Astonishia Story: A treat for retro lovers

The retro gamer in me is alive and well and needs to be fed regularly. My run of Seiken Densetsu 3 was not as fulfilling as I had hoped, leaving me unsatisfied and craving for a more nutritious retro treat. What I really longed for was a short and grindy RPG with sweet old-school graphics and as little narrative content as possible. And it turned out that my mammoth collection contained a game that perfectly fitted that description, namely the aforementioned Astonishia Story. 

First, let’s have the usual bit of data. Astonishia Story, or AS for short, is a Korean game developed by Sonnori and released in 2005(ko/jp) and 2006(na/eu) for the PSP. AS is not exactly a brand-new game: it was originally released for PC in 1994, in Korea only, and subsequently remade for a Korean gaming system in 2002—the PSP version being a port of that remake. Knowing the game’s origins tarnishes its image somehow: instead of being the tongue-in-cheek homage to the 8-bit era that it seems to be at first sight, it is actually a lazy port of a lazy remake of a game that was already outdated at the time of its initial release. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for not noticing that the PSP version of AS is a remake, for it oozes 8-bit-ness through its every pixel. Most reviewers were not exactly happy with such a lazily retro game, which led AS to be universally panned and reap the shockingly bad scores of 48 on Metacritic and 50.76 on Gamerankings. 

By all accounts, this is a horrendous game; and yet, I totally liked it. I definitely think that AT could appeal to a certain audience, namely the retro gamers who love their games on the challenging side and really don’t mind a crappy storyline. I’m one of them, and I’m sure that I’m not alone. To all my masochistic retro-digging comrades, here’s the perfect treat for you! This game fits our needs oh so very well, and here’s how. 

Game, what retro looks you have! 

Let’s start with the obvious: the presentation, folks. AS is as 8-bit looking as it can be, from the top-down view to the presence of a world map on which you can move your character. (Let’s remember that explorable world maps are very specific to the 8-bit era: while a couple of 16-bit RPGs would let you roam around on such a map, like Terranigma and the Dragon Quest series, most of them ditched the thing entirely in favour of short segments of land designed to accommodate the characters’ scale and increase realism.) In a nice nod to modern times, AS ditches the random encounter approach on the aforementioned world map and lets you see enemies instead. But fear not the dilution of 8-bit-ness, retro aficionados: the dungeons maintain random encounters—with a fairly balanced rate to boot—and the enemies on the world map are so hard to avoid that you’ll be forced to fight a good number of them, willingly or not, as you make your way through the game. 

The looks are a hit-or-miss: they are basically 8-bit shapes and patterns that, instead of being pixelated like back in the days, look like they’ve been hand drawn and carefully crayoned with coloured pencils. I am totally fond of that style, but that is really a matter of taste, I guess. Just like Ys I&II Chronicles, AS bristles with lovely and intricate details, from the people’s crammed interiors to the animals running and flying all around the place in villages, forests, dungeons and even on the world map. To see cats and dogs strolling around and birds nesting in trees in every town is deliciously heart-warming, as well as encountering fluffy white rabbits in forests; on the other hand, discovering that you can crush mice to a bloody pulp under your feet if you’re not careful enough is bound to be a shocking surprise for every player. But the detail galore doesn’t stop there: while the world map is fairly generic and tends to look the same throughout the whole game, each and every town has its own architectural style, which is breathtakingly rendered through exquisite flourishes. The same goes for forests and fighting areas, albeit with slightly less variations. As for the dungeons, their design is obviously a trifle more monotonous, but they are still quite distinct from one another and made even more alive by the presence of scurrying mice, light beams filtering through cracks in the walls and various objects. There may have been very little money poured into that game’s development, but there was certainly heaps of love to compensate, and it shows gloriously in that opulence of details.

The only thing that harks back more to the 16-bit era than to the 8-bit one is AS’ linearity. The game pushes you dutifully from one place to the next and regularly prevents you from going back to already visited areas, which could definitely be irritating. However, that linearity is handled in a way that makes it quite palatable. For one thing, there is not the slightest hint of backtracking, which is incredibly refreshing; for another, the presence of the world map makes you feel less constrained, since you can roam large portions of land at once instead of going from one town to the next through a single path in typical 16-bit fashion. Even more interesting, this linearity generates an urgency that can magnify the player’s feelings: you’re on a desperate quest, moving ever-forward, and there is not coming back whatsoever until you’ve accomplished your mission.   

