Ever since it came out on Steam last year, I’ve been a bit of an evangelist for Astlibra: Revision. It comes out on Switch today, and so I wanted to make a post here telling you why this game should *absolutely* be on your radar if you’re an fan of 2D action games like Muramasa and Odin Sphere.
The gameplay loop is the main strength of the game. At the start, the combat is you smacking a slime with a stick, but by the end, you’re spewing lasers across the screen carving through legions of enemies with projectile-launching swords, and that progression is very well-paced. Skills are unlocked by leveling gear ala FF9,, which gives the search for gear and grind an addictive quality! On the flipside though, the cost of this feeling of getting progressively stronger is that early hours can feel slow and simple.
My favorite part of combat is that it doesn’t rely on “press circle to iframe dodge through an attack” skills, with instead your iframes usually coming from magic, and you gain MP by attacking the enemy. This means that to both gain and use your iframes, you need to be in the enemy’s face. It keeps battle really aggressive and engaging!
I imagine that the main narrative itself is going to be the most memorable part of the game for many. While it has a generic opening, it’s creative and *goes places*, and I’ll leave it at that to avoid spoilers. That being said, while the *narrative* is great, the actual moment-to-moment dialogue is Astlibra’s main weakness imo. It’s just not particularly good, a result of the games single developer not being a writer by trade.
Yup, that’s right: Astlibra was mostly made by just *one person* in his free time after his office day job over the course of *fifteen years*. This is a passion project, through and though. It’s the kind of game that can only be created by a single person, for both better and for worse. There’s rough edges that would have been ironed out if there was a larger dev team, like hiding key abilities and items in seemingly-optional areas without telling the player, and have some….tasteless “stereotypical anime” moments in the dialogue. But this also gives us a real creative spark here, with an “anything goes” attitude for both the combat and the narrative. It keeps the game engaging.
It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in a game this past decade. If you’re annoyed when games don’t have that AAA polish to them, you should probably pass. But if you can look past the rough, you’ll find a real diamond buried underneath. If you’re a fan of action JRPGs, this should at the very least be on your radar!