Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant Review – Proof That JRPGs Are Still at Their Best

Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant Review

When I reviewed Chained Echoes in 2022, I was blown away. It was a JRPG made by one person that established itself as one of the all-time genre greats. At the time, I gave Chained Echoes 92/100. Since then, I’ve platinumed the game, and had time to sit with it, and my love for it has only grown stronger. Chained Echoes is a perfect 100/100 game. It’s a JRPG that’s so great that I could see genre haters saying it’s one of the few they enjoy. It’s now 2025, and the world has been gifted a continuation in the form of Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant.

Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant is DLC that takes place right before the end of the base game. It’s a side story, where the Crimson Wings aid in a science expedition to the ancient city Elrant, which is where Lenne is originally from. I’m going to try to be vague with plot details, but specific enough that Chained Echoes players have an idea of what Ashes of Elrant is about. If you’re curious about the base game, please read my original review for an explanation of its plot and mechanics. Chained Echoes has a unique turn-based combat system, and fantastic story. This review of Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant will discuss the DLC’s changes to the base game, but won’t recap much.

Getting Started

Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant is selectable from the game’s main menu. Players have the option to use their party from a completed game save, or to start with a premade party. This makes it so Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant can be played without a completed game save. It also means Ashes of Elrant can be played before even playing the base game. I wouldn’t recommend this, as it’s full of massive plot spoilers.

There’s an optional recap at the beginning of Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant. It’s very brief, and only covers information of the overarching Chained Echoes story. There’s no minutia of character details. The recap reminds players of the threat of The Harbinger and plans of the Vaen. The Chained Echoes base game ended with some major unresolved plot threads. There was a major climax, and it felt like a complete experience, but it was obvious by the end of the game that there were going to be more games in the Chained Echoes universe. I loved the story of Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant. But it doesn’t resolve any of the unanswered questions from Chained Echoes. We’re going to have to wait for a full-blown sequel. It does offer an enticing glimpse into the world’s past, and give us a lot of great character moments.

Leonar the White Wolf

Speaking of great characters, Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant introduces a new party member! Leonar is a legendary hero from Elrant. He’s a wolf man, and a strong physical attacker. He has a mechanic that leaves bite marks on enemies, and has attacks that do more damage, the more bite marks an enemy has. He also has a set of abilities, where he enters a buffed-up state, and gets buff-specific powers. Leonar is a great character, important to Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant’s plot. He’s also very fun to use in battle, and had me shake up my end game party so I could use him.

One of the joys of playing Chained Echoes was getting to a new area, and exploring. Each new map was a treat to adventure and battle in. Every area also had an Adventure Board, which functioned as a checklist and set of mini challenges. This gave players extra incentive to find every chest, battle every enemy, and find every material scattered through the map. As the kind of player who loves checking things off lists, and earning trophies, I found the system very addictive. Every accomplished goal also gives the player legitimately useful rewards. Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant has several new maps, and a whole new Adventure Board. Completing it took me just over 20 hours, which is a lot of content for $10 DLC.

Streamlined Gem System

Chained Echoes has a crystal crafting system that I really enjoyed using at first. Players find crystals that grant abilities, and level them up by combining them. But by the end of the game, the crafting got tiresome. Crystal crafting took a long time, and the bonuses gained from them didn’t feel like they were impactful enough to justify the time sink. Thankfully the crafting has been dropped in Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant. Crystals are just dropped by monsters, and are equipped to weapons and armor like accessories. There’s no levelling up crystals or combining them. The party gets new default weapons and armor at the beginning of Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant, and this makes their upgrades suitable to the length of the DLC.

My party was completely maxed out in my end game save. To compensate for this, there’s a new kind of experience points in Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant called PP. PP stands for “Party Points”. They’re experience points that can be spent on party-wide abilities. There’s a pretty wide range of abilities, called “Talents”, such as gaining the ability to talk to monsters. Talking to monsters unlocks side scenarios that lead to small bonuses such as money. There are also Talents that extend the Overdrive Bar in both directions, which makes it easier to stay in Overdrive mode. There’s a Talent for each character that results in an overall stat upgrade.

New Minigames

Two Talents are new minigames. The first one is a pretty elaborate fishing minigame, where players have to cast a line, and tap X, while sometimes stopping or pressing L1 to drag left/down or R1 to drag right/up. The player’s fishing level goes up as they catch new fish at different locations. Each fish has a size, which gives records that can be broken. There are many different lures to choose from, which snag smaller fish. But a player has to maneuver a small fish on a hook in front of a large bottom feeder to catch the really big fish. It’s a very elaborate and fun minigame that isn’t overcomplicated.

The second minigame is a digging game. The player has an area where they have to use a sonar to find a patch of land with the most visible rumbling. Then they have to press a button around that location. When they get the maximum beep, the player has to tap X rapidly. Within an area there are 5ish items to find. Most of them are useless, but one is a brand new Class Emblem. The digging minigame was ok. But Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant is a game where everything is constantly exceeding player expectations. Compared to everything else, the digging minigame is a weak spot.

New Class Emblems

Class Emblems function as a light job system. Any character can equip any Class Emblem. When equipped, Class Emblems raise several stats, and give two new upgradeable skills. For example, the Sage Class Emblem raises the Magic stat, and gives a light magic attack, and a dark magic attack. You can give this emblem to any character. So a magic user can gain new elemental attacks, or a more physical character can diversify their arsenal. The 4 new Class Emblems are all great, and will definitely replace Emblems already in use.

When I started Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant, I was worried that I would have a hard time getting back into the game. It had been a few years since I’d played. But Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant does a great job of letting the player play around. There’s a bit of battle that takes place before the story gets rolling. Soon after that, there’s an easy sky Armor section to remind players of those mechanics. This was all very welcome because Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant has a high difficulty. It’s for players that have beaten the main game. Some of the boss fights are really challenging. But I got back into the swing of things before the challenge hit. One final note is that there aren’t any new PlayStation trophies for the DLC. This is a small blemish on an otherwise near-perfect game.

Near Perfect Experience

I have to try really hard to find anything to critique about Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant. It’s a turn-based JRPG, with an innovative combat system that hits all the right nostalgia buttons. It doesn’t answer many of the questions left at the end of Chained Echoes, but it keeps me excited for the inevitable sequel. Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant is 20 more hours of the Chained Echoes some of us know and love. Hopefully, this DLC helps the main game transcend the JRPG community. Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant stands atop the JRPG genre, alongside modern classics like Undertale, Sea of Stars, and Metaphor: ReFantazio.

***PS4 code provided by the publisher***