Astlibra Revision is one man's labor of love, the magnum opus of hobbyist game designer Keizo Morishige. This is a polished version of his browser game Astlibra (labeled accordingly!), completed over the course of a decade and a half, which shows - there's a LOT of game here. Combat is tight, nail-bitingly precise down to a matter of frames, and near-infinitely customizable with a bevy of buffs (or debuffs, if you wish), weapons, and special abilities. There's ample room to play this game with nearly any build or strategy you like.

While mostly cobbled together from free assets (though very well-chosen ones - the soundtrack is killer), Vanillaware artist Takehiro Shiga (better known as Shigatake) worked on refined character art for Revision, paired with breathtakingly detailed boss designs by artist Haku Tatsufuchi. As a Vanillaware diehard, I was first drawn to this game because Shigatake worked on it, but the rest of the game is far too solid for that to be the only thing worth mentioning.

The story plays out in an episodic fashion, down to an anime-like opening sequence (complete with theme song!) before each chapter. You play as Popular McJRPG Guy and his personal Crow of Judgment on a sprawling journey that comes further off its hinges as the game progresses - there is heartache and fanservice in spades, predictable in spots and utterly blindsiding in others. It's best to experience it blind! The English translation, originally fraught with grammatical errors, has been significantly improved with a patch, but the old one is currently still available through a beta channel should you wish to use it.

The MSRP is a steal for the sheer size and quality of this game. Of all the Games By One Guy out there, this is as good as it gets! To all aspiring game designers - this game is proof positive that if you are truly passionate about your creations, it can be seen and felt from a mile away.

A job very well done by KEIZO and collaborators - warmly and enthusiastically recommended.

Truly one of the best Action RPGs ever made. Beautiful 2D graphics, awesome soundtrack, batshit crazy anime story with tons of dialogue (easy to skip if you don’t care) and super responsive gameplay. The game is crammed to the ceiling with content. There are so many levels, monsters, bosses, more monsters, more bosses, items, gear, hidden treasures, puzzles, likable characters, vast amounts of difficulty options, arena challenges and more. And don’t get me started on all the RPG systems that are put into this game. It can sound overwhelming when reading about all the systems before starting the game, but Astlibra manages to introduce the systems step by step over dozens of hours of gameplay. The player character can level up, distribute attribute points, do magic, add items to a magic Libra, distribute points on a giant Sphere Grid, find and craft dozens and dozens of weapons, shields, armors and accessories and unlock boards for every single weapon, armor and accessories to improve it even more. Seriously, if you like to become the baddest of badass RPG characters with endless grinding, optimization and build options, this is your game. But it is also your game if you like crazy anime stories. Or just a laid back, relaxed Hack’n’Slay with nice graphics. You know what? If you like videogames even a bit, you have to get this game. Period. It’s a masterpiece. Some of the best 20€ you can spend on Steam. Get it and spread the gospel. Don’t believe me? Try the demo. And oh, this is the PERFECT Steam Deck game as well.

Astlibra is the definition of a rough gem. The combat generally feels very satisfying and the difficulty combined with the multiple layers of customization and growth systems makes you feel like you're always growing stronger and you're constantly pushed to make use of all your different tools. The soundtrack is radical and the artstyle is immaculate with some excellent backgrounds. It won't really win any awards for its writing but it has a very earnest desire to tell a dramatic, fantastical tale which is a lot more than I can say for several other indie games. Unfortunately the last 1/3rd of the game was so consistently frustrating that I just got sick of it and didn't want to put in the time to grind it out. I'd still recommend it to everyone since anyone willing to put in the time to grind has several ways to get stronger and overcome the countless hallways full of of obnoxious enemies. I just don't have that kind of patience.

"Proof of life" - so goes Astlibra's rarely used but pretty important subtitle. It's a major theme in the latter part of the game, where the sheer level of time travel shenanigans and fantasy bullshit happening makes it a pretty pressing issue - but I won't go into that. But deliberate or not, the term so brilliantly encapsulates the game itself.

Its impossible to talk about Astlibra without mentioning it's development cycle. As I write this, for instance, the dead space remake has just launched. When Astlibra started development the original was still a year away. Sole developer Keizo has plugged away at this and one or two other games in his free time over 15 damn years. And this is a guy with an office job. This game is his "Proof of life". And it bleeds out of every damn screen in the game.

