This game took me 4 restarts to actually get into it, it was more I wasn't in the mood. Once I got into the game properly it is really really good platinum games smashed it out the park with this. The switch performance is so well with this game. The art style combat and story are all top notch. I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing it. The idea of this game is presented and executed very well. My only complaint with this game is I change the difficulty on the last boss battle and it reset me back and hour to play the chapter again. So I had to look up the ending. Not a fan of that otherwise well worth a play through

the 7.6/10 game of all time is calling..

astral chain’s story starts off incredibly basic and kind of annoying.. to the point where i thought i wouldn't enjoy it as much as i thought i would. to put my feelings on the characters as blunt as i possibly can: this game is like evangelion if the cast spoke like ragna the bloodedge 50% of the time. do NOT play this game in english for any reason unless you’re prepared to hear akira act like the worst isekai protagonist you’ve ever had the displeasure of listening to. the game toys with some pretty interesting ideas and concepts but the ‘chosen one’ and silent protagonist tropes end up preventing it from being something amazing. this is a game that really depends on your attachment to the familial bond of the two main characters to have an impact, and because the player’s character ends up being silent, some story beats fall entirely flat.

from what i’ve said so far, you’d probably think i didn’t really enjoy the story of this game, but i actually really did. there is a lot of lore here for players to sift through if they want and when the writers choose to actually write this game can be great. the last 45% of this game is really good, and i do think it’s worth sitting through the pretty OK first half to get to. there is a lot of symbolism here with birds which i think is pretty awesome when you link things together.

i'll keep things brief on the combat side of things, mostly out of credit to platinum for always making good action games. fighting in this game is so much fun just because of the amount of skills and playstyles you have at your disposal. in every single combat encounter with an enemy, you can link up attacks to make things feel at least somewhat engaging, which is all something like this needs to be fun. every legion (these are basically mini eva units with different playstyles that affect how you fight. beast is the best one btw.) i would have liked to have seen more types of weapons for the protagonist.. three is alright but i didn’t see myself using the pistol much unless there was something on the wall. speaking of.. this game sometimes decides that it wants to do air combat, and when it does it really just becomes an extremely shallow exchange between you and the enemy where you’re either sending the legion out to hit them in the air repeatedly, or shooting at them with the gun. definitely a weak point for the game, albeit not a large one. side note, platinum needs to stop trying to work with multiple playstyles and halfassing one. the bike portions are cool to look at but annoying to play.

SPOILERS FOR MAIN STORY EVENTS AHEAD. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.


let’s start with akira for character reviews as i think he’s the most fleshed out character here. um.. i kind of don’t like him but i also think he’s cool. it’s weird. every single time he starts to act somewhat human, they have to either punch down at him or throw him the most annoying and forced line of all time. when the writers decide they actually feel like writing him, however, he has some great character moments that build him up and are genuinely touching. his ending was amazing and one of my favorite moments in the entire story.

hal was probably my second favorite character in the game. i can’t exactly explain why, because he’s not even relatively significant in the grand scheme of things, but i just have a thing for boys that are nerds like he is. hal always comes across well and has a good heart that i really enjoyed. his role in the story never felt forced which is actually surprising, considering many other characters struggle to make as big of an impact as him while being present for longer.

jena anderson is awesome. to be honest, i think that this game would have benefitted from keeping her around for longer. i like yohan as this game’s antagonist, but jena is just so much more interesting as a character what with her dirty and careless look compared to the well kept, clean feel of the main cast. 10/10 character stuck in a 7.5/10 game. i hope she comes back if there’s a sequel.

somehow the most nonexistent, forgettable game i've ever played. the combat system is wonky and hard to grapple with yet the game is piss easy 99% of the time, the plot is hammy yet impossible to follow... the game's aesthetic can be pretty cool at times and it's got a few funky songs, but it's one of those games where i forgot almost everything about it the second i put it down. for other platinum games i can kinda understand the appeal of optimizing your combat and getting those S ranks, but you couldn't pay me to replay any of these levels.

It's badass.

Finally getting to pick this up and play feels a bit surreal to me. I've been eyeing this since it originally released. At the time I passed on it, because I was a lame and judgy 17 yr old who wrote it off as too weird and anime. By the time I convinced myself, physical copies started getting somewhat rare in retail but I was able to find an affordable import on ebay. After playing through it, I can't say my initial impressions were wrong but Astral Chain 's over-the-top, seinen-laced DNA is precisely what endeared me to it so much.

I like how the story carries itself with a sincere grace. The game's narrative somehow manages to grip onto you despite its cast of supporting characters feeling somewhat generic. Fortunately, the twins' relationship takes center stage in the latter half of the game and it's all the better for it. It nevers feel quite too serious though and I appreciate that because I am mowing down demons with my funny dog persona after all.

