The first thing to mention though is slightly negative, in that there is no bar to display the order of proceedings during battle. The combat system is a turn-based affair, but there are one or two unique elements that set it apart. The systems are truly one of a kind and are both simple to understand but gloriously complex at the same time! You have to carefully consider everything you do every stage of upgrading, choice of weapons, accessories or clothing, and each turn of the player during combat is crucial, but it all makes perfect sense. Where this game excels, and where it matters most for a JRPG, is in the RPG elements and combat. That’s not to say the colour palette wasn’t interesting, just that the backgrounds, especially in the dungeons, were particularly boring and plain to look at, unlike the characters themselves. It really did feel that they took the minimum amount of time and effort for each background. The characters have superb detail, showing emotion and interesting features (if you look really closely), but unlike a Vanillaware game, the backgrounds in Astria Ascending were drab, uninspiring and for the most part, pretty featureless, too. The characters of Astria Ascending have been hand drawn in much the same style as a Vanillaware game, like Dragon Crown or Muramasa Rebirth. On the one hand, you can really appreciate the detail and art style of the game, on the other you wonder why it wasn’t used everywhere. The background music and environmental audio were at times a little sparse, however, there was clearly a lot of effort put into the music and other effects when they were there. For example, a fire spell landing on an enemy (or indeed your team) positively cracked with realistic sounding fire energy, adding to the experience. Having played many JRPGs and other sword-based action games, the “shing” and resulting thwack of the weapons and the effects of spells being cast were joyous to listen to each and every time. However, aside from the English voice actors, the rest of the audio was superb. It truly felt like eight random people were just reading the lines rather than delivering them with passion, effort or excitement, and all recorded with varying levels of audio quality (the phrase, “Dialing it in”, springs to mind.) The Japanese cast, however, flipped that, and even though I only understand a few words of Japanese, I felt their voice over skills were much more realistic and preferable. The English voice actors all sounded as if they were bored, conveying little to no emotion. The developers themselves recommend playing the game with the native Japanese voice actors and English subtitles, and no wonder. Without any visual indication of who is speaking, any gamer who has impaired hearing will struggle massively to discern (if at all) who is speaking. You can try to discern which of the 8 are talking by their voice, but the English voice actors are, frankly, awful. The story is told via bubbles of text from conversations, however, unlike most games, these speech bubbles don’t indicate which characters are speaking, and it’s hard to see which characters mouth is moving. However once the game settles down, and the new places, enemy types and races become familiar, it’s much more engrossing. You need to be taking it all in from the get-go. The story, which could be argued as being the main draw of the game, drops the player right in it without so much as a decent introduction. All told the main story will take around 25 to 30 hours to complete, but up to 70 for the completionists. During this time, the demi-gods will go through many topics of mature content, as well as many side missions with the inhabitants and people they meet along the way. This will be their last mission, which will encompass an emotional, mature, yet thrilling journey to over 25 dungeons and five cities. You play as a team of 8 demi-gods, who have only three months to live, but they also have the fate of the world in their hands to sort out. Artisan Studio is a small team that over the last three years has focused on Astria Ascending, and the results, for such a small team in a relatively short period of time, are outstanding. It’s really quite difficult to know where to start with this superb JRPG, so I’ll start with the studio that made it.
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