There's a ridiculously large amount of ground to cover but Astlibra boils down to a sidescrolling ARPG in the vein of Ys III and Zelda II, shoved in a blender with stuff from Comiket. You get astonishingly flashy and silly combat combined with puzzle design from 1990, whilst some insanely hard doujin music which may or may not include hatsune miku goes obscenely hard in the background. And then you'll come across some insanely detailed boss sprite with cleavage that takes up half the screen and fires dodonpachi patterns of magic at you.

This is not only kinda silly, but also legitimately kinda great. The combat's main hook is effectively building up magic spells by dealing damage, and those magic spells give you temporary invincibility upon cast - which encourages super aggressive play. Bosses in particular are fantastic, but just clearing screens of enemies is somehow a joy after 30 hours of play, particularly as new engagement options keep on opening up even into the super-late game.

In general there's just so, so much you find, miss, or just ignore in Astlibra that feel like they meaningfully give you new options or feel impactful. I have absolutely no fucking idea how it does it. Things like triple jump boots and launchers are hidden in corners, random crossbows you get to solve two puzzles is powerful in combat, and mage staffs are widlly powerful but basically ignorable for the vast majority of players. The game clearly doesnt expect a player to get absolutely everything but also expects them to at least have some stuff - and the balance is struck just right.

Maybe most surprisingly, the story kinda hits. The current english localisation is a bit rough (it only really worksas it does because 2007-angsty fan translation tier fits well for the game) and you can undoubtedly pick a million holes in it's time travel/meddling gods bullshit, but it really nails it's emotional beats and hooks. KEIZO really knows how to turn a knife and throw in some good twists. The first two thirds of the game are a bit house in fata morgana-y in how they're individually story based whilst teasing at the greater whole - and that the batshit final chapters actually keep the emotional core and it's themes front and centre is remarkable. The core theme of butterfly effects and every choice coming with costs are very well done. And honestly the characters are also great - adorable crow Karon is effectively the voice of the unnamed protagonist for the entire game and is always a delight in particular. It hooked me, which is something i was not expecting at all.

Astlibra also does something very, very clever. It cheats. The revision release, whilst of course being extremely similar to just Astlibra's free version, is a result of KEIZO recruiting a handful of people, including ex-vanillaware artist Shigatake to refine the graphics, smooth the edges and add a few bits of content. And with it the game gains a much more defined aesthetic (the free version looks even weirder than the current release trust me) and refinement whilst still retaining that glorious individuals heart. It's kinda genius.

Yeah, looking at Astlibra truly critically it'll be very easy for someone to absolute rip into it. It's a bit overlong, it's difficulty balance is suspect, the postscript isnt worth playing, it's a bit too horny, it's aesthetic varies from looking like a straight up vanillaware title to looking like a geocities website and it's a bit repetitive. But as the sort of jaded asshole who was ready to make those sorts of comments, i really don't care, and it's not just the context of it's 17 year development. Astlibra is overwhelmingly charming at every single turn, fun, hype as hell and continually engaging with it's story, gameplay loop and seemingly endless secrets.

Something about this game just dredges up the wonder I had for playing RPGs as a kid which very little can manage these days - Ys VIII does, and Xenoblade can for moments - and I have loved it unconditionally. I have been up til 3am playing Astlibra just wanting to push ever onwards.

It's certainly not for everyone - the demo will probably serve as a good litmus test for whether you're into this sorta thing, and I'd reccomend checking it out first (especially as the game itself basicaly doesnt have a tutorial so it serves dual function). But I would like to think ive got it across in this review that if you're into this, you're probably going to be really into it.

Can you tell I love this?

This game was a complete surprise to me. A friend in a discord recommended it a couple months ago and if not for that I’d have not heard of this game. A brief search shows barely any media coverage. Just a handful of english reviews and only a couple of those from niche sites I was actually aware of but never would visit.

It was developed since 2007 and by only the sole original developer for most of that time until he had help for developing this Steam version (before the Steam version there was a freeware version). This background reminds me a lot of the story of Dwarf Fortress albeit not as long a dev time. It’s great seeing a passion project like this succeeding. Knowing its background makes a lot of the smaller issues I have more forgivable too.