Interestingly, AS managed to stir in me a strong feeling of gaming fernweh: an acute desire to be part of the game world and explore it myself rather than just see it on a screen. I used to experience this kind of sweet aching wanderlust quite a lot while playing games in my younger years; but I had not felt it for a very long time, and it was quite the surprise to experience it again. This fernweh was stirred by the lovely villages and forests bristling with life, the world map teasing me with unreachable places and the beautiful soft colours of the sceneries, and it felt wonderful. I’d be curious to know if the ability to elicit such a feeling is a quality inherent to that game, leading other players to experience it while playing AS, or if this is just an idiosyncrasy of mine. 

At any rate, we’re talking about a confidently 8-bit inspired game here. It may not be an exact visual clone of the heavily pixelated games of the ’80s, but it looks and feels like an RPG of that era nonetheless. But the old-school goodness doesn’t stop here: not only does AS has the retro looks, but it’s also full to the brim with good ol’ tropes lifted straight from the ’80s. Let’s dissect them right now!

Game, what retro tropes you have! 

Let’s start this section with a few words about the narrative, which, in jolly good 8-bit fashion, is quite inexistent. The storyline is just a badly crafted excuse to roam the game world: it’s mediocre at best, and more often than not completely nonsensical. Characters make constant ad hoc references to events and lore that are never mentioned again, and by the time you clear the game, you will very likely have forgotten what the point of your quest was in the first place. The characters’ interactions are fortunately more pleasant, with many light-hearted moments, comical outbursts and sweet budding romances. There is no character development to speak of, but that’s perfectly fine: occasional romantic innuendos and random bits of dialogue are all the character development that old-timers need in their RPGs. It’s also worth mentioning that the game manages to compensate for its narrative mediocrity by being humorous and self-derisive: the Fourth Wall is being broken a couple of times in deliciously absurd and unexpected ways that I won’t spoil here, and the general tone is definitely light-hearted, with lots of goofy situations and replicas. This may not be the subtler humour ever, granted, but it’s still efficient. I’d rather have a crappy storyline that doesn’t take itself too seriously than a crappy storyline that tries to pass for a great one by being annoyingly serious. 

With this out of the way, let’s move on to meatier old-school tropes. It’s fighting time, folks! As you may expect from an 8-bit-ish RPG, you’ll spend most of your time fighting, fighting and fighting more. Apart from the regular exploration bits—i.e. finding your next destination or the exit of that dungeon—and the comforting dwelling in the safety of villages, this game is all about fighting. The fighting system itself is not especially reminiscent of the 8-bit era, and may very well be the most modern feature of AS: it’s a grid-based system with a strong S-RPG flavour that allows characters to move around in turns and to use attacks with various ranges. The whole thing is sprinkled with a touch of elemental complementarities that thankfully deepens matters a little bit. It’s quite simple in essence, but there are enough ranges and elemental variations to offer a good variety of attacks and make combat pleasant and entertaining. And that’s all for the best, because indeed, you will be fighting when playing that game. The good old RPG wisdom that dictates that you should never shy away from random battles if you want to be properly levelled-up is alive and well in AS, conveniently enforced by the fact that attempts at fleeing do not always succeed. (There is a special item that allows you to flee without fail, though.) In addition, you may need extra bouts of grinding on a regular basis in order to glean money. Everything costs a hefty price, from the healing items to the weapons and armours; and unlike in more modern games, it’s very recommended to have the strongest equipment and totally mandatory to have mountains of healing items if you don’t want to be wiped out in the middle of a dungeon or a boss fight. Rest assured that there is not risk of sitting on a pile of unused money by the time the credits roll; this is old-school territory, and if you want to get some much-needed money, you’ll have to sweat for it. 

