It extends to combat, which starts only when you actively engage an enemy you found bobbing around the dungeon maps, and which unfolds with the 'Active Time Battle' system that maintains the action even when you're digging in menus for specific spells and potions.ДЄnd then it muddies that fluidity with some unnecessary complications. It embraces them in some unexpected ways, such as how gear stays limited to weapons and amulets, thus minimizing the time you spend in menus min-maxing. The battle on the iceД«ut it's also true that I Am Setsuna starts to lose its way whenever it strays from the lessons the simplicity of the snow imparts. More snow, more trees, and not a random encounter to be had. Much as in the sumi-e artwork that first image so richly evoked, the surrounding chalky void highlights the characters and their quest, lending an urgency and meaning that might have been robbed with detours to help troubled farmers.

It emphasizes that nothing is more important than Setsuna's grim duty.

Eventually I came to appreciate the single track as a further embracing of the purity of that first image. Some sidequests exist, but they're almost as rare as palm trees in the arctic, and the treks across the map grow lonely as no random encounters pop up while the fellowship tromps through the drifts and (later) coasts over them in an airship. I never learned much more about these folks aside from the what the main story imparted, and it sometimes seems a shame that the storyline never really wavers from its focus. I especially enjoyed the scenes with poor Nidr, a swordsman who battles both with the monsters in his past and those in abandoned villages, as well as the roguish spellcaster Aeterna, who looks after Setsuna as though she were family.ДЄt the tail end of Setsuna's 23 or so hours I felt a weariness of setting I haven't felt since reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. There's not a one among her companions who isn't flawed and tragic and some way, but there are some standouts who thankfully remind us that our existence is one worth fighting for. As Endir, along with some other somber guards, you must escort her through the beasts and snowfields of the world so she may do her duty. Setsuna herself is a girl whose purity matches that of the surrounding snow, but she's willingly chosen to bow to local tradition and sacrifice herself at a faraway altar so the world can live in relative safety from monsters. Perhaps the lesson is that he's the right hero for a world as bleak and sad as this. Even the sound of the snow becomes part of the experience, as the heroes crunch through it and leave furrows in their wake.

I am setsuna mods