ASTLIBRA Revision review: A JRPG passion project to be remembered
What started from a true love for the gameplay and story, and hate for the puzzles, became by a long margin my favourite game of 2024 so far. Playing ASTLIBRA was for me a story of enjoying the beginning, sticking through several hours of complaints, and 40 hours later I only remembered the good times. I thoroughly enjoyed finishing ASTLIBRA and am genuinely happy to have played this game.
Presentation
For someone looking into ASTLIBRA for the first time, I think two things stand out immediately — the presentation, or the art style specifically, and the combat.
The art style is a little disingenuous. You might discredit the game when looking through screenshots, but I will tell you that’s misleading. Multiple aspects will capture your attention while playing, be it combat, crafting, looting, or even just thinking about the story. You won’t bother to complain about the graphics because there’s a lot catching your attention.
The art style gives ASTLIBRA its own charm and enhances, for example, the scale of boss fights further. Enemies have really solid variety across the different biomes, the characters have a decent amount of detail to their design, and the backdrops are good enough to set the atmosphere for the snowy mountains or the fiery pits of the volcano’s insides.
Very loosely related to presentation, the soundtrack is simply beautiful and so incredibly crafted to each situation and environment. It hits all the right notes for character moods, to accompany a shocking twist, or maybe even complement killing a mob of slimes. It is spectacular and rich in variety of melodies — daresay even crosses a number of musical genres.
Combat
Let’s jump into combat because it’s one of the main selling points for this game. This is a 2D side scroller with combat falling more on the hack’n’slash-y type. Pretty much you spam the attack button, build combos and see damage numbers go up as a mob of enemies fades away. It has a really satisfying feeling of hacking through a mob and coming out the other side victorious.
Builds had good variety, ranging from a quick dexterous short sword-wielding archetype, a classic strength-based heavy weapon that slices enemies in half, or even magic-wielding with staffs that cast elemental attacks.
The one gripe I had with combat until I had a serious build was that it led me to a lot of frustrating deaths. I was so engrossed (let’s even say with the brain turned off) hacking away at goblins and slimes and drakes and spiders and whatnot that I didn’t pay too much attention to incoming damage. And then, death wiped all my progress since the previous save. Save points were not too distant from each other, but it was so bloody frustrating to be one screen away from the next checkpoint with maybe a level up and enough materials to craft the next weapon in the bag, when suddenly it was gone.
I should’ve played more carefully, but every single sensory input from combat was to keep hacking and slashing at the mobs. It was damn fun so why stop? Right, to not lose progress…
Progression
Still on the periphery of combat, it’s very much worth talking about Force & skills, Karon abilities and exploration.
Force and skills go hand in hand because they both belong to the skill tree. It’s a skill tree, but the nodes are by and large stat boosts — enemies drop force upon death, another currency, and this is used to purchase more nodes on the skill tree. These are great to complement the level up skill points.
However, the meat is in the minority of those nodes. They unlock magic spells and as you acquire more your ability to wipe out the screen with one cast essentially goes up in tandem. I won’t spoil much, but just to say that in combat you spam the physical attacks to build up stamina, and then spend it to cast spells. In other words, spam physical attacks to keep enemies in check and accumulate energy, so that you see the big damage numbers grow even bigger with magic.
Karon abilities and exploration also go hand-in-hand. Karon abilities work like the chips in Nier:Automata — you have a limited number of slots and they impact your gameplay wildly. They range from being able to see enemy health bars, to allowing you to wield a shield while holding a two-handed weapon. So, yeah, they can make up the foundations for pretty busted builds.
The fun part was finding these Karon skills in chests during exploration, and a lot of them by maxing out the potential of gear — nothing fancy mind you, kill enough enemies with the weapon / shield / armor and you get the skill. So ASTLIBRA rewards you for experimenting with different gear to make your favourite pieces even stronger.
Oh and speaking of gear, monsters have a chance to drop chests. You can open these with craftable keys to find formulas for legendary gear. These are not only much cheaper to craft, but their stats and abilities are in another league. These are typically advised not just because of the above reasons but because they serve you well into the next chapter without suffering too much until you can craft the next better piece of gear.
Puzzles
By far, the puzzles were the worst part in this game for me. I frequently felt stupid and simply looked up the solution online. It wasn’t about being smart, or noticing the right pattern — it was about processing information the same way as the developer. It didn’t help that the game expected me to have long play sessions on multiple occasions, which I didn’t have the time for at least until halfway through the game. Small cues from early into the chapter or even from hours ago came into play and I had to remember or get stuck. I hate feeling stupid when solving puzzles, and the first half of this game had quite a few moments like that.
