Game Informer and IGN have each gone up with new previews of side-scrolling RPG Astria Ascending, which include new gameplay footage.
Here is an overview of the game, via publisher Dear Villagers:
About
An epic adventure with the charm and pedigree of a classic Japanese RPG, Astria Ascending tells an expansive story of fate, sacrifice, and new beginnings.
The game was developed in partnership with publisher Dear Villagers and boasts contributions from world-class JRPG developers, with a score by Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy XII, Vagrant Story), narrative by Kazushige Nojima (Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy VII Remake) and art from CyDesignation (Akihiko Yoshida and Hideo Minaba).
In a world where chaos looms, players take control of the Demigods—a motley crew of eight heroes charged with the fate of the world. Each character has their own story, explored across five cities, twenty-five dungeons and thirty hours of gameplay up to fifty for 100 percent of completion. Along with the finely tuned turn-based combat, players can try out a range of side quests and mini-games, including an original fantasy-themed token game.
Key Features
Epic Tales – Fight for the future while you reckon with the past; sacrifice everything, relinquish nothing. The story of Astria Ascending was developed in part by writer Kazushige Nojima, known for his work on Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Living Landscapes – Travel the world of Orcanon, a richly imagined and fully animated 2D landscape with five cities and a dynamic weather system.
Unforgettable Characters – Pick from eight customizable player characters spanning a range of fantastical races and skills, and assemble a diverse team of heroes.
Rewarding Combat – Work together to save the world, waging strategic turn-based battles using the innovative focus point system.
A Treat for the Ears – With music and SFX from composer Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy XII, Valkyria Chronicles), Astria Ascending is a heart-swelling joy to listen to.
Astria Ascending is due out for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store on September 30.
This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.
There’s a phenomena about robots you’ve probably heard of before. It’s called the uncanny valley. The idea is the closer a robot looks and acts like a human, the more its inaccuracies are scrutinized and criticized by real humans. The reasons could be myriad — it could be the way it looks or sounds or moves or something else entirely — but the important thing is that it’s not…right. Astria Ascending lives in its own uncanny valley. But it’s not one of being human, rather, it’s one of being a JRPG classic.
There’s another saying famous saying: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” Astria Ascending certainly looks like a great JRPG, its Vanillaware-like character design is striking, with a number of unique races from the beastly feline Arktans to the angular and serpent-esque Zeft. The art direction in general is often a sight to behold. The hub area especially has a real electricity about it, with many gorgeous structures.
It swims like a great JRPG as well. Opening the menu reveals a wave of systems and mechanics. Each of the eight party members has their own starting class, equipment type, skill tree and abilities. Combat sees you use four of your party members at any one time, though you can swap out members mid-battle for strategic advantages. There are a suite of buffs and debuffs that can be applied to your team or to enemies. There’s a summon system. There’s even a Bravely Default-style system that lets you spend resources for more powerful attacks in a single turn.
And hey, it even quacks like an RPG classic. The premise is undeniably cool: The world is protected by a faction of eight demigods, people from around the world who were drafted into service and given incredible power, but also given just a few short years to live. And the current group — your playable characters — are just three months away from a pretty permanent retirement as they work to protect the world fully knowing they won’t be around to see the fruits of their effort. The writing and voice acting (both in Japanese and English) are well done. And musically, composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, who has contributed to Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim does solid work here as well.
But unfortunately, looking, swimming and quacking like a great JRPG is not enough to make you one. And it’s in the details where Astria Ascending falls.
Ulan, seen here waving her arms like some kind of wacky inflatable tube man.
The game looks beautiful…in stills. Characters’ idle animations are so fast and so wild they become distracting. Walking and running animations are awkward too. There’s a real “Live 2D” look to everything going on here that just is devoid of personality. Battles don’t fare much better as animations and effects for spells and attacks are weak and flat. It’s such a bummer seeing cool characters move in such lifeless ways.
Astria Ascending does have a wide array or systems though…too big of an array, in fact. You start the game with your full party of eight, which means you have eight classes, each with their own massive skill tree to attend to. And before you can unlock much of anything on one of these trees, you’re given additional access to a choice of three upgraded job classes per character that open up a second full skill tree. And later you’re given sub jobs and support jobs, which create even more headaches. I love tinkering with character builds, but this is just too much. Oh, and those upgraded job choices are permanent, so you better be happy with your picks.
This skill tree is fine, but when every one of the eight characters has two of these each (and most of the things on it are flat stat buffs), it becomes both overwhelming and monotonous.
And all of this mechanics and systems just end up making the game’s many, many fights long and tedious, often with little reward. It got to the point where I turned the difficulty down to its lowest setting just to mercifully pick up the pace.
When you’re not fighting, you’re walking around incredibly simple and bland Metroidvania-like environments. The structure feels a lot like Vanillaware’s Muramasa: The Demon Blade, where dungeons are made up of 2D side-scrolling rooms that can branch off in multiple directions. But each of Muramasa’s screens are visually distinct and built for dynamic platforming and action combat. Astria Ascending’s rooms all look the same and you mostly just hop around to solve the most basic of puzzles.
Every dungeon ends up looking this spartan, with identical room connecting to identical room. It's easy to get lost.
And as for the quacking part, while the premise is cool, half the game is spent going back and forth among everyone’s hometowns, solving very similar problems before going back to the main hub to report in. It feels less like a grand adventure or unravelling a mystery and more like running errands with no payoff.
The music is also CONSTANT. There are no quiet moments. There is very little up or down. The tracks are fine, but they're implemented so poorly. They're just always there, sometimes drowning out the voice acting. And those voices, while nice performances, sound awfully similar (especially for the female English voices), and since the camera is almost always zoomed out, it can be quite difficult to know who’s talking.
