Astonishia Story

"A Story Best Left Untold."

The PSP has really developed into a great platform for RPGs that might seem out of place on the newest batch of home consoles. While a classic old school RPG animated with sprites and a 2D backdrop might seem like a silly use of the incredible hardware of the PS3, it really fits in perfectly with the capacity of the PSP. Thus, a whole slew of games released in Japan during the past decade that never made it to North American shores have been released on the PSP recently with varying levels of success. Astonishia Story, a Korean game released over a decade by a company that even the most hardcore of RPG aficionados is unlikely to have heard of, is one of these games and happens to be one of the most lackluster RPG entries in a while. It was developed by the company sonnori, which uses the rather clever marketing phrase “For Fun For New For You.” Now, ignoring the fact that it doesn't make any sense and that I've never heard anybody describe something as being “for new” (or for old), clearly this company is interested in promoting new and fun games for consumption by me (which happens to be exactly the kind of game I like!). Of course, this game is technically over a decade old, so I'm guessing “for new” is used in the sense that if I haven't played it, then it's new to me. Unfortunately, the company also fails to deliver on its “for fun” promise as well, and nearly every aspect of the game is implemented very poorly, and even most praiseworthy aspects really are not that good. This is just an incredibly boring, poorly constructed game that indicates that some games aren't localized for good reasons.

The game begins with a beautiful opening sequence. We are treated to an anime style scene with various depictions of ass kicking and name taking, and the visuals are really good. The music accompanying this is done entirely in Korean and it is also surprisingly good. Unfortunately, after this short introductory segment, everything else is a disappointment. Rarely have I encountered a game where the opening sequence is the high point of the game, much less the only point worth watching. After this scene, everything else in the game is not just completely downhill, but downhill, off of a cliff, and into a fiery gorge. After this well done opening, the game takes a drastic turn for the awful, and it appears that the developers spent more time on this opening scene than on the rest of the game. Even the graphics and sound, which are impressive in this during the starting sequence, become dramatically worse and are dull even by SNES standards. The graphics are pretty standard two dimensional sprites reminiscent from classic SNES RPGs. The problem is that the old SNES games actually did them justice, while everything in Astonishia Story just looks bad. The color palette is completely off, and much of the game looks drab and unappealing. Nearly every dungeon is just a bunch of winding paths of brown and gray walls punctuated with the occasional chest and boss fight. Towns aren't much better, and it looks like very little time was actually spent on the design for the game. Everything just looks bad and dated, from the characters portraits that accompany their text bubbles to the overworld map and everything on it. So many RPGs on the PSP have been done using sprites and either 2D or pseudo-2D graphics and most of them have pulled it off nicely, so when Astonishia Story ends up looking so bad, it can't be blamed solely on using this style of graphics, but rather because this style was implemented so poorly. There is a brief end of game cutscene, but it isn't really spectacular and doesn't come close to matching that of the opening scene. On a positive note, the visuals and effects that accompany special moves and spells, while not spectacular, certainly are not as bad as much of the visual work in the game and some are actually fairly decent to look at. However, this is the sole highlight of the graphics featured during the game in Astonishia Story, and despite the fact that these are passable compared to everything else featured in the game, these are so minor really they wouldn't even be worth mentioning in most games. However, Astonishia Story has so little that is praiseworthy that it becomes essential to point out even the most insignificant of victories. Like the visuals, the music also tapers off after the game actually begins. The music isn't really annoying or distracting to the point that it becomes imperative to turn the volume off, it just is really forgettable and there aren't any noteworthy tracks. Even the boss battle theme in the game, one that most RPGs really do a good job on, is really only passable and most likely will be forgotten shortly after the battles are over. The sound effects range from annoying to grotesque, and if I had to hear the “You just stepped on a rat and made it explode” audio one more time my ears were going to start bleeding. Overall, both the sound and the visuals add very little to the quality of the game and fail to contribute to the charm and atmosphere of the title, which are so weak on their own that Astonishia Story really needed help from every area it could get it from.

However, this awfulness extends beyond the graphics and sound, as nearly every aspect of the game features production values that most likely would get most developers fired if they tried to push it as a first draft. Loading times are omnipresent and interfere with nearly every aspect of the game. Between every attack, after entering any city, and one character's victory dance boob jiggle all elicit a brief loading time. While enough they wouldn't be enough to dissuade anyone from playing the game, they are another annoyance on a rather larger list of issues. The dialogue between the characters in this game is filled with so many mistakes, and these just aren't limited to the commonplace grammar errors. However, what the characters have to say is so trite and predictable most of the time that the spelling errors becomes a minor problem that is obfuscated by the larger issue that you simply won't care what the characters have to say, misspelled or not. Sure, this is a shoddy translation job, but it is a shoddy job of an already shoddy script, and even the most accurate of translation most likely would not have helped this game. What the characters have to say is so boring, so poorly written that at times it feels as if you're reading dialogue from a play written by middle school students. Talking to people in town or watching story scenes becomes such a chore because you are forced to trod your way through spelling mistakes and one of the most boring scripts ever to shame a video game title. The script here could provide ammo for the argument against games as art for the next ten years. Even more disheartening than the spelling issue are the multiple lines of dialogue that seem to not even be part of the script. Several times, in the middle of some monologue, there will be a line something to the effect of “why is this line here” or “this doesn't make sense in context” or “I hate my job and I wish I never lost all of my money in that pyramid scheme” (sadly, I only made up one of those…), and it appears whoever put in some editorial notes in the script initially was too busy (most likely looking for another job) to take them out. Everything in this game just seems so lazily done that it gives the impression that those working on it didn't even like the game and wanted to spend as little time on it as possible.

