Media in Review: Astlibra Revision
Boy, where do we even start with Astlibra? Similar to Eternights, Astlibra is largely the product of one guy and a handful of collaborators near the end, this time over the span of 15 years of on-and-off development. As with Eternights, this makes the final product quite impressive regardless of the actual quality of the game; anything that makes it to the finish line in those circumstances should be celebrated. Also, as with Eternights, that's about the point where we're going to stop being nice to the game.
On the most basic level, Astlibra is a side-scrolling action RPG, the closest point of comparison being an old school Ys game. It is also as difficult as such a comparison would merit, often to the game's detriment. There's nothing wrong with a hard game, but the way it's hard does the game no favors. No i-frames, constant projectile spam, enemies not reacting to your attacks until you hit an arbitrary "break" point, dying in a handful of hits... Essentially everything you can do to make the combat not fun. Bosses crank this up to 11 and are universally the worst part of the game, and I genuinely have no idea how the game is even playable without using a shield past a certain point. I dropped the difficulty in Chapter 5 and never looked back, and still got my ass kicked pretty regularly.
To the game's credit, the story it tells is genuinely quite good, and basically the only reason I didn't put it down. What starts as a pretty basic "my hometown was destroyed by demons and my best friend disappeared" plot quickly turns into something far more interesting when our hero stumbles into Astraea's Scales - a magical artifact that allows the bearer to travel through time and rewrite history through their actions. The game's story explores themes of fate, consequences, and despite some weird translations, mostly manages to hit the mark. It would be nice if it wasn't incredibly horny, but I suppose we can't have everything.
The only other thing to note is that both the music and the vast majority of the graphics are pre-fab stuff that look straight out of RPG Maker. The music, at the very least, is well chosen and broadly fits the Ys vibe the game is going for with plenty of sick guitar riffs and high tempo battle songs. Had I not been told that it was pre-made, I would have assumed it was original because it fits quite well. On the other hand, the graphics are really obviously not meant for how they're being used. Level design is "blocky" for lack of a better word, collision is...questionable sometimes, and telling when an enemy is actually attacking or what hit you can be difficult. There's an enemy in Chapter 5 it took me almost half an hour to figure out that it was hitting me with its tail because it was a largely black sprite on a dark background and I was taking damage seemingly randomly when I was near it, and even once I figured that out, I still had a lot of trouble avoiding it.
Is Astlibra Revision good? That's...a hard question to answer. On a moment to moment basis, I didn't hate it, and I did enjoy the story it was telling. But every time I got thrown into a boss fight that took me half an hour even with reduced difficulty, or had to redo an entire area because a choice I made an hour ago meant that one of my party members was going to die and there was nothing I could do to change it now, it just made me think of a world where this game was largely the same but didn't want to kick me in the dick over and over for seemingly no good reason, and honestly? I'd play the hell out of that. For $20, it's worth giving it a shot (there's a demo on Steam), but maybe stay away if hard or janky games aren't your thing.