I Am Setsuna evokes classic games like Chrono Trigger, but it's no simple nostalgia play

Square Enix's latest game is unusual, as far as names go: I Am Setsuna. Period included.

There's an elegant brevity to it, but more importantly, it wants to set a mood. And boy, does it deliver.

Setsuna is a girl from a small village chosen to be a sacrifice. Only the life of a sacrifice every generation or so can stem the tides of monsters that regularly threaten to overtake human settlements.

The player takes on the role of Endir, a mercenary on a mission to kill Setsuna before she completes her pilgrimage to the Last Lands, where she is to be sacrificed. But he soon has a change of heart and joins her on her journey instead, as part of a group of bodyguards.

If this sounds like a familiar setup, you'd be right. The main premise is nearly identical to the 2001 classic Final Fantasy X, with Setsuna taking the place of that game's heroine, Yuna.

True to the recent resurgence in nostalgia-driven video game releases, I Am Setsuna — which hits PlayStation 4's online store and the Steam Store on PCs today — takes direct influence from Square-Enix's library of Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), including the Final Fantasy series, but especially Chrono Trigger, originally released in 1995 for Super Nintendo.

'Heartfelt sorrow' a key theme

Don't take the comparisons to Chrono Trigger literally, at least in terms of the plot. While that game was a mostly light-hearted adventure that began with a mischievous boy goofing off at the Millennial Fair (what a name, in retrospect), I Am Setsuna's plot is unrelentingly sad.

According to Usuke Kumagai, the director for the English version of the game, the name Setsuna is derived from the Japanese word for sorrow. 

Not only is Setsuna on a mission designed to end with her demise, every main character confronts questions about his or her mortality and place in the world. From a town populated entirely by orphans and war widows, to a village of wizards whose magical powers shorten their life expectancy to 30 or less, everyone you'll meet seemingly lives with the weight of the world on his or her shoulders. 

But it's not all a downer. Brief moments of triumph and comic relief save the story from becoming drenched in blood and nihilism.

You'll come to appreciate the playful banter and bickering between the young wizard Kir and Nidr, a grizzled grumpy swordsman. None of it escapes the archetypes familiar to fans of Japanese animation, but it comes at just the right time to bring some levity to the proceedings.

Minimalist presentation

The reverence for past classics is a strength for I Am Setsuna. Stumpy, cartoon-like characters travel between sparsely populated miniature villages, icy caverns and snow-swept mountains, all set to a remarkable piano-only score.

The entire world is stuck in a seemingly eternal winter, as though we're looking at the remnants of society after the White Walkers have taken over in Game of Thrones. (Don't worry, though, enemies for the most part are cute Pokemon-like creatures instead of flesh-eating zombies.)

Indeed, every part of its presentation and storytelling comes from a restraint that, 20 years ago, came out of the necessity of fitting a video game into a cartridge that could only hold a couple megabits worth of data.

It eschews Hollywood blockbuster-level set pieces filled with explosions battles on the scale of The Hobbit films in favour of quiet conversation between only a handful of characters at a time — rather like a small-scale theatre production.

Unlike the sprawling 50 hours-plus epics that have come to define the genre, you'll be able to finish I Am Setsuna in around 20 to 25 hours, thanks to a focused storyline rarely distracted by narrative tangents.

It's a stark change from many of Square-Enix's modern takes on the role-playing game, punctuated by bloated nonsensical scripts more interested in hitting a high word count than telling a coherent story.

Only near the end does it become more exposition heavy, but even then it dispenses world-building details that would have bogged down the personal stories that rightfully dominate most of your screen time.

Familiar JRPG mechanics

JRPG fans will have little trouble learning the basics of I Am Setsuna's mechanics, almost all of which are pulled or remixed from past classics. 

Characters can combine their attacks and spells such as in Chrono Trigger (some attacks are taken directly from it), while spells are assigned by equipping heroes with magically infused stones called Spritnite – essentially Final Fantasy VII's Materia with a new name.

Slowly, though, it becomes a little too unwieldy when you're forced to manage weapons, talismans, Spritnite and other systems all at once. Most inscrutable are Fluxes and Singularities, effects that can empower your party during a battle, yet seem to activate at random.

While you'll be able to coast through much of the game essentially on auto pilot, a few exceedingly difficult boss fights will force you to re-examine your spell loadouts, and you'll get bogged down in the unnecessarily complex menus.

Despite the arcane interface and some pacing issues in its third act, I Am Setsuna resurrects much of what longtime gamers loved about the JRPG genre when it first grew in popularity in North America.

Genre fans won't be disappointed.