Developer: Artisan Studios
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Release Date: 30th September 2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
There’s been no shortage of JRPGs to play these last few months and yet none quite as striking as Astria Ascending. The latest title from Artisan Studios isn’t just rendered in stunning, hand-drawn 4K, but was also written by Kazushige Nojima (Final Fantasy VII) and scored by Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy Tactics). With these impressive facts out of the way, let’s go save the world (again)!
The end of Harmony
All good things must come to an end. It’s fitting, then, that the seemingly idyllic lives of all of Orcanon’s inhabitants is disturbed when an evil force threatens to end Harmony for the sake of Dissonance. Enter our heroes, the Demi-gods of 333rd Company, whose sole purpose it is to keep the world safe – and protect Harmony and all good that comes with it.
These are not your typical Demi-gods, however. These are ordinary mortals (of different races) who have answered the call in exchange for god-like powers. The trade-off? They are only given three years to live, after which their power is passed on to someone else.
It’s not a particularly strong story and it can be a bit confusing at times (since just about everything has its own, bespoke terminology), but it does serve to send you on a slightly different adventure than you may be used to – even if, at the end of the day, you’re yet again saving the world.
Lots to see, lots to do
Astria Ascending is a pretty big game. At about 20-30 hours just for the main story, plus a few dozen hours to finish off everything else, you’re getting quite a lot of game here. It’s packed both in terms of quests to complete, monsters to slay, abilities to unlock, weapons and armours to find and everything else you would expect in a proper JRPG. Well, almost everything. I’ll get onto that a bit later.
You’re doing quite a bit of fighting in this game, which is why I welcome the deep progression system when it comes to your heroes and their abilities. In addition to equipping everyone with the various gear you get from enemies, loot chests, vendors and quests, you’re also constantly levelling up and spending skill points in a pretty sizable job tree. Well, actually several job trees, as Astria Ascending goes a bit deeper than most on the job (or player class) front.
Not only do you have a Base job for each character, but you also have a Main job, a Sub job, and a Support job. Each of these has their own skill trees (though not all are as expansive as others), so you’ve got quite a few things to unlock. While each character only has a selection of three available jobs, you decide which one goes into the Main, Sub and Support categories – and thus which build you want each character to focus on. You’re locked in, however, so once you’ve picked, there’s no going back.
Slay a beast, then slay some more
When it’s time to slay some beasts and loot some, uh, loot, it’s a pretty standard turn-based affair on most fronts. You’re on one side of the screen, the enemies are on the other, and you hit each other with really pointy things (and some magic) until one of you dies. A few key things are worth pointing out, however.
Firstly, you can swap out your party members at any time during combat, so even if you start an encounter with a certain four, you’ve always got the other four Demi-gods only a few button-presses away. This is really handy if you want to take advantage of a certain enemy’s weakness that only a certain job has access to, or if a character has died (and you’re unable to revive), letting you swap in someone with, let’s say, more than zero health.
Secondly, when you first start the game, you only really have access to a handful of abilities per character, making it quite manageable. This quickly changes, however, as you can probably imagine with 4 jobs available to each. By the end of the game, some characters will have more than two dozen abilities, which can make it quite tedious to find the exact one that you are looking for. There’s no way to sort or categorize, nor any way to create shortcuts to certain frequently-used skills. Thankfully, as it’s turn-based, you can take your time.
A (kinda, sorta) vast world to explore
Outside of combat, you’ll be doing quite a bit of exploring. Part of it is simply moving the plot forward, but a large part of the required exploration is figuring out where to find certain items, how to complete certain quests – and sometimes, how the heck you get to certain locations in the first place. There are more than a dozen unique locations to explore and each one of these is essentially designed like a Metroidvania, with a vast network of interconnected rooms – and certain things you can’t quite overcome on your first visit.
Certain items you get along the way will make exploration easier, as will a number of job-specific character abilities, including being able to manipulate certain elements, walking on water, and showing unopened chests on the map. And speaking of the map, this is sadly an area where Astria Ascending struggles quite a bit.
When you open your map, you will be presented with squares for each room in an area. Each square can show things like chests (opened and unopened), boss locations, teleporter locations and certain quest monsters. The problem here is that every single icon is relative. If a chest is in the top left of the square, then the chest is somewhere top left-ish in the area. It doesn’t show where the player is though (only which room you are in), so it can be quite tricky to navigate based on this. It also only shows the icons, not any kind of terrain or platforms.
Additionally, rooms can be connected in two different ways. Either directly, where two rooms are attached to each other, or via a literal line between doors, from one room to another. The doors linking to other rooms don’t just link to the room next to it though, it can link to a room far, far away. It probably sounds like a mess and it is – and thus Astria Ascending (proudly) competes for the most useless in-game map since Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Control. I mean, just look at the below screenshot…
A grand RPG on a budget
Astria Ascending is a good JRPG. They’ve got a lot of things right. The depth of the progression is great, the combat gives you a lot of options, the art is stunning, there are countless things to do and explore. It is, however, lacking in a few key areas – and is missing a few things you would probably consider standard in a modern RPG.
First of all, most of the dialogue is fully voiced, which is pretty awesome, actually. Unfortunately, the quality of the voice acting is all over the place. A few characters are good, but many are less so. Also, weirdly, a few seemingly random quest encounters aren’t voiced at all, which only really stands out, because 95% of the game is voiced otherwise.
It’s also normal for a turn-based RPG these days to show you the turn order. As in, the order in which yourself and your enemies will act. This is somewhat alleviated by the fact that it’s either your team or the enemy team, as opposed to individual characters or enemies acting one by one, but it does take away the rewarding sense you get when you use Haste on yourself or Slow on the enemy when you can’t see any immediate results – thus making it a strange omission.
Finally, a lot of the areas you will be exploring (inside each unique location) are very, very similar. Not only does it make it less interesting to explore in a lot of ways, but it plays into the things that make exploration and navigation so difficult. Because so many “rooms” look the same, it’s difficult to remember where you have been. Obviously, with everything being hand-drawn, making each area completely unique is a tall order – but I would personally rather have a smaller, more interesting world than a huge, repetitive one.
Conclusion
So, when all is said and done, is Astria Ascending worth playing? I definitely think so. While not as strong in a few key ways as its AAA competitors like Scarlet Nexus or Tales of Arise, it’s also not priced like a AAA game either. I’ll let you decide if the price is right either way, but as long as you keep its indie roots in mind, I think you’ll have a great time in Arcanon. Just be careful that you get lost not in its maps, but its hand-drawn beauty.
-K.A. Pedersen