Astral Throne Recommendation

Over a decade ago now, I had what can only be described as a "Reddit Fedora Atheist" era. I know, I know, point and laugh. It's pretty dire. While I try to not be as annoying about it as I used to be, I remain committed to not indulging magical thinking and similar mental constructs. Usually this is pretty easy.

But main character derangement can attack anyone at any time, and it's really really tempting when I loudly complain "Why has no one made a Fire Emblem Roguelike, it's perfect for the format" and then it turns out somebody basically did that a month ago! This is my impressions of Astral Throne, a game I have been thoroughly thoroughly enjoying. Honestly I feel kind of bad about mentioning Fire Emblem at all - it's clearly an important inspiration but the divergences it takes from the formula are extremely inspired and observant, so for the rest of this I'm just not going to mention it at all and take Astral Throne on its own terms.

Astral Throne is primarily divided up between tactical combat and stints on the overworld map where you heal, improve your party, and deal with some RNG. It's a roguelite, a word which means nothing these days, but I actually do think it earns the title in a way a lot of its contemporaries don't. You have challenges that are mostly set but your tools will vary quite a bit. There's basically no metaprogression, a win in my book - the only unlockables are a few extra starting "Hero" unit choices and higher difficulty levels. There's a little bit of story, but it's pretty threadbare - it's mostly an excuse for the Hero cast to support or verbally joust each other. It does a fine enough job of that and I'll talk more about it later.

Tactics Flow

This shit is REALLY good. Let's talk about the maps first.

The maps are all both visually and tactically appealing, and each type of battle has its own considerations. The regular skirmishes are mostly exercises in resource maximization, but they do a very good job at this with a good mix of hazards for your squishies, items to grab, and enemies to try and farm for experience. All of this is buttoned up with a turn limit before constant ticking damage starts, encouraging you to play briskly. It's rare that I've game overed on one of these maps; more frequently I miss valuable loot or allow a unit I was trying to train to get KO'd. Sure, people don't die immediately (except your main character), but sitting out a battle and requiring an action to rescue them and prevent their actual death is a balanced and real cost.

The more involved Battles (optional, better rewards) and end-of-act Sieges are quite brutal in spots, especially the last two fights of the game. They're packed to the brim with dangerous enemies, interesting terrain, and fun opportunities to leverage the more unique resources you've acquired or try to scrape by with a scrub squad. Despite their difficulty, I almost never felt like they were unfair. The vast majority of my game overs or other setbacks were because I either didn't think my moves through enough or, more rarely, I didn't squeeze enough resources out of the rest of the Act to match the strategy I was going for. If you're powerful enough to not be focused solely on ending the map before you're overwhelmed or lose to the turn timer, it is also very rewarding to get everything you can from these too.

The only knock against it is variety. You'll see a lot of the same stuff on repeat playthroughs. If this were a short planned experience, that'd be fine, but obviously games like this encourage repeat plays. Personally this hasn't bothered me much, but I think one alternate map of each type per act would be a really nice addition.

The stuff you do on these maps? Also excellent! You'll end up with a very good amount of variety in your army most of the time, and your opposition has basically the entire item pool to play with, so you'll get some fascinating and scary enemies on occasion. Even though a given hero always comes with two fixed starting units, in practice the divergence from their bases happens very quickly depending on available weapons and skill level ups. These bring a lot of tactical interest, but since the splashy stuff like giving everyone better movement or making a giant area of forested terrain is on the rare side, it never gets overwhelming in any given playthrough. There's usually a lot of options for how to approach a turn, and because the hit formula is pretty punishing for both players and enemies, you're rewarded for looking at all of your options.

Your units do end up being very distinct. In some cases this is for the worse - the balance between classes and specific milita is wonky in places - but even lower-tier units can have hero arcs if they line their level up skills perfectly or are the only bearer of a good weapon or entire weapon type. All of the hero units bring something unique to the table too, ranging from strong spammable utility to some wacky gimmicks that incentivize playing the game very differently. You also really feel how people grow and improve over a playthrough, and not only numerically. A lot of skills, the mounts, and certain weapons end up feeling very splashy.

I couldn't think of another place to put it, but as a fast gamer, I still found the combat animations very charming. Special shoutout to the butterflies, which function as this game's flying mount. I mean look at them.

Strategy Flow

As every roguelike enjoyer knows, though, both the tactical and strategic layers need to work in tandem for an optimal experience. Thankfully, I really love the planning and customization element that Astral Throne brings to the table. You have quite a number of options for improving your units that you receive from both fight rewards and purchase at the various shops on the overworld map. Apart from obvious options like new equipment or books that teach specific skills, there's things that - in other examples of this genre - would be locked to one person that you can use more freely like the horse and butterfly mounts that are available.

