Tokyo RPG Factory's first game offers an elegant counterbalance to Final Fantasy 15. The teams behind each, steered by directors who first fell in love with the Japanese RPG as children, have laboured side-by-side behind acres of perpendicular glass in Square-Enix's new Shinjuku offices. But while Hajime Tabata and his battalion of developers hope to redefine the genre in the forthcoming Final Fantasy, Atsushi Hashimoto and his tiny squad (reportedly just ten in-house staff, supported by a few dozen contractors) want only to recapture the spirit and ambiance of the Super Nintendo and PlayStation RPGs of their childhood. One game is a forward-facing epic, and the other a wistful sketch. In this regard I Am Setsuna is a triumph, dispensing with the bulk and baggage of today's overblown specimens in favour of a simple fable told with clarity and care.
There are no unwieldy attempts to splice pop culture and fantasy in I Am Setsuna, and, as a freshly born universe, there's no cloying fan-service. The soundtrack consists not of tired snatches of familiar melody but of an unbroken chain of fresh tunes played by, presumably, the world's most exhausted pianist (there are no other instruments; the music changes in tone to match the action, in the style of a silent movie accompaniment.) Aspects of classic JRPGs inevitably feature, but as ghostly imprints, rather than totems. For a game inspired by nostalgia, there's irony to the novelty, further compounded by the game's driving theme: the folly of unexamined tradition.
The titular Setsuna is a girl of impeccable virtue. Her blinding kindness serves a narrative function: to intensify our sense of injustice at her assumed destiny to become a sacrificial lamb. Setsuna's world, locked in perennial winter, is riddled with monsters. Every few years its inhabitants must select a willing sacrifice, whose martyrdom will, they believe, hold back the hordes. It is Setsuna's turn.
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