Honestly, this combined with some badly-timed deaths during combat led me to uninstall the game twice. Yes, I reinstalled it the day after in both occasions, but at the very least I downgraded difficulty to the lowest setting so I could smash my way through mobs. Sure there was still a decent challenge, but way easier than the higher difficulty levels and required way less grind. It was worth it for my enjoyment of the game.
Story
I give this game’s story a chef’s kiss out of 10. Ever since I played Dragon Quest 11 I’ve been looking for games that replicated this going back and forth between different states of the world. I can barely describe how satisfying I find it to go from a pristine world to one turned upside down and then back to happy times. I lost track of how many times ASTLIBRA flipped it around.
From a technical perspective this is obviously simpler in a 2D setting, but hot damn if ASTLIBRA didn’t pull all the stops to ensure the environment matched the story beats. The story evolves in truly wild ways and the core plot points are by no means expected — in fact most if not all the twists will pull the rug from under you.
This is a game where you start hitting slimes with a stick and finish with deicide. Not one, not two, it’s literally endgame content to hunt Gods on top of what happens during the story. But that’s not the focus of the story. It is important yes, but this is a story of grit, perseverance, and not letting go of your principles. I will go as far to say this Hero is as expressive as the Doomguy — and they both don’t say a word. It was impressive how much the actions taken by this Hero made his personality materialise.
Late into the story, more opportunities were given to him to accommodate his goals with less drawbacks. It wasn’t the ability to do what he wanted on a whim. Everything the Hero did was earned by his determination and prowess. Yeah he killed gods to save the ones precious to him. Hell, he went after goblins because they hurt strangers, he was the kind of guy that wanted to save everyone. Again I don’t want to enter further spoiler territory so this might come across as vague, but please know ASTLIBRA wrote in a very decent protagonist that you will be able to empathise with, even walk a mile in his shoes if you allow yourself to get lost in the story.
Aside from the protagonist, the secondary cast was also strong. Yeah at some points their writing was a little distilled into anime tropes that didn’t add much, but they all went through their own story arcs and took some turns that you won’t expect. This cast was really able to take me by surprise.
My experience with the game
It’s been a week since I finished the postscript — effectively a whole new chapter after the credits roll — and I’m still thinking about it. The day after, I woke up thinking about playing more ASTLIBRA only to realise that, well, I had reached the end.
It was not all roses though. As I raised earlier, the game was at times frustrating to the point where I simply uninstalled it. Twice. I did reinstall twice. I downgraded difficulty to the lowest level to minimise deaths and maximise my fun with the hack’n’slash combat.
It was a pure love-hate relationship early on. I loved the combination of combat, soundtrack, and wonder of exploring the maps to find legendary gear. I spent two weekends where the only thing I did was play this game. That’s how glued I was. When it got good, it got f*cking good.
And after 50 hours of playtime according to Steam — even though my save file says 43 — I can barely recall any of those bad periods. All I remember is slaying gods, or saving the people around the Hero through thick and thin. This guy at one point let go of what was most precious to him just so he could go save one of his closest friends.
I avoid grinding in video games and I thoroughly enjoyed the handful of hours spent levelling up and unlocking the potential on all my gear. It was damn fun.
And that’s the thing, I only want to talk about the good memories I made in this game. It’s rough early on, but following the story of this Hero was worth it, and everything written into the story had a purpose behind it. More than that, the character arcs were deserved and well-paced. Characters were not pulling a Deus Ex Machina to resolve their problems. The Hero earned his main ability, not just from finding the tool, but also from what he did with said power. The young man doesn’t say a word but much like you can feel the anger and destructive power of the Doomguy, you can feel the Hero’s desire to save everyone and fight to make people happy.
Closing thoughts
I’ll cut straight to the point (at the end of the review yes): if there’s anything at all that catches your attention in the first couple hours, then PLEASE see this game through. I know first-hand the game can be damn annoying, plain frustrating at points in the early chapters.
However, the combat, the gameplay loop, the intrigue of the cast, the world-building, the dopamine rush of pressing attack to see numbers go up, the sense of wonder finding new legendary gear, the scale of boss fights… if you enjoy JRPGs I’m pretty confident there will be something to grab your attention here. After all, ASTLIBRA is a love letter from KEIZO to JRPGs and its fans.
If you take away anything from this review, please try the demo on Steam. It is 1–2 hours long, and it will be representative of the combat system with some decent upgrades and gear available. It will definitely feel weird in terms of the pacing but that’s for the sake of putting the player in a position where they can experience a well-equipped Hero and some story beats in a condensed experience.
From my part, I’m taking a break from the game before playing the roguelite DLC, but this game is still very much living rent free in my head. If you enjoy (J)RPGs then I sincerely hope you get to play this game and see it through yourself.
Additional Resources
Midgame gameplay with no commentary
