Be ready to swap party members and switch your attacks quickly depending on what you’re fighting, or they’ll quickly mop the floor with you using their own Focus strikes.įocus also gives you a great tool to use to make everyone useful in Astria Ascending. Also, the enemies have their own Focus gauge, and your party their own weaknesses, so you’ll really need to pay attention to this mechanic to succeed in the game.
You’re really going to want to learn your type weaknesses. If the enemy just resists it a bit, it’s not so bad, but you can get pretty screwed if the attack heals the enemy. If you hit an enemy with something they’re resistant to, you’ll lose Focus points in various increments depending on how badly it works. The trouble is that you can mess this up as well. Bosses have a ton of HP right from the start, so you’ll want to learn this system fast. As such, if you push an enemy’s weakness, you can build up Focus points fast, increasing your damage to ridiculous levels. You get one point for free, but you can gain more quickly by hitting enemies with their weaknesses. Focus points can be used to increase the strength of any given attack in increments of 50% (up to four points at once for %200 damage). Your Focus gauge is what will really let you slam foes. Pressing enemies on weaknesses is really handy throughout Astria Ascending, as it builds up your party’s Focus. Characters all level up equally, too, so even party members who you haven’t used are ready to go if someone dies and they need to be replaced or you suddenly need a magic type you haven’t used yet. So if an enemy is weak to a certain type of magic damage, you can bring in your magic user for a later turn. (It just costs the current character’s turn). This game seeks to do away with that kind of flailing around with a few neat design decisions, including spreading healing abilities around like I mentioned above.įor starters, you can swap your party members around relatively easily in combat. Maybe non-magic attacks don’t hurt an enemy, so my fighters are useless, or I’m trying to save MP so my magic users are slapping foes with weak physical attacks. Often in turn-based RPGs, I’ll have characters that aren’t terribly helpful in a given fight. Many characters can take the role in a pinch.Īstria Ascending seems designed to make your entire party feel useful most of the time. This made the party makeup feel a bit more fluid, as I didn’t need to have a dedicated healer bumming around when they weren’t needed. Healing abilities seem better spread out amongst the party rather than just tied to a specific healer.
You’re supposed to be keeping everyone safe instead of sightseeing, so how do these Demigods hold up in a fight? The characters tend to have certain focuses, whether it be melee or magic. Each area of Astria Ascending is distinct, as are the characters that come from them, making it treat just to explore the world and see who lives there. These designs also connect the party characters to their homelands in neat ways. The game offers a variety of different races, which also make them stand out. The art style reminds me of Vanillaware’s work on Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown, with each character bursting with unique personality from their visuals. Demigods are extremely powerful beings, but they only live for a few years. Still, they’re all looking great despite their short life span. You get to lead a group of eight Demigods into battle, aiming to clear up troubling creatures (called Noises) that are causing havoc around the world. With an impressive hand-drawn visual style, involving combat that makes use of all of its characters in a variety of ways, a wild world of creatures and neat locations, and a dangerously-compelling tile-based minigame, it’s got a lot of good things going for it. Having played a preview build of the game, I can say that Astria Ascending is coming out strong already.
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