Astlibra Revision (2022)

I received this game as a gift, and started playing it without doing any research on it. I was extremely surprised by how good it is. Allow me to share some spoiler-free information about it.

Astlibra is a 2D action-JRPG, with a rich storyline, fun gameplay and great soundtrack. The game opens up with a young boy and girl running away from their village which has been attacked by demons. Their escape is cut short by a towering demon, who launches an attack on the boy. The screen goes black, and the boy wakes up on a bed in an abandoned hut, where he meets a talking crow who doesn't know anything about themselves. This scene alone left me with a lot of questions - how did the boy end up in this hut, with miles and miles of nothingness around? Who built it and why? What is up with the crow? What happened to the girl? Why did demons attack the village in the first place? All of these get answered throughout the game. I will not share any additional information about the story itself. Playing through, it became clear to me that the biggest inspirations for this game's lore and story were Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross and some Final Fantasy games, among others. If you enjoy those games, you will enjoy Astlibra, as well.

The gameplay of Astlibra seems simple and clunky at first, but this is far from the truth. As you play, you unlock new spells, passive abilities and combat techniques that you need to utilize. It is very satisfying to hit things or cast spells. Of course, it wouldn't be an RPG without a rich upgrade system. Leveling up, upgrading stats through a huge talent tree and gathering gold and materials for new equipment are essential mechanics for upgrading your character. There is also an essential upgrade method that involves a pair of scales and balancing stuff on those scales, which was fun and original. I don't think I've seen something similar in other games.

The soundtrack is phenomenal, as well. The music feels like a mash-up of Nier and Ys music. Dynamic, exciting, atmospheric and a lot of chorus. What also really amazed me is the representation of many different genres of music. While the entire soundtrack is distinctly video game music, different scores allude to different genres. It's hard to describe, but if you were to take a listen to the soundtrack, I'm sure you'd understand what I mean.

With all the positives I've described above, let me list a few negatives:

• SFX: The sound effects are generally good, but there are two specific sound effects that are big exceptions to that rule. Namely, the sound cue that plays before an enemy launches a projectile, and the sound effect of the protagonist consuming a food item are... weird, to say at least.
• Difficulty: The game becomes gradually more difficulty, but at the end of the game, it really escalates fast. Don't get me wrong, it's not unfair. But, it also does require you to either lower your difficulty setting or do additional grinding.

And that's pretty much it. Of course, there are a few more things I found bad, but they're minor enough to not be worth mentioning. I highly recommend you give this game a try.

TL;DR: Phenomenal story reminiscent of classic JRPG games, great soundtrack, great (and more importantly, fun) gameplay. Enjoy.

The game starts out a bit rough, but man does it go places. I wish I were in the mood to write a full review, because there's a lot worth writing about here. Maddmike and NightTray cover most of what I'd have to say in their reviews, though, so I'll just mention a few things for now.

I think the basic combat mechanics are a bit clunky. There's a bit of a stiffness to attacking, dodging, and shielding that feels slightly off. Some enemies, particularly early on, have annoying tells for their attacks. I frankly didn't understand why people liked the combat at first. Then more systems opened. More and more new skills and spells became available. My opinion of the combat steadily rose until I was having an absolute blast by the midgame. There's nothing quite like it and I really love the emphasis on using i-frames from spells to dodge attacks -- it allows for a grant offensive pace. The underlying clunkiness never really goes away, but it becomes such a small part of the combat that it almost entirely stopped bothering me.

One other gameplay note: I started on hard and the enemies felt annoyingly spongy making the game rather grindy, so I bumped it down to normal. Normal was honestly a bit too easy, though. I only had to bother learning boss patterns when I challenged some content much earlier than intended. That didn't really impede my fun, though!

The story is absolutely over the top anime nonsense and I love it. The best comparison I can think of for the amount of escalation in the plot is Gurren Lagann. It just keeps getting bigger and crazier, but manages to stay meaningful and coherent. I also found the characters grew on me a ton over the course of the game despite some tropiness.

Definitely one of the best games I've played this year, and it's already been a great gaming year for me!

I'm about 6 hours in so far and I'm legitimately surprised by how positive the reception is on Steam and from the few critics that have reviewed it. I'm finding the action to be clunky and uninspiring. There's not much variety in regular attacks-- there's only a single attack button plus rising and falling attacks and most weapons are essentially the same. Of the spells I have so far, one is just much much better than the rest, though they are admittedly more satisfying to use than the melee combat. You charge your spells through melee, though, so that's unavoidable. Many enemies lack proper tells and are annoying to fight, though pose little actual danger. This can really compound with screens getting overly busy with particle effects, making the tells that do exist difficult to parse. It's grindy as hell, though, I knew that going in. What I hadn't realized was how tanky the enemies are, which makes everything feel fairly tedious. On top of all this, the art is straight up bad in several spots (e.g., noticeable tiles in terrain) and the story has done very little to capture my interest so far.

This isn't to say I hate the game-- obviously I'm just listing complaints here. It's sitting at 5/10 in my mind right now. That's much lower than I expected given I like the genre and it's been so well received otherwise. Since I'm not having an outright bad time, I'll play for a bit longer and see if anything clicks for me.

