#acff: devblog

[astralchainfunfacts]

Fun fact: On January 22, 2025, a throwaway account posted to the r/PlatinumGamesInc subreddit detailing supposed new information about Astral Chain 2's development troubles.

The post provides a lot of information about the state of the game and its company, detailing stuff about why Kamiya and others left, the dire financial state of PG, and how Nintendo essentially rebooted the game's development after significant delays.

While we won't know for a while whether this post is actually true, I find a lot of the information about the in-progress game specifically to make sense with what I know about the first game. Here's some I found interesting:

One of the early levels (not the first but among the first) was set to take place on an aircraft carrier off the coast of the city.

This lines up exactly with what we know about the Ark! In every picture and concept art of the Ark we have seen, there has been this tiny island off to the right that is never explained nor shown in detail.

In the artbook, this island is even labelled as "演習ャード" (exercise yard, i.e. for military). So, this is exactly what I was hoping to see in the sequel!

Among the new Legions, there was to be an angel with blade-like wings and a tiger/sphinx-like creature.

This also makes sense to me. The game was originally going to have you capture chimeras to use as weapons, and plenty of concept art shows Legions of chimeras that never got one in the final release, so a Wing Legion would make sense. Tiger/Sphinx would probably fall under the Beast category, but it would be much better geared towards elemental abilities (think File 11 Lost in the Fog).

Players would have been able to temporarily fuse their Legions with elemental powers (fire, water, earth, air). A small selection of the Legions from the first game was planned to make a return.

This reminds me of the scrapped precursor to Ability Codes, which heavily focused on elemental powers. Though I don't know much more about this system, it logically makes sense they'd finally get to implement it in the second game.

While I love to get my hopes up about this stuff, this all remains speculation on my part. Maybe we'll hear something at the Nintendo Direct tomorrow! (...I'm not getting my hopes up.)

[astralchainfunfacts]

Fun fact: An unused tutorial screenshot left in the game's files shows a Harmony Square super early on in development, featuring vastly different building placements, old Legion icons, and a NieR-esque UI. The red case's name translates to "Street Artist".

This screenshot is likely a little further on in development than the one seen in the devblog "Lend Us Your Ears", whose UI is much more akin to NieR's (especially in the bottom right):

[astralchainfunfacts]

Fun fact: Zone numbers aren't assigned in sequential order. As the dev blog says:

The first digit tells you which district it’s a part of, and the second digit is the zone’s number within that district. For example, Zone 36 is the sixth zone established in District Three.

The art book map above (dev scribbles aren't shown in the blog!) gives these zones general vibes:

0X - スラム (伍番街等) - Slums (Sector V, etc.)

1X - 庁舎 (Government) - interestingly, it does say ひみつの港... (secret port...) under Zone 10...)

2X - この辺はインフラがあつまってる (Lots of infrastructure)

3X - No general vibes but 36 is labelled as 旧庁舎街 (Old government district?), which I found interesting

4X - 上流階級の住むエリア (Upper-class living area)

The line shown in the image is 300-350 km, but the dev blog says the island is 200-250 km^2.

And yes, I have counted the confirmed zones:

09 (Sector V / "Quarantine Valley"), 10 (Police HQ / "government zone"), 30 (Maison Forest), 32 (Ark Mall), 33 (Harmony Square), 36 (Central City / Rayleigh Plaza), XX (Aegis Research Institute) - places you go to in-game

07 (Union City), 21 (Energy Processing Center), 31 (Artificial Nature Park / National Park), 35 (Central City) - mentioned by name in a police report, in a voice line, or on a sign

08, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34 - mentioned in-game, but no name given

03, 12 - one of Lappy's Ultra Quiz answers, which may not be real

[astralchainfunfacts]

Fun fact: Internally, the game has this unused render of the Ark's map without fog, and with the ARI much closer to shore.

For reference, this is the (extremely low-res!) Ark's map in the Archives on your PC:

And here's the much higher resolution version they put on the devblog "A Scenic View of the Ark":

Plus, here's the zone labelling of the map on that same devblog:

Did you know? We only see about a fourth of the Ark in game-- most of 1X, 2X, and all of 4X go missing.

[astralchainfunfacts]

Fun fact: The official Astral Chain dev blog mentions this kid located in the Aegis Research Institute (ARI).

The kid is actually located in File 05's ARI section, but not where you'd think. He only appears before you watch the cutscene where you see Akira and regain full movement privileges.

Simply walk past Akira's room and turn left. He's in the corner:

Unfortunately, scanning him with your IRIS does nothing...

Internally, he's part of EmSet 26, named "イベント後消す" - "Delete after the event". Even though he isn't scannable, his IRIS data is actually in the game:

Kiyoshi Layard (short name "ARI Patient"), ID UBF005316

Born 2068-01-05

Gender: M

Height: 129.2

Weight: 36.8

Blood Type: A

Size: 69.7/54.5/68.7

He might be significant for something-- but he probably isn't! As far as I know, he does absolutely nothing. Yes, we've tried the Platinum Code...

Maybe you can figure it out?

[astralchainfunfacts]

Fun fact: The US Astral Chain website (astralchain.nintendo.com) was taken down around April 6, 2021, for seemingly no reason. It now simply redirects to the Astral Chain storefront page on Nintendo eShop. You can see what it looks like on the Wayback Machine.

The Japanese website is still up as of the time of writing, but that's probably because it didn't get its own subdomain. :(