So, if you’ve watched my streams anytime this past fall or winter, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve been singing the praises of a game called Astlibra Revision.
I like it a lot. So much, in fact, that I’d go so far as to call it the best game I played in 2022. However, it’s hard to explain why without going into a lot of detail, so that’s what I’m about to do. I’ll try not to spoil too much of the game, but if you want to go in completely blind, this is your only warning. Click the Read More button if you're prepared to read thousands of words about my GOTY 2022.
I guess I’ll start by talking a little bit about the history of the game. Astlibra Revision is, well, a revision of a freeware game by a developer named Keizo. For whatever reason, a ton of websites claim it was originally a browser game even though a simple google search and the dev’s own AMA on Reddit prove otherwise:
And no, that isn’t a typo; the game was developed over a 15 year period. The freeware version was only released in Japanese, with Keizo adding new chapters to it as development progressed. Since the game never got a translation from Japanese, it was virtually unknown and overlooked in favour of games that, understandably, players could actually read. I discovered the game during Steam’s October 2022 Next Fest, where a bunch of upcoming games get their own dedicated spotlight with playable demos. My strategy was to search for the term “metroidvania” and download whatever demos looked interesting, then stream the demos and share my thoughts on ‘em.
Folks, I got pranked hard that day, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Astlibra is not a metroidvania - it’s a sidescrolling action RPG similar to the Ys series but with clear inspiration from a ton of other RPGs. The game isn’t designed around getting upgrades that unlock new paths in a singular interconnected world; but instead divided into chapters that take place in their own separate maps entirely.
The premise of the game is fairly straightforward - the game opens with your character (a nameless, faceless orphan) and a little girl trying to escape from a horde of demons. The two of you are attacked by a dragon demon, and you get knocked unconscious, awakening to find yourself in an abandoned cabin in the wilderness with the girl gone and your only companion being an amnesiac talking crow (who claims he is not a crow) named Karon. Karon does some recon and determines that you are in the middle of nowhere.
After taking stock of the situation, the two of you decide to risk wandering the wilderness in search of civilization and set off on your journey.
For eight years.
Did I mention that the game warns you straight up front that the intro sequence is very long with no real gameplay?
It’s not quite as long as, say, a Persona game, but you can expect to spend about 15-20 minutes before you actually get into the gameplay proper if you choose to watch the opening. Were this any other game, it’d be a hard recommendation, but Astlibra’s story is such a wild ride that I really do think it’s worth your time to sit and take everything in so you know what’s going on.
Okay! So now I finally get to talk about the gameplay! At its core, Astlibra is a fairly straightforward 2D hack-and-slash. Your first weapon is a tree branch given to you by your good buddy Karon and it comes with a basic 5-hit attack string performed by pressing the attack button. You’ve also got a helm breaker attack performed by holding down on the d-pad and pressing the attack button while airborne. Although you don’t start with one, you’ll soon find shields that allow you to block attacks as long as you have enough shield gauge to do so, with better shields having a higher gauge.
All weapons in the game have similar attack strings, but have different ranges and weights, can come in one or two-handed varieties, and inflict various damage types and break damage - more on that later. Attacks feel sufficiently weighty, with each landed hit resulting in just enough hitstop to feel meaningful but not disrupt the action. It’s tremendously satisfying to swing into a big group of enemies and feel the game slow down just a bit as you score a few dozen individual hits.
Your first fight is against three slimes who are barely a match for your simple tree branch. A few combos will mop them up without issue and allow you to progress. It’s fun to look back on this moment once you’ve gotten further into the game and realize how far you’ve come.
If you’re paying careful attention during the fight, you might notice that you’re receiving a combo bonus for repeatedly scoring hits on enemies, similar to the bonuses in Ys games like Origin or Oath in Felghana. The system encourages you to stay on the offensive, rewarding you with damage reduction, increased attack range, speed, and even stealing resources from enemies if your combo count gets high enough.