Speaking of mowing down demons... The combat in this game is pure bliss. I love how responsive the dodge feels. Pulling off a row of perfect dodges into a slew of sync attacks against a miniboss/boss injects you with a metric fuck ton of adrenaline and is some of the most satisfying game feel I've ever encountered. The legions are all so varied and fun to use. There are probably some that are just objectively better to use for an entire playthrough but enemy encounters often had me switching legions mid combo depending on the situation. I like that I felt forced to experiment with the strengths of other legions because it leads to combat always feeling fresh even near the end of the game.

As much as Astral Chain tries to cutout the bullshit and throw the player into the thick of action, it also pays an impressive amount of respect to its setting. At the end of the day you are a police officer and the priority is to protect and serve. The inclusion of the IRIS and the investigation notes add an extra layer of immersion that connects you to this world, its people and its history. The game also expresses this through a variety of optional missions within in each "file" outside of the main quest. These missions can range from balancing a tower of ice cream for a snot-nosed kid to destroying a cocky officer's high score in the shooting range with your Arrow legion. Others can be more sprawling side adventures that often end up in you having to save civilians from an Eldritch horror residing in the Astral Plane. I personally think it strikes the right balance of variety and quality of content. I was a little disappointed with the lack of motorbike missions and how much time I spent on that last sliding puzzle (you know the one).

I would be remiss if I didn't throw out a mention to this game's OST. Astral Chain boasts a seamless dynamic soundtrack. The HQ and civilian area themes present moody, serene synths that effortlessly transition into the more frenetic electric guitars and drums once chimeras burst on the scene. The music is a character in itself and cranks some of the most cinematic moments in this game (like the entirety of File 11) from a 7 to a 10.

Anyways this review is already too long. This is easily a top 2 switch game and has converted me to PlatinumGames enjoyer. I hope they can make a sequel granted the funds and material are there. I'm going to go collect the S+ ranks I missed.

Es como Evangelion, pero con un protagonista todavía menos carismático. Dios bendiga a Yuzu por permitirme jugarlo a 60 fps.

Pros:
- El sistema de combate, en el que tienes que manejar a dos "personajes" al mismo tiempo, es bastante refrescante.
- Tiene una gran cantidad de contenido en forma de pequeñas misiones, muchas de ellas bastante curiosas, aunque acaban cayendo en la repetición.
- Muy japonés.

Contras:
- La cámara puede darte serios dolores de cabeza.
- El sistema de progresión es muy muy limitado y varía poco la jugabilidad.
- Muy japonés.

It's everything I dislike about platinum games with nothing I like. The overpowered iframe dodge kills whatever cool positioning trickery you could eke out of this stand system, movement is finicky due to the high momentum that inhibits precision despite platforming asking for a modicum of it, there's no semblance of character from anybody in the cast even outside of the protagonist being human cardboard, the narrative is a half-baked parade of anime cliches that assumes much more intrigue than exists of its foreshadowing that feels like it's made so the players' children can follow along, the game continually places its combat gauntlets in a place with one single tileset and very little iteration on what you're doing there, and the detective mechanics aren't interesting and aren't stressed in ways that might be remotely interesting or fun, it's instead concerned with insanely bloated and overlong sequences of you beating on unarmed civilians and doing collectathon bullshit that's over-telegraphed while the parts of the game that actually need explaining go unremarked-upon. I like the police station theme and Marie is funny, though.

Mechanically, very few of its Platinum gimmick inclusions feel like they actually deserve to exist and just slow down the pace? Blade mode, zandatsu, and wicked weaves all feel really bad in comparison to the games they're from and strings are so fucking long before you use a sync attack and so repetitious and uninteractive that it's not really fun to beat on enemies.

The actual legion combat stuff is just not very fun, you just kind of hit L2 and let them do their thing while you mash your own attack and dodge, occasionally using cooldown moves or command inputs that have to be unlocked from the fucking 135 skill nodes. If they didn't have the "teleport to where your legion is standing" move I'd say "literally everything it was trying to do was done better by Bayonetta 3," but I can settle for "99% of what it was trying to do was done better by Bayonetta 3."

Bayonetta 3's decision to make you buffer 1-2 attacks ahead of time while having to dial in combos yourself as well is genius for allowing that left-brain-right-brain fantasy of playing a puppet character in a game like this, but you just can't do that in this game because there's one single attack string for every weapon and pitiful pause combos. The chain stuff doesn't feel like it affects combat as much as it should, circling an enemy to bind them is a lengthy process due to how slow the game is in general and your reward is being able to get a full greatsword string in, which you can do anyways if you get a perfect dodge.

Tripping charging enemies is cool and evokes an MMO's stack/spread mechanics, but it just doesn't happen enough or have enough layers of mechanical or encounter design to be fully compelling. Also, Shell-type enemies are fucking garbage and one of the worst enemy concepts I've seen in this genre. I would rather fight a DMC4 Chimera than an enemy which makes other people in the encounter full-on invincible until you trial-and-error each variant's weakness, something the game does not deign worthy of explication despite tutorializing the pause menu's function.

Flying around with the chain and doing air combos is its own brand of fun but this game had eight full hours to show me some sauce and there wasn't anything.
Goodbye forever, Takahisa Taura. Your games all suck.