The combat is easily its greatest strength. It's a fairly straightforward side-scrolling ARPG at the beginning but as you play you get new combat techniques and possession skills (magic basically) that keep things fresh and add depth. For example as you explore you’ll find scrolls that unlock techniques like a sky slash and backdash. Regarding the possession skills that gets very interesting as using them gives you i-frames and proper usage of them makes a big difference in boss fights and it's balanced by preventing you from spamming possession skills by needing ST which you build by attacking monsters with your weapon.It’s fantastic when this all comes together in boss fights.

The story is rather interesting. Wont say too much to avoid spoilers but it has some good twists. Whenever I thought I had things figured out, new story information had me reconsidering.

Weakest point is its sub-par translation. It's like that of a JRPG from 20+ years ago. You’ll understand it fine. Issue more is characters dialogue is less natural then it could be and word choices at times are slightly off. This translation, and occasional though not too often pervy dialogue, can take away from the narrative at times. Good news is a recent post from the publisher recognized criticism of the translation and confirmed they will be improving it, presumably in time for the Switch port the post also announced.

There are A LOT of systems in this game. None of them are bad but it does hit a point where I question if it needed some of them. For example you have a basic leveling where each level you get 5 points to distribute among your stats, perfectly normal so fine. Then your weapons and armor acquire proficiency as you use them which unlocks new abilities and you set these abilities in a menu that requires you have enough magic crystals for whatever the ability costs and you can change your ability loadout at any time. Then there’s also a growth chart where you can spend Force (an elemental currency dropped by monsters) and this also increases your stats and unlocks new possession skills and some weapons and more magic crystals. None of these are unheard of systems but usually games don’t have this many. Why overcomplicate things by increasing stats by distributing points every level and spending Force to increase them too? One makes the other a bit redundant. Could easily drop one or two of these systems. Those aren’t even all of them but the other major one is more unique and justifies its existence, explaining it would need some spoilers.

For the background visuals they stitched together stock photos to make everything and at times it was really odd looking where it's clear they pieced photos together or it clashes with the anime style characters and monsters. At its best it does show some great looking scenery though. The character and monster designs are nice looking but their animations can be a bit stiff.

Took me 30+ hours to finish the main game and having looked at the japanese wiki with google translate, the post-game is ridiculously beefy. It was much longer than I’d have initially expected but I was impressed with how it kept me engaged the whole time. Easily can get 10’s of hours more of this without starting a new game.

Very enjoyable experience overall, especially considering its background. One last note for anyone who plans to play it, there’s an arena that unlocks new challenges after every chapter. Always do it when you can. There’s a few extremely important items locked behind that and the game doesn’t tell you this. Odd choice but I assume is a consequence of the developer wanting it to have meaningful rewards.

One man, one dream, and 16 years of passion culminate in this orgasmic action rpg.

Like every respectable man in the land of the rising sun, he inserted a significant number of cute maidens in this epic journey of one man who sacrifices everything to save his true love through time.

You have a considerable number of companions with different bosom sizes and goals, and elemental summons that can control fire and ice but not the size of their skirts, massive bosses with massive cleavages and a respectable number of underwear jokes, even some gender-bender shenanigans for the ones with more "eccentric" proclivities, a coomplete experience.

As a tip I recommend playing on harder difficulties or else you probably find this game easier than getting an erection playing Nier automata.

If you really like old school Ys games specifically the sidescroller RPG Ys III: Wanderers from Ys then you'll probably love Astlibra.

There are a number of sore spots like the Aguni boss fight in the lava area and a number of really frustrating bosses in the post-game story where they'll throw multiple 150k HP bosses with 1 hit kill lasers but despite all that I ultimately enjoyed the 60+ hours I spent with this game and would highly recommend it to anyone who:

1. enjoys the difficulty of the Ys series
2. has a lot of patience

The post game is excellent btw: it kind of turns into a diablo-like loot game where enemies start to drop Weapon/Armor/Accessory boards which basically makes all equipment viable at the end game by letting you slot in extra bonus stats or skills into everything.

