The only way around this is to buy enough immunity accessories to render those attacks impotent, a steep cost that restricts creative strategizing. The exception to this is the boss battles, but they’re problematic for a much more frustrating reason.Īlmost every boss uses attacks that afflict party-wide status effects, often ones that rest control from the player and turn the battles into a slasher film where the main characters all get picked off one by one. Battles often feel messy, devolving into rampant damage fests in an effort to eliminate enemies before they can take advantage of your team’s weakness. Where the gameplay falters, though, is in the battles themselves. Defeating a regular enemy only ever earns one point, so Astria Ascending is a game that strongly encourages grinding. That said, unlocking new abilities requires a staggering amount of skill points that are never very easy to earn. The progression trees are vast, offering a wide variety of abilities and stat increases that affect combat in fun ways. This not only changes the character’s appearance in battle but also provides entirely new strategies for taking down enemies. What’s more, every character can specialize to further expand their list of abilities and boost their stats in interesting ways. It’s a necessary tool that encourages strategizing both party layout and character builds.Įach character in Astria Ascending has a different class, ranging from the defender-type Captain to the more mystical Summoner. It’s best compared to games like Bravely Default 2 or Octopath Traveler in that characters can store something called Focus Points to increase battle capability. GameplayĪstria Ascending offers a fun, if not entirely original, spin on turn-based combat. There’s a larger conspiracy to unravel, but the lazy pacing, repetitive structure, and clunky dialogue do little to incentivize seeing it through. Ultimately the story doesn’t feel like it goes anywhere, and the time spent to get to any narrative payoff isn’t enjoyably spent. It doesn’t help that most of the demi-gods’ internal chatter reinforce the fact that these characters have really spent no time getting to know one another in almost three years of cohabitation. Characters will speak for an interminably long time before getting to the point, and when they do it’s usually a “surprise” twist that I’d seen coming several hours earlier. It’s an interesting way of pacing the story, but it grew stale after the third almost identical encounter.īut the part that makes it hardest to work through is the quality of the dialogue: it’s bad. Instead, the game falls into a rhythm that gets repetitive very quickly: monsters known as Noise are attacking a town, the demi-gods investigate, and fight some bad guys who have renounced Harmony. The first third of the game seems to be an introduction to the world, but it never really digs into the culture of each race or even spends much time dealing with the personal issues the demi-gods are facing. Instead, they act as though they’ve just met, often making ignorant comments about each other’s cultures or backgrounds.Įach of the demi-gods comes from a different race that lives on Orcanon, and each act focuses on the race of a particular demi-god. If these characters have all known one another and lived together for over two years it would be expected that they’d be close or at least know each other well. It's a challenging place to begin, and the game doesn’t do much to justify starting in such an odd place in the timeline. The game picks up with the current slate of demi-gods, led by a woman named Ulan, with only three months left until they die. The demi-gods are chosen by a goddess and perish after three years of service. StoryĪstria Ascending takes place in the world of Orcanon and follows a group of beings known as the demi-gods as they seek to maintain a balance called Harmony. It struggles to elicit any sense of excitement with its meandering, hard-to-follow story and cheesy writing, and never quite melds its turn-based combat with its 2D exploration in a way that feels satisfying. Unfortunately, Astria Ascending doesn’t reach these expectations in almost any capacity. It’s a remarkable collaboration that would raise the expectations of a JRPG fan. PS5 review code provided by Artisan Studios.Īstria Ascending has a lot going for it on paper: it’s developed by Artisan Studios, a Canada-based developer with a penchant for beautiful, hand-drawn artwork, and written by Kazushige Nojima, the man behind the plot of Final Fantasy VII.
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