#Obviously the art style is very unpolished but also this was literally made by one person and it's a two-hour musical

[astro-b-o-y-d]

Me last night: Oh, how fun, Youtube's recommended me another Twisted animatic. Let's see what scene they-

Me:

Me: This is the entire musical. This is an animatic of the entire musical.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok before I forget about it completely now that I've moved on to other stuff for like a week already I should probably say something about Astria Ascending.

Astria Ascending is a trainwreck, but it's one that I spent literally a hundred hours on. The art style and music are generally pretty good (although some NPC designs are kinda iffy, but at least the artists were less horny on main than for XC2), and I thoroughly enjoyed the job system and combat. It's obviously heavily influenced by various older FF games in a lot of ways, especially 12, but mechanically I actually liked this more than most of them.

Coincidentally, and despite being made by a non-Japanese indie studio, they had a couple people who've worked on FF games contribute writing and music. The music was a good call, and that was one of the things that was consistently pretty good in the game. The writing was not a good call, and it was one of the things that was consistently not good in the game.

I know Tetsuya Nomura has worked on lots of good games, including ones that I've really liked, but I kind of have a long history of not getting along great with his writing. Like I had plenty of fun with FF7 and FF8, but I'm not going to pretend the stories weren't a complete mess, especially in 8. I liked the worlds and characters and stuff enough to get past that though. And even though I haven't played them myself, I kind of had the same reaction to the KH games he's worked on.

And then there's FFX, which I kind of hated. Like a lot. I only finished it out of spite and because my laptop was in for repairs that week. It started out with a bunch of interesting stuff, and I had tons of ideas of where it might be going with it, but every time they revealed something significant about the world or plot it was less interesting than everything I'd thought of. So I'd readjust my speculation based on the new information, and then a few hours later I'd be disappointed again. By the end it had just been disappointment after disappointment for a few dozen hours, and it remains one of my least favorite RPGs I've ever played, and definitely my least favorite I've actually finished.

Good news though! Astria Ascending's story and writing is a lot like FFX, only a lot worse. There are a decent number of interesting things about the world, but it just doesn't go anywhere with any of them ever and has the most bland and superficial possible story with no real depth. At least in other stuff he's worked on they generally at least have good characters or character interactions or character development that carries them, but that barely exists here. I would struggle to come up with five adjectives to describe most of the main cast without resorting to really generic stuff, and hardly anything happens to them and they barely change or grow.

I know I said good news, but that wasn't actually entirely sarcastic. It kinda lets you know up front that it's not particularly well written, so I never got my hopes up and was never really disappointed.

I feel like I've been almost entirely negative, but I really did have plenty of fun aside from that. They said they were inspired by FF12, especially the International Zodiac Job System version, and it shows. I genuinely liked the job system and some of the wacky combinations of things you can put together with it, and once I figured out how things work my party was constantly doing very silly things.

The side quests are sometimes poorly explained, and I eventually stopped wandering around finding where stuff was on my own and just looked it up online, but I was actually pleasantly surprised that it had some decent puzzles here and there in the dungeons/temples and mostly enjoyed going through those even if the map is a disaster. They've also basically fixed the game breaking bugs it had for the first few months it was out, so while it's still pretty unpolished and has some weird issues sometimes it's at least playable now without major issues.

Also it has one of the best card game minigames since Triple Triad, which I wasted a lot of time on. It's not quite as good as Triple Triad in the end because the random rule just makes it stop being fun 80% of the time instead of just being harder and taking more thinking, but at least the rules each NPC uses are fixed so you're not spreading around bad rules like in Triple Triad. I feel like they had potential to do a bit more with it than they did, but ultimately I had a lot more fun with it than something like Gwent.

So yeah, I can't really say it's a good game, but it's a game that has good things in it while also being a total mess, and I mostly enjoyed my time with it. Also the battle music is going to live in my brain for the next several years.

(edit while updating tags years later: I have no idea why I went on a tangent about Nomura when the writing in this is Nojima's fault. Sometimes my brain doesn't work, but I suppose they did do most of those FF games together so most of my issues still stand I guess)