Theres one other thing I should mention: I feel like this game is weirdly balanced around an ability in the game called "Berserk" which basically gives you 3x damage but also makes it so if you're hit once you die. Now maybe its because I was playing on Hard Mode but I was dying pretty much in 1 hit anyways without that ability. And if you do end up using healing items in boss fights, they don't reset if you end up having to restart the fight from a death. So, if you end up playing the game I would suggest going into the game knowing that you're probably going to have to use this ability at least for the main game.

Astlibra no es ni de cerca perfecto pero aun así no impidió que me maravillara la ambición de su relato. Acompañado de un combate sencillo y una construcción de personaje satisfactoria y adictiva. Su historia es emocional y bella todo bajo la clara mano de un escritor amateur pero con una enorme pasión y amor a los jrpgs que lo inspiraron.

Experiencias como estas son de admirar, imperfectas pero al mismo tiempo igual de cautivadoras.

Keizo esta sin duda es la prueba de tu existencia.

The combat was cool and unique, and I got addicted to the feel of always getting stronger through the multiple progression systems. I also liked that regular enemies could be just as challenging as bosses, maybe even more. The Karon skills were cool and varied, as were the possession skills, but I got into my usual complacent gamer mode and didn't use most of them.

The music was generally good and used well even if it was comprised of random doujin tracks (props to him for using Vocaloid tracks). Because he used a lot of tracks from each composer, the soundtrack had a strange consistency to it so that was nice. Some tracks stood out in a bad way but I got used to them (WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!).

The main story was an insane wild ride that reads like a shitpost if you try to describe it to someone. I like that KEIZO used all the KINOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO tropes together and somehow made them stick. Despite the amateurish character writing the game had a ton of legit emotional moments. The setting was also very creative and literally built for me. I don't know if it is the anime brainrot, but I found the fanservice comedy in this game funny instead of cringe.

As other posters have mentioned the postgame is worse than the main game in every aspect. You hardly visit any new areas or find new equipment, and the additional progressive system didn't interest me much. Also, you become very overpowered so none of the bosses pose a challenge (tbh I played on Normal, but I found some main story bosses hard, especially near the end), which was disappointing because you just kill stuff mindlessly for the last 20 hours of the game.

The postgame story had some great moments, but it also was unnecessary and I think it made the game's story worse as a whole by making it unnecessarily convoluted and completely breaking the time travel logic of the setting. I would have preferred if its good aspects were just integrated into the much more poignant main game.

The game has some bullshit puzzles and obstacles, the weight check in Chapter 6 made me suffer, but they are not that common. Each chapter feautres a point of no return at the start, so one must keep a ton of save slots to be safe. Also a lot of necessary items like the crossbow or crafting recipe books are rewards in the optional arena, so you have to do it between the chapters (it is pretty fun, but there is no indication you have to).

I don't know if this was a great or even good game, because it is very flawed in most aspects, but it does some things no other game I have played did, and is generally very creative and soulful, so I had a blast with it. That's what you get when the game is made by one person, and I'm happy to have experienced it.

I think it also made me more optimistic for the coming era of games with AI generated assets, given that even if much of the music, sound effects, and art weren't made for this game in particular, KEIZO still managed to show his vision by combining them. I hope that the AI revolution will enable more people to create the unfiltered autism games they always wanted to.

Astlibra Revision is RPG Mechanics - The Game. Every single RPG mechanic you've ever seen is jam packed into this in a way that makes your brain flood with dopamine every 30 seconds as you get more powerful with no care in the world for balance (which is ironic considering the scales mechanic). You literally get new mechanics up until like the very end of the game, in fact I don't think there's any limit to the amount you can grind in this game if you just want to keep getting stronger forever, which is pretty neat. Also literally no other game looks like this, I love how cobbled together its art style looks because that's also how the game feels on every other level. It's kinda a sort of cohesion through incohesion which I think is really special and interesting from a game made by (mostly) one person.

This is, without a doubt, my favorite game of the last decade.

If you are a fan of Korean grinders like DFO or Maple Story, but want a single-player experience that gives absolutely no craps about balance, you will have an absolute blast with this game. It wants you to break it. It dares you to break it. And when you do, it's pure bliss.

