Astlibra Revision

• Genre: Action Platforming RPG
• Time Played: 65 Hours
• Too Short/Long: The core game feels just right, but it's probably a little too long with it's Postscript in mind. Don't get me wrong, I WANTED to keep playing, but it has you redo areas, when you were likely already redoing areas over. It's not something I generally dig and usually feel could be integrated into the core game a bit better. Still, the revisit of old content is quick and abridged.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Extremely please, I think I've got a new favorite out of this one.
• Why I played: I'd been following it for awhile and even remember seeing stuff about the original version and it's always interested me.
• Recommend to others: This is a definitely recommend from me. In fact, I am about to shoot over the link to a few people I was talking about it with in person. 

Astlibra starts out as a game filled with jank, cobbled together stock assets, intermingled with art from several different artists of very different backgrounds, obvious Game Maker-esque tilesets, royalty free music, questionable animation, writing that is hit or miss at times and probably needed another pass through an editor, and game systems slapped one on top of another.

And it never stops being that. But it owns that, and is maybe one of the best games I've played in recent years. Astlibra is fun to play, fun to experience, has great characters, and overall a great story with pretty good writing, even if it misses the mark from time to time. It's convoluted as hell but it's a time-traveling story and what time-traveling story isn't? I think there are clearly some spots where time stuff just happened to work out, because it was written as so, but overall it works.

The game is fun as heck though, I definitely feel like it's trying to fill many niches... and it does so, pretty well. While it's not a metroidvania per-se, I think it could definitely appeal to those who like the ones that lean heavier into the RPG aspects, more than the big interconnected map, platforming, and getting new abilities. I definitely think this is an RPG first, and action platformer second. That said, it has a lot of that.

What makes progress so great is that you're always upgrading SOMETHING. I do feel some games have too many systems, and this teeters the line, but it doesn't cross it because none of those systems are all that complicated. You farm monsters to get loot, loot lets you get new equipment. Equipment gets mastered and you get new skills. As you are doing that, you level up. As you do that, you get points toward a giant skill/stat tree separately from your level up stat allocation. As you do all that you get new items, those items can be weighed on scales that give you other passive bonuses.

Things are always escalating, in the story, in combat, in mechanics, in stats, in numbers, etc., and it's hard to put that down. There is hardly ever a dull moment and hardly ever a point where you're not striving for something or making progress.

Plus, it's just fun. Everything is quick and snappy. Some jank aside, the game generally feels pretty good and is pretty forgiving.