The freedom really is just right. You won't always have every option, but you have a lot of freedom to use the ones you do receive, and figuring out the best way to do so is fun. Who would make the best use of a second weapon type being taught to them? Who needs the horse the most? Who makes the best use of this subclass-adding item? The game is full of considerations like this, sometimes due to downsides on things, limits on resources, or because units have weaknesses you need to accept.

A few more specific things I like: Units generally start only able to use one weapon type, but they can learn more by using manuals. Each class has a pool of weapon types it can learn from the Weapon and Mystic Manual, and then a third pool of non-learnables - except not really, because if they read an Esoteric Manual, they'll guaranteed get a random weapon from outside their class set! It's a small thing but the option to get people with weird types can make for some unusual and fun builds, and the divvying up of unlearned types into effectively three per character (unlearned weapon, unlearned magic, and esoteric) helps you manage the randomness without giving you too much control.

The implementation of mounts is very enjoyable. As mentioned you can put anyone on one, which is a really tough strategic consideration. The mount movement range are sometimes VERY useful,and it always feels like a huge upgrade for the recipient. But I especially like that they have a downside. One of the hero units makes shop mounts free when she's the main character - an INCREDIBLE perk, to be sure. But it has the potential to make enemies who are effective against mounted units very scary! Still worth it, no doubt.

The game is full of considerations like this, interesting cute trade-offs, pick-your-poison bad random events, and the like. It never overstays its welcome and it's a lot of fun to try and craft units that can smash through some of the more difficult stuff. And - not to put too fine a point on it - you can get a lot of this satisfaction without having to plan out who is having what kid 10 chapters in advance, which is something I really appreciate.

Blorbo Appeal

Now, I think this is the part of the review where I say something like "The plot isn't anything important, it's a roguelike, you can just ignore it." and we move on to a conclusion or to more critical components. And I could do that, because I don't think the broader plot in Astral Throne is anything particular special. It's a pretty standard Bad Situation Justifies Kill People thing you kinda need for this genre in general. It could not be there at all and I'd still happily recommend the game.

Now, you can take this with a grain of salt, because I haven't even come close to seeing all the dialog options. But! I am actually enjoying the cast of this game a lot more than I expected to. Sure, the story isn't anything super fascinating, but it's an excuse for some of these characters to travel together in a high-pressure situation, and some of the conversations in this game I've seen have been genuinely funny or engaging. I think a big part is it doesn't overstay its welcome. Even the longest cutscenes, the two campfire scenes that take place after Battles #5 and #10, are pretty brief and won't stay long enough to bother you if you're not feeling the vibe. But one of them sold me on reading the dialog, sparse as it was - and fortunately, it's actually the first one you'll probably see, as it's the conversation between the default Hero and Secondary selection Lyra and Vega.

And this is where the game does genuinely do one really clever thing, which is show how different characters treat different members of the cast. What a good choice for a roguelike! To use the above example, the way Vega talks to Lyra versus Cetus, my favorite glass canon disaster queer, is TOTALLY different but completely fitting with the impression you get from him no matter which one you see first. It's such a genuinely inspired idea and yet such an understated part of the final product. I'd love to see more roguelikes with ensemble setups like this take advantage of the what-if format that naturally happens with you replaying the same events over and over.

Caveats

There were a few things that I noticed which either didn't bother me or only mildly annoyed me that I feel I should mention. I consider putting up with or ignoring these worth the chance to play the really fun game in here, but I'm mentioning them in case you might feel differently. In no particular order:

• By far my one complaint with this game is UI polish. The cursor behavior is really finicky on my Deck sometimes with the dpad. Less of an issue if you're on a computer and mostly using your mouse, but also sometimes menu layouts are awkward or you can't call something at a time it feels like you should. I would really like to be able to open character inventories when they level up and need to pick a skill!
• Depending on your preferences, the way that hit chance in this game is calculated and... is often very low... might rub you the wrong way. Sometimes you need to do attacks that have 50 to-hit and just be fine with that. I know for some people this is very much not what they want in a tactics game, so be warned.
• Even on base difficulty the game can be pretty tough at times, and obviously the randomized nature of many things means you can't really brute force it by knowing ahead of time what to do. The balance is also wonky - some classes are just worse most of the time. Again, not something that bothers me much, but it might you!

I'm really enjoying my time with Astral Throne. The developers are hoping it's successful enough to fund further development and like - I would certainly love that. But I honestly feel like it's already worth the asking price and would be happy if it were never touched again. It's a great little game and I hope we get more like it.

If your fancy is tickled by what I've written, you can find the game here.