What starts off as a simple side-scrolling action game with a grand total of 3 actions turns into a game where you build our your moveset to encompass thousands of possible combinations. You're whipping spells, attacks, dodges, summons, all while fighting massive screen filling bosses and timing your iframes to dodge attacks that will one-shot you.

Gameplay is king, but the story is no slouch either. The writing is a bit juvenile, but the story itself is a tale of consequences. Your actions impact everyone, for better or worse. How you choose to internalize or validate these choices is ultimately how you view the world. It does drag on a little bit, but honestly, I didn't care.

And the game is horny. So that can be a positive or negative.

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.

The story of Astlibra's development is effectively canonized by now: if you know about this game, you probably already know it's a 2D sidescrolling JRPG developed by one guy, KEIZO, for 16 years. From both a gameplay and narrative perspective, this makes Astlibra feel retro and modern simultaneously, and oh God does it show this is an indie project.

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.

In a sense, the over-the-top design philosophy is infused into the gameplay nearly as much as the narrative. By the postgame there are four different progression systems, you unlock a wide variety of techs called "Karon," and I really have no idea how differently the game plays by experimenting with the many different build options because I fell into my rut around 25% through and brute forced my way to the end. 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; JRPGs normally make me sleepy, but the gameplay loop is fucking 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, possession skills (the closest the game comes to a magic system), 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 (or Metroidvania, the OG soulslike) where every input matters, dying, dying, and dying again to fucking 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. You can respec anytime you want, you chart a poorly implemented sphere grid, you grind your way into a veritable armory, wherein mastering each piece of equipment unlocks new Karon abilities or unlocks more magic crystals, necessary to actually equip Karon abilities, and you will never have enough magic crystals to equip more than 10-15% of your available Karon abilities at any given time, allowing plenty of room for experimentation.

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.

The art design is quirky yet charming, drenched in effects, 2D sprites slapped on backgrounds that are essentially two images photoshopped together exacerbated by its stiff animation. I adore the music. It is again something one should treasure through discovery, but the PC-98 aesthetic drenches this game artistically, and there's not a single bad track.

Really, 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. Right up until the postgame.

The postgame is effectively a sequel slapped on top of the base game; you think the bulk of plotlines are resolved, you think you've unlocked and done everything, and not only does the game implement MORE new mechanics with a Diablo-like loot system literally 45 hours into the game, but the story resoundingly emphasizes things are not yet over with a new mystery that completely curtails your ability to accept the game's "proper" ending as it is. And oh boy, the postgame is fucking fun, but everything falls apart.

It's best to go into this relatively blind, but I have a lot to rant about here. I won't spoil anything in detail but skip this paragraph if you don't want any expectations skewed.

--
The riveting difficulty gets tossed out the window as the game throws a new layer of possession skills that essentially trivialize every encounter you'll face until arguably the final-final boss (who still wasn't a fragment as difficult as the game's two "proper" final bosses), and the story almost literally deus ex machinas into oblivion every theme it spent its entire length establishing for the sake of conclusion. This game had a theme, goddamn it, and an excellent one at that. And the worst part about it is that I'm not even that mad, because the method by which it does so is, although tropey, so fucking cool it plays right into one of my favorite narrative structures. While the entire premise gets massacred in the process, it's done in a way that contextually makes sense (if you can look over how bloody extra everything is). But Astlibra's thesis carried so much emotional weight that seeing it discarded for the sake of worldbuilding and resolution is painful. By all rights, the proper ending is satisfying enough for a certain kind of crowd -- my kind -- and the postgame is just a postgame, however beefy it is. Can I reject the unfolding events as noncanon? Hard to say.
--

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!

Complete the main game
Now I can safely conclude that Astlibra Revision is the best JRPG in 2022.
This game is a 2D ARPG just like Odin Sphere or Muramasa. However, the story occupies a large part of this game and it's pretty good. I would even compare it with Chrono Trigger.
But it still has some drawbacks, the difficulty curve and growth curve are not very reasonable. You have to do a lot of grinding to level up.
Anyway, if you think Elden Ring can be the GOTY, I see no reason why Astlibra Revision can't.
At last, let me tell you a scary thing: this game is made by one person.