It’s a shame that for all Astria Ascending does do well – from its impeccable UI, management systems, art direction, and battle system – its narrative structure and world building give very little to invest in as the game sort of throws everything at you and expects you to have any semblance of emotional attachment to the characters. It seems like a storyboard was set down with routes of who should do what and how it impacts each particular character, the race they represent, their honor, and their story, but was done without any real drafting and instead kept the mentality of “the first idea is the best idea”. It can feel rather overwhelming at first which leads to this odd misbalance the game has of being both focused and lost simultaneously. It’s a perfectly solid portable experience that’s worth the few drawbacks if you can forgive Astria Ascending’s dented package.Įverything in Astria Ascending just takes you off to the races right away without any real transition easing you into its world, characters, and events. However, despite the blur and reduced frames, it’s not especially egregious as the stunning art direction is strong enough to make up for a few faults and the turn-based nature of the game doesn’t necessitate a high refresh rate. The visuals themselves scale nicely and the renderings in menus and exchanges look really fantastic, but when in motion a lot of assets seem less than sharp. It hearkens back to some absolute classics with undeniable influence from the likes of Child of Light and Octopath Traveler with how its systems and mechanics carry out its gameplay.Īstria Ascending is a beautiful looking game, but overall performance and visuals on Switch, while not bad, are still diminished enough that it takes away from how crisp and beautiful it can really look on a vibrant screen compared to other platforms. Astria Ascending in particular is especially interesting because of its mobile beginnings that got scrapped and ultimately revived into the product we have today, which lends itself as a mostly competent JRPG experience. It’s no secret that a game ultimately runs depending on how well optimized it is regardless of art direction of 2D or 3D. Astria Ascending is an interesting review given that we were granted our copy on launch day, so as someone who loves to research and dive in as much as possible into how each game is optimized for particular platforms, I’ve cross referenced with the Xbox and PC versions as well to see how the Switch version holds up given the lenient graphical demand of the title.
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