Finally a Good Offline Mobile Anime RPG? Ex Astris game review
192Download the game here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gryphline.exastris.gp&hl=en&gl=US
Ex astris is a full fledged single player jrpg made for mobile. This has left everyone wondering, when is it going to exploit my latent gambling addiction and leave me dead in a ditch with a handful of anime girls.
The answer is, never. Actually I need to say that one again with a massive question mark because I'm not pinning my flag on the faith that a company doesn't want all the money in the world.
Ex Astris is a sci-fi by hypergryph, the developers of arknight, which means nothing to me but hopefully that fills you with love and respect or whatever feeling you need that will make you spend the $10 upfront cost this game is asking for. Reportedly the game is around 14+ hours to complete and it has two endings, which aren't dramatically divergent so not really worth mentioning. But here we are.
It has a login at the start but you can skip it and operate entirely offline.
The sniff test for whether a game has a good combat system is whether I'm willing to go out of my way for a scrap. Ex Astris nails it with an engaging hybrid turn-based system. During enemy turns you have the chance to perfect parry, deflecting all damage and staggering your opponent. You also have to manage who is going to be blocking in real time, which gets tricky when only certain characters know how to not take a drill to the face.
What I like about this system is that perfect parries mean that taking damage is entirely your own dumb fault. In most RPGs taking at least a little damage is just the necessary wear and tear of encountering literally anything, similiar to most of my relationships. I think I speak for us all when I say there are a few people I wish I could have perfect parried.
Attacking is also complex enough for anyone willing to dive deep into min maxing combos. So far I've been happy pretending I know what I'm doing in this department, slowly finding little tricks and synergies
World design is split into tight zones, who doesn't love a tight zone. To get to them you jump aboard a space campervan which hides the load screen beautifully. During loading you can cook for buffs or craft artifacts for your Loadout, which comes in the form of a triangle jigsaw puzzle.
I'm playing on a Samsung galaxy Note 20 5G and it runs flawlessly at medium settings and good enough on Max with 60fps. It's Aesthetically gorgeous, even on medium. It goes for a cool airy treatment which helps distinguish it from hoyoverse's more snuggly warm schemes. I can almost smell the fresh air in this game. unfortunately imaginary worlds can't mask the scent of bus farts, the natural habitat of mobile games.
Controls feel great And the character moves as good as you'd expect from a standard triple A game, and not a standard japanese rpg game, if you know what I mean.
Writing on the other hand is almost beyond repair. My most uncharitable take is that it feels like they chucked the Chinese script through chat gpt and then a guy who pretended to know English gave it a quick once over.
Writing has an extremely bad case of the glazglorbs. This is a term my friends came up with whenever I mentioned what I was grinding in Warframe, which invariably sounded like a listacle of made up words James Cameron would think sounds pretty sci-fi.
So you'll often read a paragraph you instantly don't remember because every second word means literally nothing to you. It's like I'm playing an Alzheimer's simulator. The conversations people have barely feel like they're too each other most of them time.
The terminology does slowly begin to make sense but overall this script is getting gangbanged by a poor translation and the deadly fear of words used in a normal daily vocabulary.
There's been a lot of chatter recently within the anime and gaming community over how translation work should be done. I'm not going to go waist deep into that but it comes down to this, translation work is an art, not a science. Ex Astris's translation feels like the most ridged ideal of trying to treat it like a mechanical science, and as a consequence the human touch feels entirely absent.
I'm not regretting this purchase, but you have been warned!
Also btw it has cloud saving that can pass between Android and Apple if you wanna play on iPad at home, but you will have to buy the app twice, ok anyway, bye!