You’ll have to sweat quite a lot in general when playing AS, actually. This game boasts another prominent trope of the 8-bit era, which is none other than mighty Difficulty. Interestingly enough, difficulty in AS does not take the classic form of sudden difficulty spikes: such occurrences are completely absent from the game, making way for a difficulty curve that increases in the smoothest way and should be easy to ride as long as you don’t run away from random encounters. Instead, the difficulty stems from your character’s limitations. Here’s a telling example: the game is heavily biased in favour of MP-consuming attacks—classic, shall we say. Unfortunately, your characters really don’t have that much MP, including the ones that are supposed to be the best magic-wielders. It’s thus not uncommon to run out of MP after two or three random encounters on the field—or even one, for that matter. Level-grinding doesn’t solve the issue at all, since it only grants your characters a fraction of extra MP; this limitation is very much a design choice, and one that is bound to be present throughout the whole game. The only way to circumvent that hindrance is to stock up piles of the resident—and rather expensive—MP-restoring items before venturing in dungeons or fighting bosses. (The world map is less dangerous, since the next town is always close by and fleeing from fights is a tad easier.) This is also true for your HP, albeit to a lesser extent: even the meanest field monsters tend to hit incredibly hard, and seeing your weakest characters lose 90% of their HP from a single hit is pretty much routine. Let’s also mention that your party is NEVER automatically healed after a boss fight, even when you’re in the depths of a dungeon and must still cross a mass of corridors to find the exit while hanging on to your last HPs. On a more strategic note, the game often attributes random elemental strengths to enemies AND keeps their stats hidden from you. As you may imagine, this can easily lead you to waste some precious MP by unknowingly casting spells that foes are immune to and trying to figure out which attacks are the most efficient through trial-and-error. All in all, the general rule goes as such: while never being downright unfair, the game always put you at a slight disadvantage by default—and sometimes at a massive one, which leads us directly to the next trope in line. 

Let me ask you this: would an 8-bit-flavoured RPG be complete without a ridiculously long and difficult final boss fight, in which all odds are against you? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about: an epic two-phase boss battle, with no healing in-between and a second phase that pits you against a megaboss that can pretty much wipe out your whole party in one hit while your strongest attacks hardly make a dent in its HP bar. That’s the pinnacle of 8-bit-ness, the cherry on top of the hardcore 8-bit RPG sundae. And it is in Astonishia Story, of course. You didn’t expect less, did you? Indeed, if AS had any modicum of popularity, its ultimate boss battle would probably be legendary by now. I needed no less than five tries to beat the two final bosses of that game, and it took me forty minutes to do so, despite the fact that my characters were only a couple of levels away from the maximum attainable level in that game—which, incidentally, is Lv.25. This is just ridiculous, it really is, and it’s a blatant case of fake longevity if I ever saw one. And yet, I lapped up the challenge and felt so incredibly sated and fulfilled when that overpowered second boss died at my hands, making way for a short yet lovely ending. O, sweet joys of the 8-bit era! The thrill of slowly wearing down and finally eradicating a mighty boss with your infinitely weak party is just incomparable, even more so when it is topped by a sweet ending sequence that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I will post an addendum especially dedicated to that intense final boss battle, for there is more to say on the matter. For now, let’s move on!

It’s worth noting that while taking its cues from the 8-bit era, AS still benefits from three decades of gaming evolution; as a result, it avoids most of the pitfalls of early RPG-dom. For one thing, it shows a modicum of welcome leniency in the saving department by allowing you to save at any moment and load a different save while playing, which is quite neat and convenient; in an era that still gives birth to an infuriatingly high number of portable games with no instant save feature, this is a treat that must be enjoyed to the fullest. Technical problems and glitches are entirely averted, and the most annoying thing that can happen in that game is to be temporarily blocked by a sprite standing in your way. The menu system is also much more intuitive than your typical 8-bit menu, which is quite a relief. Last but not least, a good number of annoying tropes of the 8-bit era are deflected entirely, such as fake difficulty due to bad controls, lack of information or cheating AI. The dreaded “Lost forever” trope is present, granted, but with no dire consequences whatsoever, which makes it a mere annoyance rather that a serious hindrance. (More on that in the upcoming addendum.)

All in all, Astonishia Story is nowhere near as horrendous as reviews painted it to be. Granted, it’s a complete throwback to an era that is long dead and gone and as such, it can definitely be panned as lazy and uninspired; however, I had a lot of fun playing it, and that’s the most important part. If you’re a dedicated retro gamer with a masochistic streak, a love for grinding and a high tolerance for mediocre storylines, this game may well offer you a couple of very pleasant gaming hours. These won’t be my final words on the matter, as the addendum to that post is on its way. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!