Moving on from the slime fight, the game prompts you to open the bizarrely-labeled “KARON” option in your menu - doing so reveals the game’s first method of customization. Passive abilities in Astlibra work similarly to the ability system in Final Fantasy IX, where you assign a limited stock of magic crystals to equip the passive abilities that you want. Early on, your crystal pool is very limited, so you won’t be able to equip the double jump ability that you start with. Thankfully, your ability choices aren’t permanent and can be swapped out at will as long as you have enough crystals to afford their cost. Unlike FFIX, however, you don’t gain more crystals by levelling up. You can either find them scattered around the maps in treasure chests, or by two other methods which I’ll be getting to in a little bit.
Being an action RPG, Astlibra features a beefy collection of equipment. There are tons of weapons, shields, armour, and accessories to collect. I really love how every piece of gear in the game (accessories excluded) modifies your character’s appearance. There is no generic “one size fits all” character sprite in this game, which is absolutely not necessary for gameplay purposes but is such a nice touch that I’d be doing the game a disservice by not mentioning it.
On top of gear changing your appearance, each non-accessory equipment piece can be mastered, once again taking a page from FFIX. By earning enough experience while wearing something, you’ll master that item and unlock some sort of bonus! A bonus you’ll see often is Enhanced Performance - not only do the base stats of the item increase, but you also get another magic crystal that you can use in the Karon menu to equip more abilities. Some items grant you an entirely new passive ability to equip, and you can even use that ability for no magic crystal cost if you have that mastered item equipped! It’s such a great way to encourage you to try and seek out every piece of gear instead of just using whatever has the best stats! And just in case you were wondering, there are 96 passive abilities in the game, and you only start with four. You’ll almost never run out of new gear to find and try.
Of course, you’re not going to get all this equipment for free. Almost every piece of gear needs to be crafted with materials obtained by killing monsters and gathering from ore piles with pickaxes. Thankfully, this isn’t going to be a huge grind since there are ways to improve item drop rates between boosting your luck stat and finding passive skills to get more drops. Mining only takes a few seconds of your time, and gathering points respawn whenever you get to a save point. You’re also going to want to boost your luck because each chapter has its own set of hidden rare and legendary equipment recipes, and it’ll be a lot easier to get those legendary chest drops with a high luck stat. There’s also one more benefit to having a high luck stat, which segues nicely into the next big mechanic the game has to offer…
When you kill monsters, you’ll receive one of six different coloured gemeralds on top of your usual EXP/money/item rewards. These force gems are spent in what the game calls the Growth Tree, which is a huge grid of nodes that grant you permanent bonuses as you unlock them. The nice thing is that if a node asks for a gem colour that you don’t have enough of, you can instead convert any other colour gem to the one you need at a 3:1 ratio, making it so that you won’t get stuck on the tree if you don’t have access to enemies that drop the specific gem colour you need.
While the vast majority of nodes on the tree give you stat bonuses, you’re encouraged to push toward the ends of the branches since these are where the best rewards lie. You might find more magic crystals to use for passive abilities, keys to unlock additional branches on the tree (it’s really more of a skill labyrinth than a tree), and even pieces of equipment, naturally with their own ability to master. There’s also one more huge incentive to explore the tree, and that’s…
Magic! Your pal Karon isn’t just there to hover around you - he can temporarily possess you and empower you to cast a variety of magic spells. There are tons of these spells and they have all kinds of different effects - self-buffs, projectiles, orbiting shields, fullscreen attacks, temporary assist summons, just to name a few. In order to cast these spells, you need stamina, or ST. ST is generated when you hit enemies with your melee attacks, and it will drain back to 0 if you don’t hit anything for a bit. You can equip one spell for each elemental type in the game, and each element is activated by performing a directional button combination while holding the cast button as shown in the image above. Fire spells are always cast by pressing up once or twice, cold is down once or twice, earth is down/right or right/down, etc. Thankfully, the action pauses while inputting your commands (unless you’re playing on the two hardest difficulties!) so you can take a breather to assess the situation while determining what to cast.
