At times I Am Setsuna is truly beautiful.

I Am Setsuna wears its influences on its sleeve—also on its pants, shirt, shoes, and company branded baseball cap. The game pulls heavily from SquareSoft’s SNES classic RPG Chrono Trigger to the extent that the inspiration is mentioned by name on the front page of the game’s website.

That means you know going in that you’re in for a top-down, turn-based JRPG where time ticks down actively during battles, and you can see your foes on-screen before facing them. There are no surprise encounters here—save the ones scripted into the story.

The story follows the titular Setsuna through the perspective of Endir, your masked, silent cipher of a protagonist. Setsuna has been selected as a sacrifice—like her aunt, mother, and many other women before them—on the theory that sacrificing one girl every few decades will cause the monsters that inhabit the world to leave them in peace.

By the time Endir enters the picture (on his own quest to kill Setsuna for unrelated reasons), monster activity is on the rise, and these beasts seem to be more organized than ever. Cue a fateful meeting between our hero and heroine where he decides against cold-blooded murder, and suddenly a journey ensues that pulls a growing cast of party members in its wake.