get combos at all. In I Am Setsuna you have to "craft" sprinites and equip them to have the spell available. In Chrono Trigger you simply learned the skills by leveling up or getting far enough in the story. That sounds all great, right? It would be if it wasn't for the spritnite system. They don't only vary in damage and AoE and element, they also have tons of special properties on them (especially status changes are pretty big in I Am Setsuna). And the spells and combos have more unique effects.
Each character can also learn slightly more spells than in CT. That makes up for significantly more combos than Chrono Trigger had (remember, you needed Crono or Magus for combos). Spells / Combos / Spritnites In I Am Setsuna, each 2-character combination has 3 combos and each 3-character combination has 1 combo. The gameplay is mostly copied straight from Chrono Trigger, so I'll focus on the things that are different. Gameplay - Now here I can talk about a lot. Most of the time however, the OST is too calm and slow for me to actually really love it. Yeah they really even partially copied the songs right from CT and just changed a note here and there, so it isn't 100% identical. The I Am Setstuna OST isn't bad, but it's so calm and the only songs with a notable melody stole that melody straight from CT. I found myself humming the CT battle theme instead of listening to the actualy battle theme pretty often. Music - Now the game really made me miss the CT OST. Luckily, it's still acceptable given the game's length.
The downside is that since the whole game plays in snow you really only have very few sceneries: Snowy forest/village/mountain, ice dungeon, ruins. It also has a nice graphical effect that moves the snow to the sides when you walk through it. The characters don't have any feet, but most of the time your walking in snow, so you won't see it. Graphics - Graphics are pretty beautiful. I Am Setsuna does not offer a New Game+, but after a certain point in the game you can revisit all previous locations again for additional rewards, new monsters and bosses, which actually gives you quite some optional endgame content. I think 30 hours is actually the perfect RPG length. Even though many complain about the game being too short, I want to note that it's not shorter than Chrono Trigger. It keeps you going, it has its good moments, it has no logic errors. There's nothing ground breaking, but it is also nothing boring. Story - The story has everything you need in your average JRPG. But let's take a look at each aspect one by one. Where the game fails, however, is everything where it tried to do something new. The battle system is also an almost exact copy up to the same skill names and combos and the fact that every single monster has a unique behavior pattern that requires to apply some tactic. Sure the story isn't about time travel and the whole game is a snowy region so it lacks the high variety that Chrono Trigger had, but it still has hundreds of Chrono Trigger references up to cutscenes that could totally be CT cutscenes, just reskinned. I'd say it copies Chrono Trigger almost to perfection.
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