Astral Chain Kinda Rocks

The Nintendo Switch is different things to different people, but to me it’s Nintendo’s first great handheld since the OG Nintendo DS way back in 2005. While the later editions to the DS line were no doubt financial hits, I think that time will show that what DS games lacked in graphics, they more than made up for with fun-factor.

Metroid Prime Hunters, Mario Kart DS, the New Super Mario Bros. and Custom Robo are my personal favorites but Pokemon Diamond and Pearl are fan favorites as well.

But the Switch is truly unique, both among consoles in general and in Nintendo’s handheld family.

I recently rented Astral Chain, PlatinumGames’ Switch exclusive and while the first two hours of the game had me a little frustrated, it has opened up into one of my favorite Switch games I’ve played, blowing stuff like Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing out of the water.

It’s a button-mashy spectacle fighter with a cool-cyberpunk aesthetic and a Super-Japanese story that will have you laughing at its sheer absurdity. The game’s 3 fighting styles (Baton, Sword, and GUN) gel nicely with it’s robotic partners connected to your player character with the titular “Astral Chain”. These “Legions”, are enslaved demons from some goofy-ass cyber dimension and they come in 4-ish varieties: Regular Sword-Guy, Anti-Air, Strong-Man, and Woof.

All of them except Woof are useful in combat, but the dog-like “Beast Legion” makes up for that with his cute factor.

About half the game is combat and the other half is wandering around doing L.A. Noire style detective work (though it’s nowhere near as deep) and completing silly, but mostly fun side-quests. You’ll do everything from cheering up co-workers at the police station (did I mention you’re a cop?) to retrieving a lost balloon for a woman in the city. There’s even a mini-game where you get to collect stray cats.

The combat is simple enough to not be frustrating, but stylish enough to make you want to keep doing it, and even though there are only like…12 enemy types not-including bosses, it hasn’t gotten boring yet. You can use your demon buddy to tie up enemies in chains, catch them in midair, double-team them in a flurry of blows, and even do sweet, action movie gun choreography. It’s usually a little too easy, but its very stimulating. Seriously.

Look at these screenshots! I can’t even tell what’s going on and I’m the one that took them.

Even if its not the most technical action game, it keeps you fully engaged during the fights. If I wanted to be truly critical, I’d say that the action, while frenetic, isn’t up to the usual PlatinumGames standards. Vanquish and Metal Gear Rising present a far better challenge and have comparable visuals to boot. But even a groundball by PlatinumGames is better than a Home Run by most other devs, so I’ll let it slide <Insert Vanquish Joke Here>

My biggest gripes have to be the long-ass tutorial, which seems to be par for course for more and more Japanese games these days. I was fuming when Astral Chain decided it needed to explain to me that I can use currency to buy things at the shop. As if money and stores don’t exist… ya know, in real life.

Aside from that the dialogue can go on a bit long some times, but it’s skippable. What’s not skippable is some of the detective missions, which often require you to individually talk to 20-30 NPCs, sometimes more, with no voice acting, just to progress the story. It’s boring, and completely out of place.

The other crumby feature is that about half the time, when you’re in the alternate dimension fighting the demons, you have to do a bunch of shitty platforming that is completely awkward and unintuitive. I must have fallen off the dang platforms about 100 times in total. The main issue is that there is no jump button instead the game requires you to control your legion have them levitate out to a platform you're trying to reach and then use a command to pull your character towards your lesion sort of like a slow-motion grappling hook. But the problem is that your legion is designed for combat not for traversal so while it's easy to get your legion to move from place to place at a distance it's really difficult to command them to make minor technical adjustments in their placement meeting that you infuriatingly miss platforms by a couple inches. Over and over and over. The specific command that causes the issue is that when you make a small sharp adjustment with the analog stick, your legion darts in whatever it direction the adjustment was pointed and (which makes sense for combat) however there is already a button that commands your legion to charge at the closest enemy using the left trigger so there's no reason to map the same commands to two different buttons when the second button is also needed for precise jumping.

I don’t mind platforming in a platforming game, but I can’t come to terms with why we’re still putting broken platforming sections in non-platforming games. Doom Eternal? Astral Chain? I’m looking at you two.

While it's not exclusive to Astral Chain the Switch’s screenshot button is quickly becoming my favorite feature of the console. Astral Chain is just silly enough to have a photo-taking mode. Not only does your character allow you to take photos and save them with different filters but additionally you can turn the camera around and have your character take a selfie. You can even command your enslaved demon to hold the camera and take the photo of your character if you need to get a further view, which is as ridiculous conceptually as it is visually. This feature alone probably accounted for 20% of my time playing the game.

I role-played as a sociopath.

My excessive use of the screenshot function on the Switch with this game did highlight one of the Switch’s drawbacks which I haven’t heard anyone mention before. Screenshots are captured at the resolution they’re rendered at. Seems like an obvious, no-duh, sorta detail, but with Astral Chain specifically the difference between a screenshot while in handheld mode and a screenshot while docked is pretty staggering. Handheld screenshots are significantly worse looking, making me wish the Switch had a more robust screenshot editing suite that might allow some smoothing filters to account for this.

While I have yet to beat Astral Chain at the time I’m writing this little review, I am so far very satisfied with the game. It’s true that my opinion might have been different had I paid $60 for the game instead of the $20 or so I’ll likely spend in total for renting it, but it’s been a lovely experience regardless.

If you like action games, and love goofing around with optional features like the ones I’ve described, then I suggest you pick up a copy!

The Spill

November 22, 2021Michael Scott