And speaking of the map, this is sadly an area where Astria Ascending struggles quite a bit. 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.Ĭertain 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. 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. Outside of combat, you’ll be doing quite a bit of exploring. Thankfully, as it’s turn-based, you can take your time. There’s no way to sort or categorize, nor any way to create shortcuts to certain frequently-used skills. 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. This quickly changes, however, as you can probably imagine with 4 jobs available to each. Secondly, when you first start the game, you only really have access to a handful of abilities per character, making it quite manageable. 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. A few key things are worth pointing out, however.įirstly, 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. 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. 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 locked in, however, so once you’ve picked, there’s no going back. 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. 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. 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. Well, actually several job trees, as Astria Ascending goes a bit deeper than most on the job (or player class) front. 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. 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. 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. 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. Lots to see, lots to doĪstria Ascending is a pretty big game. 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. The trade-off? They are only given three years to live, after which their power is passed on to someone else. These are ordinary mortals (of different races) who have answered the call in exchange for god-like powers. These are not your typical Demi-gods, however. 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. 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.
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