![]() While these mechanics exist in Astria, it feels less punishing when I bring the “wrong” characters into a battle. ![]() Normally in a JRPG, the player has to consider their team composition very carefully as elemental weaknesses play a large part in battle outcomes. Astria Ascending takes after JRPGs such as Octopath Traveller and Bravely Default in that you can store turns to use later. Maybe the game has something poignant to say about racism in the second half, but that doesn’t diminish how much I dreaded advancing to the next cutscene.įor how embittered the characters are towards one another, the party-based combat feels very, very good. More importantly, the constant sniping and the fantasy racism was uncomfortable to experience in practice. Astria is so fantastical about the concept of coexistence that it loses me on the relevance of its themes. Stories are powerful when they rhyme with real life. Nobody has to take medication in order to stop being prejudiced against people who are different from them. In practical terms, coexistence between different groups does require sacrifice, but it’s never a life-or-death consideration. It’s an interesting philosophical question, but it didn’t stick with me. The central plot also asks the player whether or not co-existence between different groups of people is worth it if it comes at a high personal cost. They also use emotion-regulating fruits called the harmelon, which is supposed to maintain coexistence between the races. In Astria’s setting, world peace was achieved because each nation sent one of their people to become a doomed demi-god. I’m hoping that they sort out their shit in the second half, but the adventure feels pretty excruciating in the meantime. Does solidarity matter when their star-crossed fates are unavoidable? From what I’ve seen of the first half, the demi-gods don’t think so. Whenever I started a cutscene, I braced myself for the heroes to start verbally attacking each other. Instead of camaraderie, the overall mood of the party is filled with impatience, jealousy, and prejudice. The party members are constantly at odds. Most JRPG heroes can have their disagreements, but they ultimately have to remain civil to each other if they want to survive a perilous journey. If you asked me to describe Astria’s art in one word, I would tell you that the game is a “storybook. And, somehow, I find a new fascinating detail in the background every single time. Sometimes I would return to old locations to go sightseeing. All the backgrounds in its two-dimensional environments are lovingly hand-painted. Astria has some of the most distinct and eye-catching character designs I’ve seen in a western roleplaying game. The Final Fantasy influences carry over to the fantastical art style. Astria promises a 50-hour campaign, eight robust characters, and a more mature narrative than other games in its genre. So even though the game isn’t from Japan, it feels like a JRPG in terms of aesthetics. The game also includes Japanese and English voice-overs. It also puts an interesting twist on the “plucky-adventurers-save-the-world” story formula, though I’m not entirely convinced that the execution lands.Īstria was made by French-Canadian developer Artisan Studios, but some of the developers behind the game are veterans from the Final Fantasy series, NieR:Automata, and Bravely Default. I enjoyed the combat in both of those titles, but the colourful art style of Astria Ascending felt like an upgrade from the somber colour palette of those games. Astria Ascending is a turn-based JRPG with gameplay that pays homage to Bravely Default and Octopath Traveller.
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