There’s one more benefit to spellcasting - you are immune to all damage for a short period after you cast a spell, and this applies to every spell in the game. Some spells even transform you, which grant even longer periods of damage immunity. With good timing, you can simply ignore dangerous attacks by casting a spell of your own! Between the combo bonuses, ST generation, and immunity while casting spells, Astlibra is a game that really wants you to stay in the fight, and rewards you for doing so. However, it should be noted that you’re only immune to damage, not status effects - trying to cast a spell to avoid an attack that causes bleed or petrification is usually not a good move.
The only way to get these spells is by progressing in the growth tree mentioned earlier, but it’s well worth the effort. Almost every spell is useful and it’s definitely a good idea to pour some of your stat points into magic to take advantage of them.
With each level up, you gain stat points that can be assigned into one of seven categories. Almost any stat distribution is viable with the exception of adaptability which is usually more niche and not meant to be focused as a main stat. Thankfully, stat respecs can be done for free at any of the blue crystals located in most shops in the game, or you can purchase a respec potion for dirt-cheap in case you want to respec in the field. It's worth your time to experiment with different builds, or dump a bunch of points into luck for a bit if you're looking to get more items.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the mechanics in this game, but they’re designed to flow together so well that it makes you want to fully engage with all of them. Each chapter brings a new set of enemy and gathering materials to make items with, and in the process of making them, you’re gaining new passives, learning new spells, and growing stronger in a way that isn’t just making your damage numbers bigger. There’s so much customization available that you’re always wanting to seek out the cool new stuff that you couldn’t do before. One of my favourite skills allows you to do 3 times your normal attack damage, but it also makes any damage you take lethal. It’s a massive game-changer and allows you to potentially punch way above your weight class, if you’re good enough to never get touched.
These new ability “aha!” moments extend to the combat as well. One of the earliest mastery skills you’ll learn allows you to cancel an attack at any time into a guard when you have a shield equipped. If you’re a fighting game player, you’re probably salivating right now. Unlockable skills allow you to heal when you perform a Just Guard (blocking right as an attack hits). You also can find an ability that allows you to perform a Castlevania-style backstep that makes you immune to damage, and this can also be used to cancel attacks. You'll also find scrolls that teach you new combat abilities such as launchers and shield bashes, just to name a few.
The more time you spend in combat, the more you grasp the subtle nuances of how you can chain attacks together, and it won’t be long before you’re able to do launchers, quickly guard an attack while moving upward from your launcher’s momentum, land a few more hits, start a helm breaker and then queue up a spell to go off as you land. It’s immensely satisfying and enjoyable to truly master how fighting works in Astlibra, and it’s another one of the many reasons I love it so much. You could probably beat the game by carefully attacking from a safe distance and blocking when you think an attack is on its way, but you can also jump in there and go absolutely wild if you want to, and the game rewards you for it.
I absolutely could rave about the gameplay some more, but I’ve already written a good 1500+ words about it and there is plenty more to talk about. So, next I’m going to talk about the game’s visuals. They’re kind of…weird? It’s not an ugly game, but there’s a strange pseudo-realism to the graphics where it looks like photorealistic textures are filtered and formed into video game shapes. Environments are clearly designed around video game logic, where impossible rock formations float in midair, looking almost like a Maple Story jump quest. Enemies have a sort of skeletal animation style, where rather than distinct animation sprites, a collection of PNGs are animated to move as a single unit. This is especially noticeable in big boss fights, where massive screen-filling bosses move each limb individually for their movement and attacks. I know that this style of animation isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I can’t fault the developer for doing this when most of the art assets in this game are from pre-existing asset libraries.
For Astlibra Revision, Keizo enlisted the help of artist Shigatake, known for his work on Vanillaware titles like Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown, and Muramasa. He redrew some of the monsters, character portraits, sprites, and the dragon-type bosses in the game. Compare these updated character portraits and sprites from the freeware release to Revision, courtesy of Shigatake himself. While most English-speaking players won’t have a frame of reference for the updated graphics due to never having played the original freeware release, it is much appreciated.
