Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsA good action game
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2019
I just finished the main campaign of Astral Chain, and I haven't started the post-game content yet beyond the chapter opening cut scene. My quasi-review, with no spoilers.
The game is fun. The TL;DR is that I think it deserves a 9/10. I guess 5 stars if I'm forced to use a 1 to 5 scale (because that's how rounding works). It's a fairly deep fighting game glued together with investigation, a sprawling character upgrading mechanism, platforming, and even stealth sections, but somehow it all works.
Astral Chain is visually stunning. The Astral plane itself is a bit samey and not super distinct, but that's basically the only thing. Characters are interesting. Most locations have a lot of personality. The tech is ridiculous but cool looking. It simply looks amazing.
My only real visual complaint is that it'd benefit from anti-aliasing. If Nintendo makes a Super Switch that runs normal Switch games, I'd be pretty content if they added anti-aliasing, and if the rest of the horse power was enough to max the existing scaling resolution options locked to 30 frames per second. Because the game's got tons and tons of style, and it'd show through a lot better if the edges didn't look a bit weird.
The non fighting stuff is pretty straight forward. Want to climb a ladder? Walk up to it and press A when prompted. (This gets seamless after you do it a couple of times, and you can basically get the timing at a run once you're used to it.) Most of it's a matter of paying attention and choosing the right tool from your options.
Maybe the weakest part of the non-fighty stuff is the platforming. It's not actually bad, but some sections are a little meh, and it's not always totally clear what the end goal is. One time the game stole the camera from me, so it became much harder to platform quickly for that one scene. I'd be upset with this whole thing if it was a 3D Super Mario game, but since platforming is a secondary task, it's merely fine instead of quite good like the rest of the game.
Fighting gets incredibly busy.
First there are lots of enemy types. Sometimes there are lots of them on screen at once. Some you'll want to quickly take out, others ought to be fought at range, yet others really want hit and run tactics, etc. In some cases you'll get monsters with different optimal tactics on the same screen, so you'll need to decide what to do.
Second, you get some basic fighting game options as time goes on and you upgrade your gear. Like there's a thingy that lets you push away, then towards plus attack, and you do a flying kick. There are only a couple of these, but they're present.
Finally, and by far most complicatedly, there's your Legion. That's the thingy that's chained to you. You have tons of options with them. By the end you've got 5 of them, so you need to choose which to use. Then you have up to 2 special skills assigned to each one (and it changes from Legion to Legion). Beyond that, you need to decide whether to let your Legion go off on its own, or to control it directly with your right stick while you control your main character with the left.
And let me just say, controlling 2 different characters at once when their positioning can matter a lot is a bit of a brain stretch. Like if you want to wrap some monsters in a chain and momentarily bind them, you need to maneuver both of your characters so that the chain that connects them forms a closed loop around your targets. Which is fine if there's like 1 or 2 monsters, but sometimes there are more like 10, and you've got to do a lot of dodging around. With 2 characters.
The story is a bit basic, but it does the trick. I found the characters to be mostly personable, although Akira (your character's sibling) gets a bit pouty at points, and a bit mean at others. But mostly the characters and plot and general flow works to get you from place to place.
Your basic mission works something like this. The station gets a call. You go to a place. Once you're there, you need to investigate a thing. There are a bunch of optional side mission bits (sometimes fighting, other times finding things, tracking down criminals, whatever). Some of the side bits are repeated with new paint, but every once in a while someone'll do something like challenge you to a shooting contest or some other totally random thing. I found that generally most were worthwhile. There'll be some point of no return, then you'll do a little platforming and exploring, and then there'll be some increasingly hard and dramatic fights, eventually leading to a major plot revelation and an end boss.
The game has 3 difficulties to begin. One basically plays the fights for you so that you can explore, solve crimes, and watch the major plot evens unfold like it's anime. Casual is the easy difficulty. Standard is the hard one. Once you beat any given chapter, you get access to a very hard option so you can go back and play through again and have the game really beat your ass.
The whole thing is well constructed. The plot is functional The game generally flows well. I didn't notice any major glitches, and minor ones were appropriately minor. About the only thing I'd do if I could wave a magic wand would be the anti-aliasing I mentioned before, because the art style is great and I think it deserves it. Controls are good, even if they take a bit of getting used to at first.
It's good stuff.