As one might expect from a game with such shoddy translation, the story in Astonishia Story is incredibly lackluster. Lloyd, the brave and obviously sleep deprived knight from the Kingdom of Rudelberg, manages to oversleep a very important ceremony and arrives just in time to help escort the kingdom's most important artifact to…well, somewhere. They never really say, and it doesn't even matter because Lloyd and the six other guards that they decided to spare to this extremely important escort mission (one can only assume the rest of the army also overslept) are ambushed and have the artifact (a seemingly innocuous staff) stolen from them. Lloyd, as the sole surviving member of this terribly planned escort mission, vows to get the staff back and return it his kingdom. Going by the famous maxim “If I don't tell them my entire squad is dead and get the staff back in time, they'll never notice the staff is gone or miss the rest of the people laying dead a couple of miles from town”, he neglects to go back for reinforcements and decides to push forward by himself. From here, the story somehow becomes less interesting and devolves into something you might have written when you were six, and then immediately thrown away because even at six you knew you could do better. However, the premise for the story is actually fairly solid, despite the fact it is eerily similar to a lot of RPGs, and if in the hands of the right development team, it could actually have been very good. The instruction manual lays out an epic adventure that never really pans out. What ultimately drags the story down below mediocrity is both the pace at which it is told and how little attention is actually given to development. This is perhaps the worst example of storytelling I've encountered in a game, and instead of actually developing a story, the game is more focused on just recounting a series of events. Nothing is ever developed, and major plot points occur and then are not talked about again. The game feels like it flies through the story, proceeding at such a breakneck speed that the characters never have time to dwell on what has already occurred, instead only focusing on what is happening in the present. This causes what might be serious and important plot points to feel trivial and mundane and detracts from any clear sense of purpose the game might have. This all climaxes in one of the most disappointing and least satisfying endings in the long history of RPGs. However, considering how disappointing and uninspiring the rest of the plot is, I suppose the ending is exactly what one might expect and it really serves to highlight how poor this development team is at telling a story.

The story is also severely hampered by the constant interruption with bizarre and extremely unfunny jokes that occur at fairly regular intervals. The game constantly jumps between taking itself seriously, presenting itself as providing a weighty story and claims of containing an epic RPG adventure, and a game that promotes itself as just one big joke, with half-hearted attempts to be clever, or what apparently passed for clever in 1994 Korea. Now, there are a couple (literally two) of instances in the game where the humor actually hits and might possibly elicit a smile. Lloyd complains about being controlled when somebody inquires why he hasn't left town yet, and another random villager defends his speech when Lloyd points out it is better suited for a village entrance. While these sort of interactions are slightly humorous, and interjecting humor into a serious plot can provide some great moments of contrast to the severity of the situation, most of the time it is just far to distracting and startling. Rather than subtle interjections of humor, like the ones previously mentioned that are congruous with the style of the game and don't detract from the story itself, most of the jokes are so bizarre and esoteric, that not only will most people not even understand the content of the joke, even those that do will most likely be distracted because it is just so jarring and seemingly out of place. As Lloyd travels through a forest, a large headed man suddenly appears and makes a joke about Korean copywrite laws (because there's nothing better than a Korean copywrite law joke except maybe a joke about Laotian traffic laws), and just as suddenly he leaves never to be heard from again. These jokes are random, out of place, and unlikely to resonate with an American audience. More than anything, these sort of jokes contribute to the feeling that this game was produced by a group of amateurs rather than a professional company.

Certainly not helping this uninspiring story is the uninspiring cast of characters you are forced to use throughout the duration of your quest. Not only are the characters based on the most frequently implemented of character archetypes, they are not even developed well enough to form even the most cursory of attachment to. Lloyd serves the role of the dutiful knight and beyond that…well, they never really get that far. He has a strong sense of duty, a sword, and a bad haircut, but beyond that we really never learn very much about him or his motivations. Despite his lead character status, he is not developed beyond even the most superficial of senses. His traveling companions are not much better, and typically join his quest for only the most tenuous of reasons. There is very little connection between Lloyd and any of these characters, and even the supposed romantic interest in the game feels forced and unsubstantiated. None of the main cast is really even worth mentioning in any detail, and your traveling cast consists of a surly dwarf, a stoic martial arts master, a tomboy female lead, amongst other, equally uninspired characters. From my aforementioned descriptions, you should fully be able to predict the actions and script for each of these characters. They develop exactly as you would expect from every other RPG you've ever played, and these really aren't even developed well enough to be good cliches. Rather, they just are flat, uninteresting, and underdeveloped characters, all of which fail to provide even the most remote incentive to empathize and care about the traveling group. The villains in the game are slightly more interesting, including the winged Akra and the swordsman Francis de la Cross, both of which are the most complex characters in the game that actually reflect upon their choices and seem heavily conflicted at times. While these are not on par with most villains in RPGs, they certainly are standouts in an absolutely terrible cast and at least show hints of depth. However, most villains, and even these two at times, never have their motives really fully developed and at times seem to have a muddled purpose.