The use of existing assets extends to the soundtrack as well. Keizo is a man who recognizes his weaknesses, and so rather than attempt to compose 130+ songs for his game, he instead turned to free and paid sources. As a result, it can sometimes seem a little disconnected, with no real opportunity to build off themes or leitmotifs since none of the music was composed specifically for the game. That being said, most of the choices are solid, with only a few songs I actively disliked. Boss themes are bombastic and match their massive size, and there’s plenty of variety in genres. I was initially hesitant when I heard the game would be using existing music, but once Surface Tension by S.S.H. kicks in when you fight the first boss, I was all-in.
Although I really love Astlibra, it does have a few pain points that might turn players off. No game is perfect, and I can’t fairly talk about how much I love this game without also talking about the things I dislike about it. I’m going to start with my biggest complaint about the game:
The game’s tone will shift from serious to horny at the drop of a hat and it really drags the story down when it happens. I wish it were just one or two isolated incidents, but there are several times during the story where Keizo contracts the Horny Virus and decides to hit you with some tonal whiplash. As an example, once the game starts introducing female companions into the main cast, they’re often made the target of seemingly out-of-nowhere horniness. One chapter’s premise involves the ladies of the group heading off to the mountains to take a break at the hot springs. For whatever reason, the men (including your character) decide they’re going to tag along and peep on them in the bath for no good reason. You, the player, have no agency to prevent this from happening or even to raise any objection - it’s simply an unavoidable part of the story that you’re forced to take part in.
There are also some especially egregious character designs - one of the most important characters to the plot wears nothing but lingerie. One particular boss fight in a later chapter stands out since it appears right after a pretty emotional plot beat, and the mood is kind of spoiled when you’re suddenly fighting a giant woman with her legs spread open. Amazingly enough, we actually received a toned-down version of this design, as the original release was wearing even less clothing.
Another rough spot that I have with the game is the localization into English. It’s completely playable and you’ll be able to understand the plot, but there are plenty of weird phrasing choices, line breaks that look like they were placed around the original Japanese text, extra or missing punctuation, and even a few incorrect skill descriptions.
Thankfully, the localization is slated to receive another editing pass in a future patch, but for now it’s a bit janky, so if this is a dealbreaker for you it might be better to hold off until it gets an update.
Finally, the game has some puzzles that aren’t especially well-designed. Since these are required to progress the story, it can grind the flow of the game to a halt if you can’t figure out the logic required to solve them. Chapters 4 and 6 both have the worst ones in my opinion, so I would absolutely suggest looking up a guide if you get stuck. This game is at its best when you’re enjoying it and not trying every key item in your inventory in the hopes that you’ll finally find the intended solution.
Despite these weaknesses, Astlibra Revision is a game that resonated with me in a way that most other games don’t. It’s a game that one guy spent 15 years of his life making, a game that clearly takes inspirations from earlier titles, but refines and and remixes them into something truly unique. The story is bombastic and escalates with each chapter - what starts as a seemingly generic fantasy RPG quickly balloons into something absolutely wild and off-the-wall. It’s not the greatest story ever written or anything like that, but it is entertaining as hell and I found myself weirdly invested in it.
This game has so much love poured into it that you absolutely owe it to yourself to play it. It might look a bit janky but it's got tons of soul, and if you enjoy ARPGs I'm sure you'll have a great time with the game. It's currently discounted on Steam for the spring sale and it also has a pretty hefty demo that allows you to transfer progress over to the full version. A Switch port has been announced with no release date yet at time of writing, and the Astlibra Gaiden sidegame where you play as a different character and explore a roguelike-style dungeon is also in development as DLC for Astlibra Revision, which I'm sure I will sink much more time into once it drops.
Astlibra Revision GOTY 2022. I've never been happier to be pranked by a Metroidvania tag. Play this game.
