Astria Ascending

A credits list that promises more than the game delivers

Astria Ascending's pitch starts with its résumé. Hitoshi Sakimoto, composer of Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, serves as music director. Kazushige Nojima, who wrote Final Fantasy VII, VIII and X, directs the narrative. The hand-drawn art comes from CyDesignation, and Artisan Studios built the game on the foundation of their earlier Zodiac: Orcanon Odyssey. That's an unusually stacked lineup for a game published by a mid-sized indie publisher rather than a major studio, and it's the reason Astria Ascending got real attention on release that plenty of similarly-scaled JRPGs never do.

What that pedigree bought the finished game is a genuinely gorgeous cast of hand-drawn still character art and a score professional critics generally single out as one of the game's strongest elements — Sakimoto's work here lands as advertised. What it evidently didn't buy is a narrative delivery to match. Multiple high-vote Steam reviews from players who played through the entire campaign describe the writing and voice acting as actively bad rather than just uneven, a specific and pointed criticism given who's credited with directing it. It's a strange, specific kind of disappointment: the pieces most associated with famous names — the score, the concept art — land well, and the pieces that depend on execution across a full production — line delivery, pacing, scene-to-scene writing — are where the reviews turn sharp.

The Fated Eight, the Harmony, and a lot of dialogue you can't skip

The setting, Orcanon, follows the Fated Eight — demigods serving the goddess Yuno who maintain a societal doctrine called the Harmony across a world of multiple sentient species. It's an ambitious premise with real scope behind it, and the eight-character roster gives the turn-based combat a genuinely large cast to draw from, with an active party of four swappable mid-fight against enemies with real elemental weaknesses to exploit. That's a solid, traditional JRPG skeleton.

The recurring problem players report is pacing rather than the systems themselves. Dialogue boxes advance one at a time with no skip option, including in scenes a player may already have sat through, which several reviewers call out as the single most frustrating specific choice in the whole game — not a difficulty complaint, a pure friction complaint, in a genre already asking for a real time investment. Combined with the writing criticism above, the net effect several long-form reviews describe is a story that asks for patience it hasn't earned by that point in the campaign.

Combat that makes you wait to play it

The turn-based combat's central complaint is structural rather than a matter of taste: enemies routinely act first in an encounter, meaning a meaningful chunk of most fights passes before the player gets to make a real decision. That's compounded by encounter pacing several reviewers describe as bloated — fights that run long without a matching increase in tactical interest, which reads as padding rather than challenge once it's happened often enough across a full playthrough. The elemental weakness system underneath it is sound in principle; the complaint isn't that the combat lacks ideas, it's that its pacing gets in the way of using them.

Where the game does something genuinely distinctive is in its aerial segments — scrolling shoot-em-up sequences with rotatable elemental weapons that break up the turn-based structure with a different genre entirely. It's a hybrid the JRPG space rarely attempts, and it's one of the few places reviewers across the spectrum, positive and negative alike, single out as a highlight rather than a source of complaint.

Presentation: gorgeous stills, rough motion

The gap between Astria Ascending's best and worst moments is nowhere more visible than in its presentation. Character portraits and concept art draw genuine, specific comparisons to Vanillaware — high praise in this genre — but that same praise comes attached to a caveat almost every reviewer repeats: the actual cutscene animation doesn't match it, with more than one comparing it directly to cheap Flash-style puppet animation. It's the same tension that runs through the whole game — individual elements land at a genuinely high level, and the seams between them are where it falls apart.

A world rebuilt from a mobile game most players never heard of

Orcanon isn't a new setting built for this release — it's a from-scratch rebuild of Zodiac: Orcanon Odyssey, a 2015 mobile game from European developer Kobojo that carried the same extraordinary credits list: Nojima writing, Sakimoto composing, art direction from Hideo Minaba (art director on several mainline Final Fantasy titles) and Akihiko Yoshida, known for Vagrant Story, Tactics Ogre and Bravely Default, attached as a director on the art side. Artisan Studios took that abandoned mobile concept and rebuilt it entirely for a full multi-platform console and PC release under the Astria Ascending name. That lineage matters for how to read this game's reception: this isn't an inexperienced team reaching beyond its abilities for the first time, it's a genuinely rare concentration of Final Fantasy-adjacent talent getting a second, much larger shot at the same world — which makes the specific, diagnosable gap players report between the music and art on one side and the writing and animation on the other feel less like the whole project being beyond the team's reach, and more like a production pipeline that couldn't stretch evenly across every discipline the credits list promised.

Value

At NZ$43.49, Astria Ascending sits in a price bracket its own Steam review corpus argues it hasn't earned — a recurring theme even among reviewers who otherwise recommend the game is that it's worth trying at a steep discount rather than at launch price, with one long-time player specifically noting they enjoyed it after getting it at 90% off. There's no ongoing monetisation to weigh against the box price either way, and no add-on content beyond cosmetic and soundtrack extras. The value case here isn't really about money on top of money — it's about whether a rough, uneven execution of a genuinely talented team's ideas is worth full price up front, and its own audience answers that mostly with "wait for the sale."