Calling Astlibra Revision an interesting game would be a huge understatement. I completed this game a bit ago and have been sitting on it wondering how I would even be able to tackle talking about this game. It is a passion project by a single person who strove to create an action rpg wholly to their tastes that has been in development for well over a decade. It is a game of such extraordinary magnitude and scope that I really have no idea where to even begin to talk about, so the most I can do is just talk about some bits that particularly stood out for me, and let people decide for themselves whether to take the dive with this game.

The first thing I want to explicitly point out is that this game has been in development for around 14 years and you can definitely feel its age. It is littered with a multitude of systems and mechanics that will be quite unfriendly towards anyone unfamiliar with this genre of game, not to mention that game can feel clunky to control at times considering just how many different moves are tied to a mix of charging buttons followed by a directional input. Oftentimes I found it difficult to get out a specific move just cause it’s so easy to select the inputs for another one(which of course leads to frustrating deaths). It’s a bit rough around the edges and it’ll feel janky for a while, but once it starts clicking in, it REALLY clicks in. I would describe the combat as a very fast paced classic maplestory-like combat as far as the feel goes. You’ll have a plethora of weapons and armors each with their own mastery skill to unlock which you can then equip, a HUGE stat tree that also serves as a point to unlock magic skills, a level up system with traditional point allocation to specific attributes, and a crafting system that serves to make an assortment of tools, healing items, and weapons. There’s just so much to unpack and it can be very daunting to even consider what you should be doing in regards to “builds” or weapon type. Thankfully I want to say that there’s no wrong way to build. You can respec at any given time so you can really just do whatever you want for any situation. With all that said about its systems, this game can feel like a grind and a slog depending on your difficulty choice(oh yeah that game has multiple difficulties). I would genuinely recommend not going for anything above Normal because enemies and bosses, even below normal, can be very spongy and can be a huge turn off if you’re not ready for it or ready to grind for rare recipes for powerful weapons. The game can also be quite brutal. Enemy placement can at times feel like it's done specifically to givw you a bad time. Bosses in general will also be quite brutal if you don't fully take advantage of every mechanic the game provides you with. I myself had to turn down the difficulty from Hard because it just was too time consuming and I really wanted to continue and enjoy the story.

The story of this game is quite something. What starts off as an innocuous classic rpg style story set in a medieval fantasy setting quickly evolves into quite the ridiculous epic. This game is LONG, and you will definitely feel it with each drastic development in the story taking you to the most unexpected places. I don’t want to say much more as shockingly enough, while the combat really clicked with me in a sort of weird and janky way, it’s the story that I really ended up enjoying the most. I honestly don’t know how to describe it other than it feels like I’m reading a Japanese light novel and some might even see that as a detriment if you know what I’m talking about. But it really feels like a story written by a single person with beats and turns completely catered to them specifically and what they wanted to see from an epic rpg story. It’s the kind of story where just when you think it’s over, it isn’t. And then it happens again. It goes so many places that, honestly, some might dislike the abrupt directions the story goes for but I myself, however, really enjoyed the journey.

I want to speak a little bit about the music as this is something that I noticed quickly. Much of the music is derived from royalty free sources, primarily from Dova-Syndrome. Which makes sense considering this a single person working on the game and it’s quite common for Japanese indie developers, particularly of the rpgmaker genre, to use Dova-Syndrome music and similar sources. If you have experience with this, you will definitely recognize some of the tracks used. Some are even fairly obscure Vocaloid songs. However, while mainly not original, the soundtrack choices still do a fantastic job encapsulating each moment. From its battle/boss tracks, to the hub town’s track which you will certainly grow fond of. This is unique to me, but there were moments where I instantly recognized the track being used that had me going wide eyed or a goofy grin on my face considering the situations they’re used in. This is also a bit of an off topic note, but while trying to search for a very particular track I really liked(and failing), I found out that some of these tracks date as far back as 2004. It’s actually quite likely that given how old some of these tracks might be, some have probably been lost to time and are probably resurfacing for the first time again here. At least I’m convinced that’s the case for the track I simply cannot find a trace of on the internet.

I really enjoyed my time with this game. While the combat is frustrating and brutal at times, this is definitely a unique game and one that now has a special place in my heart. It will not be for everyone, but if it happens to vibe with you, I’m sure it will REALLY vibe with you. A few things I want to mention is that for how well received the game is on steam, I actually had quite a bit of trouble finding much information on the actual game itself outside of the Japanese wiki, which isn’t exactly optimal for most people to navigate. Funnily enough, the places I found the most useful information(outside Steam discussion), were in the comments section of youtube videos of the very few playthroughs of this game there. Also, I don’t know if I stressed this enough, this game is LONG. I clocked in at about 50 hours myself so this should also be a point of consideration when deciding to give the game a go.

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention that this game's translation can be iffy at times. You will run into multiple grammar and syntax issues that can take you out of it, though they're generally not too intrusive. However, there is a Switch version releasing next year that will release with new DLC that adds another mini campaign as well as updates and polishing to the translation. I would probably recommend to wait for that to come out.

Steam Curator

This retro throwback has the trappings of a JRPG but plays more like a straight action RPG. Think single player Maplestory and you'll be pretty close to the mark.

It's also excellent, with tightly refined combat that feels excellent to play (mmpf that hit-stop), tons of progression systems, and a low stakes 'no wrong answers' approach to how you spec your character.

Watching numbers go up has never been more fun.