Spooktober 2023, Entry #2

The retro RPG Maker graphics, stylized art direction, the surreal yet playful aesthetic, the cerebral jumpscares: this made for a genuinely frightening experience. And that was all before the true ending.

I got the normal ending, had my fun, rated it a 3/5, and nearly sat this down without batting an eye, completely oblivious to what I was missing. The true ending recontextualizes the entire game so dramatically it had might as well not exist without it. It's a fantastic example of lateral storytelling and how to make a tragedy deeply personal. Fuck all that scary monsters, blood-and-gore, watching-people-die Michael Myers nonsense; J-horror really does hit different.

And it's wrapped up neatly in a 3-hour package. In a quagmire of 70-100 hour JRPG epics, I desperately need these single-sitting pick-me-ups, even as they drown me in their despair. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

In a genre drowning in 60-120 hour epics that can absolutely devour a working man's entire year, Ys I & II are a breath of fresh air. Each of these is a solid 2 session game -- 1 if you have a full day to commit to it -- finishable in 10 hours tops.

These were originally designed in the late 80s, so a guide is probably a must if you don't want to get lost because you didn't find the evil skull hidden behind a secret wall because the game doesn't completely convey what light magic does...

I appreciate how each game is divided into two arcs: arc 1 is a land-trotting adventure to gather information and tools to prepare you for arc 2, a dive into a massive, labyrinthian dungeon ripe with rooms, artifacts, and story. The final dungeons of each game are massive and half of the game. Darm Tower is so cool it got a full spin-off.

Ys II is probably a technical improvement on Ys I in nearly every way, and the review page reinforces that opinion, but I enjoyed Ys I more. These games are fun for the same reason the original Dragon Quest is fun: they predate the fusion of superfluous mechanics into a fatty genre. Ys I & II are lean, but Ys I more so. You bump into stuff and you win. That's the selling point. Ys II's introduction of a magic system conflicts with the bump system.

And while inventory, grinding, level design, and bosses are all technically an improvement, Ys I's dynamic locales, small-scale sense of adventure, and general aesthetic are more compelling. And that is, after all, an RPG's biggest selling point, no?

But as my introduction to the Ys series, these are fun. I look forward to how the series progresses.

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.

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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.
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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!