ASTLIBRA Revision

Do not forget: You are taking other people's treasure when protecting your own. If the Scale of Destiny favors a soul, it destroys the fate of another. Will you change this balance, or cast your eyes aside? Is it true that your choices bear no responsibilities? Is it true that you committed no crimes?

Do you ever know from the very moment a title screen hits you're about to play an all-time great? The PC-98 music hits, the moonlit background descends, and I knew instantly Astlibra was about to become one of my favorite games.

There's something to be said for the sheer freedom of expression allowed when one has absolute authority over their creative expression, especially in a culture like Japan routinely producing off-kilter ideas. Keizo is, like any good Japanese artist, fucking horny. You thought Takahashi was horny while directing Xenoblade 2? Nah, fam. Astlibra is plagued with scantily clad titty beasts. Plant monsters whose only censorship is her vines, floating bodies without appendages but no deficit of cleavage, goddesses whose battle armor is lingerie, individual boob physics on each breast, and a year's supply of juvenile sex humor you've seen in literally every ecchi you've ever watched. To really round off the sentiment, there's a traditionally JRPG colosseum-like arena with individual matches and one of those matches is titled "Harem" in which you have to slay every degenerate demon the game has ever thrown at you. Keizo is fucking horny.

Keizo is also, like any good Japanese artist, fucking extra. This man has read his fair share of visual novels, clearly loves time travel, and probably threw every idea he ever had over its development time at the wall and performed mad science to fuse it all together. This design philosophy extends to the gameplay for sure, but I'll come back to that later, because there's a phenomenal story here if you can make sense of it all.

Time travel is fascinating; even when it's riddled with plot holes it's gotta be one of my favorite genres. There's not a lot of "meaningful" choices in Astlibra, but there are choices, you can make the wrong ones, and you will feel the weight of them. There's VN-style epilogue-like "dead ends" (not always bad endings, necessarily). But most importantly, Astlibra's central theme is its opening tagline: life is a series of choices, and every time you make a choice to help someone, to save someone, you hurt or lose someone else. You could have the literal tools of God in your hands with the ability to correct any history you saw fit, but the butterfly effect unfolds -- what will you lose in the process?

Chapter 7 really struck an emotional chord with me, one that all-time greats like Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica have, when the price of obsession was made manifest. What are you willing to sacrifice for your obsession? I watched a dry comedy-drama called Russian Doll last year, also a time travel story, and a certain character described something they termed a "Coney Island moment": your one past decision where everything went to hell. You made one catastrophic decision, however inconsequential it seemed at the time, tugging the lynchpin that kept your entire life together, and the butterfly effect surely unfolds. Astlibra's thesis is thus: if you could reverse time and undo the "Coney Island moment," sacrificing all the bonds and memories you made in the process, would you, and could you live with the consequences afterward? So many ideas are thrown into the story & lore it can be difficult to untangle, and yeah, I'm pretty sure it's riddled with plot holes (although I'll note that by the end it *felt* like every loose end was resolved), but if you can untangle the mess and bask in the distinctly Japanese zaniness, it packs some serious emotional weight.

If you choose one, you lose another. I made my choice by weighing my options on the Scales.

The over-the-top design philosophy is infused into the gameplay as much as the narrative. By the postgame there are four different progression systems, a wide variety of techs with near-infinite build options and the ability to respec whenever you want. I finished the game on hard, and it was fucking hard. My final clock time -- getting 100%, including achievements -- was 61.5 hours, and Steam registers a playtime of 95 hours. There's idle time in there for sure, but that demonstrates well over a dozen hours of lost progress because there is no autosave and trash mobs can fucking rip you a new one. By chapter 5 or so, it's entirely practical to be dying within 3 hits.

Combat is visceral and the gameplay loop is crack. You will be swarmed by fields of mobs as you hack 'n' slash your way through them, manipulating your iframes, guard gauge, cleverly hidden techniques, and Karon build to steamroll them as efficiently as possible, the gamepad rumbling in your hands with every slash, the frustration of playing what often feels like a 2D soulslike where every input matters, dying, dying dying to trash. Every chapter has its own equipment section with materials dropped by mobs only found in that chapter, accompanied by a super streamlined and super rewarding crafting system, making it sinfully easy to blow 5 minutes grinding for a few more mats to purchase that next available weapon. The game rewards grinding almost too well.

The game's biggest flaw is how it reeks of early-to-mid 00s development. The gameplay loop is simple. The shitty ESL translation steals heavily from American idioms, like "using the John," in ways that just make zero sense within the setting's context, yet it's nonetheless nostalgic to a time of mediocre VN translations (Tohsaka's anus is defenseless), shitty anime subs, and downloading new episodes on BitTorrent then burning them to your DVD while posting screenshots of your ripped DVD collections on fan forums. The puzzles and platforming are excruciatingly retro; satisfying in their own way, but to solve them you have to think about them from a design perspective of a different era. You literally walk through glitches in the scenery to solve puzzles. Secret treasures in the game are well hidden in fucking pixel-sized green arrows, in the late game behind scenery, obstacles, and other hurdles making them, frankly, impossible to find unless you have a treasure guide up, and I absolutely recommend one to the side while playing. It's borderline cozy how there are virtually zero guides available online because it's so niche and playing it draws you into a real community; but there is a treasure guide, you should use it, and expect that otherwise, you will probably have to figure shit out on your own.

Everything comes into harmony to produce a grossly addictive game as I was propelled from literally the first 30 minutes to see the plot unfold, yearning to see the story's earliest and most harrowing mysteries resolved -- in most cases, far differently than I could have ever imagined.

Struggling to regain what I lost made me lose everything else.

It's rare these days I can play a game and not levy a dumptruck load's complaints at it; I'm aging and I have a lot to bitch about it. A game's worth isn't so much defined by its flaws as it is how much its draws transcend those flaws. Astlibra is a gem. It's uniquely its own, there's so much to digest, and its creative expression is something you can really only get out of a game developed by one KEIZO for 16 years. The sort of poetic beauty to it all: the slice-of-life adventure of handling a new town's dilemmas every chapter; your guild master opening each chapter with a spine-tingling, heartrending summary of whose woes you must resolve; to see a VN-style opening theme at the end of EVERY FUCKING CHAPTER; all in a spacetime transcending romantic epic in pursuit of your first love. It's quirky, it's convoluted in a way only a JRPG could be, and it's beautiful. Go, my minions!