I Am Setsuna: Wrong Answer

I might assume there's a camp of people who were both invigorated and disappointed by the first major "decision" of I Am Setsuna. The scene itself I let stand still for some time. It hit me well: the piano accompaniment, the target's claim to her inevitable death, the poise of the mercenary who's found his mark. I didn't want to swing the sword. But the gamer in me wanted to test the scenario's limits. I flipped between the two options constantly. Could it be that I Am Setsuna would allow me to perform outright assassination?

I knew that no, it likely wouldn't. But perhaps it might, at the very least, alter the course of plot and character relationships. Too curious to care any longer, I swung. Thus the immediate lesson is learned about I Am Setsuna: the answer doesn't matter. Neither answer does. The plot continues identically regardless of whether the mercenary Endir attempts murder or shows mercy. The "choice" was a lie — a button prompt dressed as agency. And somehow, that makes it the most honest moment in the entire game.

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The Chrono Trigger Shadow

I Am Setsuna wears its Chrono Trigger inspiration like a winter coat two sizes too large. The ATB combat, the dual and triple techs, the piano-only soundtrack standing in for Yasunori Mitsuda's orchestral warmth — everything about the game is a reference to something greater. The snow-covered world is beautiful in its minimalism, but the minimalism extends to the writing, the character development, and the world design in ways that feel less like artistic restraint and more like budget constraint. Towns blur together. NPCs repeat themselves. Dungeons are corridors of enemies with no environmental storytelling.

The dual and triple tech system borrows Chrono Trigger's party synergy mechanic, but without the spatial positioning that made CT's combos feel tactical. In CT, where your characters stood on the battlefield determined which techs were available. In Setsuna, it's just "have these two characters in the party." The Momentum system — press a button during attacks for bonus effects — adds timing to an otherwise passive combat system, but it's a bandaid on a foundation that needed more ambition. The developers at Tokyo RPG Factory clearly loved Chrono Trigger. The problem is they recreated its surface without understanding its depth, like covering a song perfectly but missing the emotion.

The Piano and the Snow

What I Am Setsuna does have is atmosphere. The all-piano soundtrack is haunting — repetitive in the way that snow is repetitive, which is to say beautiful if you're in the mood and suffocating if you're not. The white territory creates a sense of pilgrimage that the story needs: Setsuna is walking toward her own sacrifice, and the world looks like it's already mourning. The problem is that the game doesn't trust this atmosphere to carry the emotional weight. Instead, it delivers exposition through dialogue boxes that tell you how sad everything is rather than letting you feel it. "This is a world covered in sorrow" is not the same as showing you a world covered in sorrow.

The snow itself is worth discussing as a design choice. Every location is white. Every dungeon is cold. Every town is sparse. It creates a world that feels exhausted — a civilization running out of energy, running out of reasons to fight the monsters, running out of everything except tradition. The sacrifice ritual that Setsuna is walking toward isn't just a religious practice. It's the only thing this world has left. The bleakness is oppressive, and some players bounce off it within three hours. But if you stay — if you let the piano and the snow work on you — the atmosphere becomes the game's strongest argument. Not every JRPG needs lush forests and vibrant cities. Sometimes a world covered in white says more about its people than a hundred detailed environments could.

The Ending: The Only Answer That Could Have Mattered

And yet. The ending of I Am Setsuna arrives with a quiet inevitability that retroactively justifies the entire twenty-hour journey. Setsuna's sacrifice isn't a twist — it's been telegraphed since the title screen. What makes it land is that by the end, you've accepted it. The "wrong answer" at the beginning — swinging the sword, trying to kill Setsuna before her journey begins — was the only honest response to a game that asks you to escort someone to their death. Every hour spent walking through snow with this character was an hour spent learning that some endings can't be avoided, only accompanied. The game never lets you save her. It never pretends you could. And in a genre that defaults to "the hero saves everyone," that quiet refusal to offer a happy ending is, somehow, the most emotionally honest thing I Am Setsuna does.

Was It Worth the Journey?

I Am Setsuna is a flawed game with one perfect ending. The combat is adequate Chrono Trigger mimicry. The characters are archetypes who never quite become people. The snow and piano are atmospheric but monotonous over twenty hours. But the final hour — when the inevitability you've been fighting against all game just arrives, quiet and certain — is among the most affecting conclusions I've experienced in a JRPG. The wrong answer at the beginning wasn't wrong because it changed nothing. It was wrong because it tried to change something in a game about accepting what can't be changed. Play it in one sitting if you can. The snow hits different when you don't stop walking.

I Am Setsuna sold poorly. Tokyo RPG Factory went on to make Lost Sphear and Oninaki, neither of which found an audience. The studio was quietly dissolved. In retrospect, Setsuna was the only game they made that had a genuine emotional thesis — that some journeys end exactly how you know they will, and the walking still matters. Lost Sphear tried to be bigger and became forgettable. Oninaki tried to be different and became confused. Setsuna stayed small, stayed sad, stayed honest about what it was, and that honesty is why it's the one people still talk about seven years later.

Updated April 1, 2026.

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