![]() ![]() ![]() 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. But nothing critical that can't be overcome, and I expect the devs will fix this stuff soon enough.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. I don't know why though, and I expect in PC this won't be a trouble. Also for some reason the start screen freezes and restarting the game didn't work, so I had to re-start the whole console to get it working again. The game also has its share of bugs, it crashed on me a couple of times and some achievements didn't unlock, especially the one you get from completing the story. The game features an arena and a hunt, which are just high-level battles with optional bosses-like creatures, I enjoyed doing the arena, but the hunt was messy, the creatures wouldn't spawn most of the times for some reason (even when they showed at the dungeon map). I got exhausted from those, never finished one temple and didn't even bother with a second one. It features a dungeon map, but it's very messy, hard to use and unnecessarily complicated, imo. These locations are like dungeons but are indeed mazes, I got lost a lot of the times (which could be a me problem), it's not obvious what you're supposed to do, and sometimes you need ring powers/upgrades to move along, which I didn't know so I just abandoned many of them. The game also features platforming, which is a cool concept, but the navigation is awful, especially in the temples (there are 12 of them). ![]() I also enjoyed the art, the backgrounds are cool and the music was very enjoyable. The story itself is not mind-blowing, it's your run-of-the-mill hero story, but it's not bad either, I actually liked it. But alas, they didn't expand a lot on the lore other than what was required to understand the story. The world building I thought it was pretty cool, lots of interesting races, I loved the concept of the bird-like awiwis or the fish-like peyskas. Which I don't enjoy because it artificially extends the time required to complete the game, imo. The combat has some difficulty spikes at times though, which I didn't really like, but you can just grind more to increase your power. You have your standard fire-water-lighning-air-light-dark magic system, you have summons, you have buffs and debuffs, pretty standard and I don't remember anything particularly innovative. 60% Xbox Series X/SI liked the combat system and the ability tree, you have a base and main tree, but you can acquire two other like support trees so you can build your character in lots of ways.
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