Furthermore, I consistently found the party’s physical damage to be significantly weaker than their magic, even when buffed with FP.

This means they’re hardly ever useful, particularly Arpajo the thief, whose main ability is to steal items I never need. Each of them has a unique skillset, and some of them don’t have elemental abilities at all, which means they have no way to accrue FP. However, I found certain aspects of combat to be imperfectly balanced, and part of this comes back to having a whopping eight party members from the outset. When this world is tough to understand, and every scene is a chore to get through, the plight of the demi-gods is a hard sell. There’s a potentially interesting tale here about how being demi-gods affects our heroes’ relationships with their loved ones, and whether enforced harmony benefits the world, but all the game’s issues are maddeningly distracting, which discouraged me from caring. There’s several moments when characters speak calmly when they’re supposed to be emotional, and multiple names and terms are pronounced differently between characters. It’s almost like the voice actors were given their lines without any direction. Perhaps it was to highlight the game’s voice acting, which isn’t terrible, but mediocre considering how much of it you have to sit through. This would be a minor gripe if there aren’t so many cutscenes, mostly of characters talking whilst standing perfectly still.ĭuring casual dialogue these exact same boxes can be skipped with a button like in other RPGs, so I don’t know why the devs made the choice to not do so during cutscenes, because it would’ve greatly helped Astria Ascending’s poor pacing. In every voiced cutscene (and some unvoiced), you have to wait for each dialogue box to appear and disappear, one by one, often with several seconds between them. Too many cooks, and all.Īs a result, Astria Ascending’s story is extremely slow-paced, made even slower by the single worst part of the game: you can’t skip dialogue boxes. During the 16 hours of the game I played, the eight demi-gods were together almost all the time, which means most cutscenes had a minimum of eight characters in it. A large part of this overwhelm stems from being introduced to eight main characters at the very start of the game. It took me a long time to figure out that Eko (a character) is a Peyska (a race) from Vetira (a city) because the game doesn’t do enough to explain the difference between those three fantasy proper nouns, nor the dozens of other names and terms that get thrown around. It’s a lot to take in at once, and the game rarely stops to let you catch up. Our demi-gods have three months left to live, and find the world besieged by monsters known as Noises, and must travel the world to find out what the heck is going on.Īstria Ascending throws all this information at you, and more, in its first few minutes. All the fantasy races of Orcanon live in harmony in a big city called Harmony, and maintain said harmony by eating a magical fruit called Harmelon, delivered to them by a race of subservient imps known as Migmies (a name that never stopped making me uncomfortable).

They are given powerful abilities, but die after three years on the job. Our heroes are a group of demi-gods: normal people conscripted by gods to protect the people. Astria Ascending takes place in the high fantasy world of Orcanon.

Astria ascending game