Announced during February’s Nintendo Direct, Astral Chain is the new gift from Platinum Games to the Nintendo Switch platform. Mixing police investigation with fights against Chimeras, Takahisa Taura’s first major project as director is not a game that is beyond reproach — despite a concept with enormous potential.
- Genre: Action
- Release Date: August 30, 2019
- Platform: Nintendo Switch
- Developer: Platinum Games
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Price: $59.99
A new original IP from the Platinum Games team, Astral Chain offers action genre fans the opportunity to join The Ark, a kind of futuristic city and the last bastion of humanity in the face of an ever-increasing threat. Inhabitants of the city must deal with an onslaught of Chimeras, merciless creatures that have emerged from a parallel dimension.
As a young recruit of Neuron, a police task force charged with the eradication of these monsters, you must learn how to use your X-Baton to ensure the law prevails — all while taking care of your Legions, Chimeras which have been captured and turned to counter the enemy forces.
Divided into a dozen chapters, Astral Chain offers a classic ‘shōnen’ scenario, with a constant rise in strength before a finale of cataclysmic proportions. We’ve seen it all before, but it contains twists and turns that are still worth the detour. However, it suffers overall from quite poor writing and narrative, which leaves something to be desired.
This is obviously not what we look for in a Platinum title, but Astral Chain tries to shove its lore down your throat, and some early chapters even require reading reports from your PC before you can move on to the actual content.
The idea behind Astral Chain does have the merit of being original — behind your status as humanity’s last hope, you’ll also experience the life of an officer of the law, with each file or act starting at the police station (one or two exceptions aside).
The Neuron headquarters are full of NPCs, who only dream of two things — to tell you about their lives, and to ask you for small ‘favours’. Most of which are superficial side quests, but more on that later. Even if giving life to the police station was with good intentions, again the weakness of the writing and the derisory lack of appeal of these side quests make them unconvincing.
There’s actually a major problem with the very structure of Astral Chain — on the one hand, the game tries to sell us a ruthless world in which a sense of urgency is omnipresent, and on the other you have to raise the morale of your colleagues while dressed as a stuffed dog. While the Yakuza games do a great job of managing this perilous gap between absurd humour and a first-class plot, unfortunately Astral Chain does not.
While plot isn’t necessarily key in a game such as this, the promise behind Platinum’s new title was to mix grand battles with investigation in a futuristic universe. The latter is clearly present, but the way it is implemented misses the mark quite badly. One could have thought that the staging would remedy this, but even here Astral Chain disappoints.
Epic cutscenes can be counted on one hand, while each phase of dialogue gives rise to a ballet of still animations. Finally, it should be noted that important exchanges between characters take place in the middle of fights, so it is very easy to be too distracted to follow along.
However, don’t write Astral Chain off just yet — far from it. These few instances don’t do enough to erase the pedigree of the studio which created it.
Astral Pain
As mentioned above, Astral Chain is committed to mixing investigative set pieces with dynamic battles. Between areas full of monsters, your character will have the opportunity to help widows and orphans in many ways, always through smaller, secondary objectives such as following a suspect, closing a Chimera portal, bringing ice-cream to a child. These objectives are varied, and sometimes remind us more of a collection of minigames than real missions.
The problem is that they are anything but optional for those who covet the S+ score for a chapter — that ultimate reward in games of this type. If you set them aside, they will not appear in the summary at the end of the chapter — and you can say goodbye to the perfect score you might have been expecting.
Again, the game is torn between the desire to make us live a frenetic adventure, and the desire to give detail to The Ark and the concerns of its inhabitants. These investigation phases ultimately consist only of a series of actions that quickly become redundant, even if the game takes the time to integrate the Legions and their power into the first part of the game.
These appendices will at least provide an opportunity to recover the resources needed to improve your equipment, so that at least gives us the opportunity to discuss Astral Chain’s selling point — its five Legions.
Each offers a different fighting style and field skills. For example, the Beast Legion is perfect for finding treasure or enemies hidden underground, while the Arm Legion is able to lift huge obstacles.
The way the five Chimeras complement each other lends a beautiful depth to the gameplay during battles, and customization is complete enough to make us spend a decent amount of time optimizing in the menu. In addition to a small talent tree, each monster has two slots for active skills, and a passive that will evolve as your Legions evolve.
Your equipment may also be improved, but increasing the level of your X-Baton or Legatus Unit will require a lot of resources collected from the field — as well as a portion of your salary, determined by your rank as an agent.
Despite an interface that sometimes lacks clarity, the customization side of Astral Chain’s gameplay works really well. To add a little layer of RPG to the game, Platinum have also integrated many types of consumables to increase your character’s stats for a short time. If you are playing on “Normal” difficulty, it will sometimes be necessary to use these items, as Astral Chain doesn’t hesitate to throw formidable bosses your way towards the end.
When it’s time to take up arms, Neuron agents brandish their astral chain and the Legion attached to it. Battles are fought by managing two characters at once — your Chimeras cannot remain in the field indefinitely, so you will have to monitor their health gauges to avoid the long cooldowns that determine their reappearance.
The number of actions available to you in the middle of the action is dizzying — it is possible to change the form of your weapon, to use the chain to hinder enemies or stop their charge, and all to which are added the specifics of each individual Legion.
Clearly, Astral Chain is not easily tamed, and it will likely take you several hours to get used to the large number of controls and the information which bombards your screen.
As you progress, your allies will gain new ways to synchronize with your agent’s assaults, adding new combos and capabilities. On Normal difficulty, the game offers a challenge, but it is only the difficulty of the battles that will be an obstacle to progression.
Astral Chain is a capricious action game, and the many camera or targeting issues have tested our patience on many occasions. The discharge of the huge number of visual effects means battles become hard to read as a result, and this is the final straw.
Level design is also the cause of much disappointment — given the amount of real estate your character and Legion take up on the screen, clashes in cramped spaces become infernal, even causing unfair deaths.
Between these eventful encounters, the player is invited to complete the secondary objectives mentioned above, or explore one of the many Chimera portals in The Ark. Here, the game proposes platform stages or puzzles, which are always very basic and utilize the powers of the Legions.
Intended to add variation to the game, the latter are too simple and the mechanics of the platforming far too risky for it to revive interest in the game outside of the battles.
Astral Chain also struggles to implement original game phases such as infiltration or timed sequences — always with the same approximation in gameplay and which make the game more frustrating than anything else.
If there’s one thing we can’t take away from Astral Chain, it’s the sublime artistic direction, which mixes cel shading and more classic 3D art. It’s a result that explodes on the screen. The rendering has its drawbacks, since the frame rate — capped at 30 fps — regularly falls below 20 fps during the busiest situations.
In handheld mode, the visual overload will certainly cause you to lose all hope of understanding what is happening on the screen as soon as it displays more than three enemies at once.
As discussed earlier, the staging of the game doesn’t really help its unique graphic style shine — everything is too stiff, the lipsync is almost non-existent, and the character design leaves a lot to be desired.
The same is true for the soundtrack, which despite some compositions that leave their mark, is full of rather generic electro tracks.
Show moreWritten by Lloyd. Translated from the French by Millenium.