The speech bubbles are also of little assistance when it comes to knowing who's speaking.
At this point, I suppose it’s clear that I didn’t like Astria Ascending, but I do find it to be an interesting case study for what makes a JRPG good or bad. Astria Ascending pretty strictly follows the formula of classic JRPG design, but while it hits the right notes and plays them in the right order, there’s just no soul to this music. Even if developer Artisan Studios addressed all of the issues I listed above, I’m still not sure the game would be good. Because it would still be missing a thousand little details that even I can’t so easily put my finger on.
Astria Ascending is not a bad game, not in a technical sense anyway. It’s just one that lacks heart and passion. It’s a photocopy, an amalgamation of good things from other games without the understanding of what those good things mean or how they should interact.
It’s uncanny. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
A game that harkens back to the traditional turn-based RPG's or yore. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, it inspects the best made wheels and runs with it. I will separate this into the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, (or meh).
Good:
Four-fold class system that in theory allows and extreme level of customization, (I'm still too early in the game to actually be able to use any of it).
Classic Turn-Based RPG
Ability to swap any number of characters at any time, and this includes KO characters.
One of, if not THE best grid-based leveling system.
The game explicitly tells you about the various, novel races during the introduction. Rather than having them be mentioned, with the player have no idea what they are talking about.
Bad:
Combat is not balanced. This is largely because the game includes the Focus ability. If you hit a target's weakness, you gain focus. This can either by used for summoning, and the skills of the summoned beings, or to magnify an attack. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this means the game's strategy is build focus and then max-out an attack with an element the enemy is vulnerable to. This is the same bullshit that Xenosaga 2 used, which absolutely crippled the game. Astria Ascending is no where near as bad, but it still fails to balance it.
If you actually use your skills, then you will quickly run out of MP. This means that you default into many battles where you only use your basic attacks. Although, there are abilities that regen MP, so maybe it's early-level boringness, where your characters can't really use any of their abilities. The next logical step is to give you extremely powerful abilities that don't work on bosses. As I said, it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, just copy it.
Field movement is akin to Valkyrie Profile, and is just terrible. Just as it was in Valkyrie Profile.
Meh:
Art style tries to copy Vanillaware without ripping them off. End up nowhere near as good as Vanillaware.
Story has an emotional hook, but quickly devolves into generic fare. The answer to why things are happening is usually Plot.
Job system becomes extremely complicated, and is irreversible. I suppose this adds replayability, while easily messing you up.
While you can swap characters at any time, it seems you can only revive characters in the main lineup. This means you have to swap them into the lineup, and hope another character's turn comes before the enemy.
The first boss introduces a number of elements before you can do anything about them.
I don’t know why this game has gotten so little attention, especially compared to others that’ve come out in recent years. While not breaking any molds or doing things uniquely, it’s a perfectly serviceable, functional turn-based RPG.
Chances are that I’ll never pick it up again, and I didn’t 100% all the journal entries busywork, but I spent 20 bucks for it and was satisfied, and I’m sure you can get it for cheaper and enjoy the pretty art and straightforward experience.
Gameplay
As mentioned above, there’s not much I can say about the gameplay: combat uses an action boost system kinda like Octopath Traveler, and it’s fine; the overworld platforming and exploration skills are there; the bootleg Tetra Master minigame is fun enough as a post-endgame distraction to extend your playtime if you so choose.
The major complaints I have are:
1) the difficulty/challenge balance is non-existant, there was no work done besides numbers changing depending on your choice, and it’s no wonder that the devs allow you to change difficulty at any point;
2) the bullet hell minigame that at times you have to do to progress is so token, it hurts, and is also affected by the crappy difficulty balance;
3) my BIGGEST gripe, which might also be the most petty, is how you have to choose where to assign each of the character’s three extra jobs, and not only are these locked to the slots chosen (main job, sub job, support job), and you can’t change it at all in a playthrough; but your choice of main job also removes your base job’s equipment options.
If this game was spectacular and quick, maybe it’d be understandable as a means to offer replayability. But I’m not gonna play it again, and I doubt many would. If you wanna limit things, then at least make it an endgame option to switch between jobs, or that you need to fill out a skill tree before you’re allowed to switch which job is assigned to each slot.
Performance
A small token acknowledgement that, at least on Switch, the game is a bit slow with its loading screens, in-between areas and getting in and out of combat. Nothing compared to fuckin’ Cris Tales, but still worth bringing up. Maybe it’s different on PC or other consoles, but I find it an important factor in turn-based games to be expedient and to not waste your time.
Also, the game is severely lacking in its options menu, and some areas can be WAY too dark to make anything out. A serious problem, when considering there’s still some platforming elements to deal with.
Story
Astria Ascending’s story is just there. It’s very basic, it’s not particularly engaging, and the characters don’t have enough to them that made me like them any more or less. Especially when you have 8 playable characters right out the gate, but you don’t have to use all of them, you get nothing to have you connect with the protagonists of this game.
That being said, SPOILERS: I find it kinda stupid/funny how the story is set in a totalitarian, dystopian world, where everyone must abide by the governing body’s mandates... and you’re playing as the enforcers of this system, without ever once questioning if their world and society is fucked up. A system where people are chosen to be given superpowers for three years, serve as enforcers, and then die, and if they refuse or attempt to flee, are hunted down. And that it all leads to the utter destruction of the whole thing. Nah, it’s the disinfranchised escapees not eating their brainwashing Harmelons that are the problem, not our authoritarian theocracy that’s giving rise to dangerous anarchists looking to burn it all down.
Zero self-awareness, and I can’t help but laugh. The complete opposite of a conventional JRPG story.