One of the best features of Astonishia Story is the battle system, but unfortunately this was implemented so poorly that what starts out as promising ends up as another disappointment in the game. The battles play out somewhat like a strategy RPG would if nearly all elements of strategy were removed from the game. You control your characters movement on the battle screen and then select from a variety of expected RPG options. What is nice about this scheme is that it is very easy to control and it takes no time at all to get into a rhythm with the game. However, what ends up diluting the effectiveness of the system is just how dumbed down the battles end up being. Unlike most games, there is no advantage from what position you attack the enemies in, so front on melees end up being the norm in the game. Similarly, the only options that seem to be available for most of the enemies is pursue and attack. There really is no aspect of any sort of strategy to the battles, which is a shame because the core battle system is solid. Instead, all battles either end up devolving into you and the enemy rushing each other to engage in an exchange of physical attacks until one group faints, or waiting for the enemies to come to you so you can use your overpowered special skills to wipe them all out in one hit. Another annoyance with the battle system is the somewhat random amount of damage that your characters deal out. The values here can vary wildly, and one attack that will wipe out an enemy in a single blow one battle will not even take out a quarter damage in the next to the same enemy. The stats for enemies seem to be generated randomly, and while this is not typically a problem, the variance here is so great that it leaves battles nearly unpredictable. This further removes aspects of strategy (or thinking in general) from the gameplay because it makes little sense to plan out the battles when you can't gauge the strength of your enemies. It pays off to level off a bit in each area, because the stat boosts you gain can often offset the somewhat random stats of the enemies, powering you up to a point where you can afford to deal a low end amount of damage and still not end up getting wiped out by not planning ahead for the unpredictably powerful attack.

Partly due to this poorly implemented battle system, the game can actually be fairly difficult, especially by the standards set by most modern RPGs. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and actually would have made the game more rewarding if it had been worth playing through. However, this too becomes somewhat sloppy once more party members are acquired. A lot of the early portion of the game has Lloyd traveling solo, and as such he has to fight the battles himself. Thus, one unforeseen critical can doom Lloyd to certain death and saving often is a must. However, once some other characters (specifically, the mages that can cast powerful magic spells for relatively low MP costs) join the group, battles become significantly easier and spells and special attacks greatly reduce the level of difficultly. Boss battles are fairly frequent, and once you can get a couple more members in the party none should really cause any problem to those that have played RPGs before. The last couple of bosses might still provide some difficulty, but if you're clever and plan properly, you can actually beat the final boss of the game without taking a single hit.

There are a lot of things the game almost does right, but a lot more than are just hopelessly beyond salvaging. The game is mercifully short, and will most likely be completed within fifteen hours. Unfortunately, this is only a positive because the game itself is so bad, that if it had lasted any longer most people might not even finish it. Honestly, even at fifteen hours the game seems to drag a lot, and the ending is so abrupt you almost get the feeling that the developers just wanted to get the game over with because they were bored with it too. There is nothing supplemental after beating the game, and no real sidequests of any note during the game that would prompt a second playthrough, so the fifteen hours is all you get, which, quite frankly, is still too long to be exposed to this title. Those that aren't fans of RPGs should definitely stay clear of this one, because if you haven't been swayed over by good RPGs, this title surely won't do it. Even hardcore fans of classic, old school RPGs should probably avoid this one, as the PSP has many other titles to offer that are better deserving of your dollar. There just are not any redeeming aspects to this title, and even at 15 hours this game is a waste of time. This game definitely has a very small audience that will appreciate it, and is most likely limited to those that love everything RPG related and the immediate family of those that worked on the game.

For Fun For New For You (THE GOOD):
+Opening sequence is really well done
+A couple of somewhat interesting villains
+Core of the battle system has promise

Not Fun Not New For You (THE BAD):
-Most of the game has a feel that even the developers weren't interested in it
-Game looks and sounds dated, even by SNES standards
-Battle system too dumbed down to be any fun
-Terribly constructed story that never is given much attention
-Uninteresting, uninspired main cast of characters
-Bad translation of tepid script

Lost Time Lost Cash For Me (THE UGLY): It is interesting to note that the game itself was released on June 6th, 2006 (06/06/06), a sure sign of the evils lurking in the game. Coincidence? Definitely.

But the game is still totally evil. When you play it, blood comes out of the back of your PSP and you can actually hear the system crying. Although, the crying might have been coming from me, as I was pretty upset that I had wasted a whole $10 on this game.

THE VERDICT: 2.25/10.00

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/03/08, Updated 12/11/09

Game Release: Astonishia Story (US, 06/06/06)