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Astral Chain [NSW]

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    #16
    Nope, had enough of this.

    Got through the entire game up to the end of I think File 10 without ever dying and finding it overall not terribly challenging (except the parts of it which are poorly made, like the shoddy platforming) and then just hit a brick wall of difficulty. I've kept up with levelling up my stuff and my Legion, but no dice.

    I'm toying with just watching the very last bit on YouTube. I tried lowering the game to the easy difficulty but it puts you back to the start of the file, and puts an obnoxious onscreen label on the UI (it's huge) to make it very clear at all times you're in the easy difficulty. Couldn't just let people have fun, I guess.

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      #17
      Tried the easier difficulty but in the end I've just gone to YouTube to watch the end of the plot. I just couldn't be arsed with another one of those investigation sections.

      It's a game of excellent and mediocre. Visually, it is practically peerless, especially on the Switch. It's 30fps, fine, but it does things that are just an absolute joy to behold. I mean this on every level, too - so technically, incredible. Art-style, wonderful (where it's allowed to shine, see below). Also things like the UI and messaging, how it communicates enough despite all the crazy things happening onscreen, seriously masterful; it's not something so well-understood but it takes a lot of work/experience to get that right.

      However, the visual polish is in part because the game is quite formulaic, with a lot of re-use. You visit each area multiple times, and a fairly large amount of the game takes place in the Astral Plane, which is made up of the same assets reconfigured into different shapes. They look wonderful but after your fifth time going there, you start to hope it's at least going to be a different colour or something... And that's made worse by how it has the same music every time, with the same combat music over and over again.

      Similarly, the enemies are all thematically similar, visually. Like, they're different - one charges, one flies, one shoots, some are big, some are small... But they're all cut from the same cloth, with similar visual effects, and on anything but the max difficulty, the enemies are either defeatable by brute force, or they require a very specific action to make them vulnerable - I'm not sure there's much in between. All of this makes the game a bit samey; you're fighting the same enemies, with the same abilities, in the same places with the same weapons over the same music with the same sounds and VFX for the bulk of the game.

      The world looks wonderful, and the design of everything is great. The equipment, the characters, the graphic design, Lappy... Everything looks great. However, the world-building is lacking and feels paper-thin. Going in, from how good it looks, you expect there to be great visual story-telling, but that just doesn't pan out.

      That feeds into the story. You can see every beat of it a mile away. Like, right from the first level, most people can probably figure out what's going to happen in the end, and that makes it tedious. Then, characters transition in and out the story, but the game's just not long enough to flesh out what is actually quite a large cast. Again, all the characters look great and I get the feeling that in the supporting material used to design them, they're really deep and fleshed out, but that isn't conveyed during the game. This is weird, because the non-combat segments involve a load of subquests where you help people with their problems, and these would be perfect to tell us more about the characters and develop them, and some of them hit home - for instance, one of the characters dresses up as the mascot character for the police force, while another has a crush on her - so that guy ends up flexing in the gym in front of her... But it's just an empty costume and he's been doing it for hours. That's funny, and tells you a little about who these people are, but so many of them are just basic fetch quests that tell you nothing and are just to give you something to do.

      Similar deal for the level design. The Astral Plane involves "puzzles", but really they're just busy-work. They involve the typical stuff; moving blocks, hitting switches... But they're ridiculously simple, and sometimes drive that home by a cutscene which shows you the solution as you arrive in a location. With it being a Platinum game, there might be fun to be had in trying to speedrun them, but that doesn't appeal to me, personally.

      Similarly, the first encounters with many enemies often have tutorial popups which tell you how to beat them even on the non-easy difficulties, which feels like pointless handholding.

      Then, some game mechanics, like the platforming, are poorly implemented. Work has gone into them (for instance, when you jump, moving platforms freeze) but conversely, there are rough spots, like finisher cutscenes not pausing gameplay, or situations where the player can get hit while coming out of an interstitial cutscene.

      Despite all this, there whole sections of genuine genius. The combat, when in high gear, really is fun, and the Legion idea where you kinda-sorta control two characters is very novel. The actual moves you do are interesting, and don't just feel like Devil May Cry; when you're zipping about the arena, using the chain to ensnare enemies or many of the other abilities you have, it really is fun. It just isn't enough fun/variety, IMO, to power through ~12 hours of doing it.

      I think if you have a Switch and love action games, you should play it. Weirdly, despite all I've said above, it's one of my best games of the year purely because of how it looks; it's just so stylish and wonderfully realised in that department, and it's rare I'm bowled over by how a game looks to the point of forgiving its other sins; this is definitely one of those times.

      EDIT: Aaaaaand the game has an in-game camera where you can take character selfies and special images... And you can't save them to the Switch. They're limited to the game. There's a clumsy workaround but seriously
      Last edited by Asura; 01-11-2019, 17:56.

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        #18
        Played about 3 hours and I'm not enjoying this. I'm getting to grips with the combat but it feels and looks chaotic and lacks any kind of impact, and I find the UI messy too what with the amount of things to do and track (using Legions as red-junk vacuum cleaners being among the most inane, collecting tissues to sell as scrap, etc.). The characters (especially the mute protagonist) and story feel like comic archetypal bunk. Not even kitting out my chick in impractically revealing combat gear is doing it for me. And as for the viewpointer 'detective' work - it's pure gash. I was hoping for great things from the first directorial role for Takahisa Taura after his great work on Nier Automata, so I'm disappointed with this. I can't see myself playing it to completion.

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          #19
          I was turned off it pretty quickly too for the same reasons. Can't understand all the glowing reviews it got

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            #20
            Yeah, it's an odd one, the reputation it has. Platinum should just focus on pure arcade combat, maybe with only the most silly and tokenistic storyline sprinkled on top, like Bayonetta. The attempt to couch their usually excellent combat in a full blown story-driven adventure, with shifts in pacing and meandering narrative bits and interaction and investigation, really doesn't play to their strengths in my view.

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              #21
              It worked on Nier. Of course, that was more of a collab.

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