Astralius

~ ASTRALIUS ~

IGS

CD-ROM

1991

With all the awful games I've played in my life, and all the Deep Blues and Basteds and Night Creatures and Legions that I've managed to find places in my heart for, I've never come across another game that pisses me off with its shittiness quite as much as this one does.

Where do I begin...

The heroes walk slowly. And I mean INSANELY slowly. Perhaps you thought the Faussete Amour and Beyond Shadowgate people were slow. Well, they're Sonics compared to this bunch. And there are battles every step of the way. In some cases, I mean that quite literally. Take a slow step. Battle. Step. Battle. Two steps! Battle. Time slips away and after a while you realize for all the battles you've fought, you've explored but one hallway of a dungeon that's absolutely massive compared to your small, slow, dimwitted characters.

Combat is carried out in a ridiculously goofy way. You'd have to see it to understand how goofy it is, but here's a hint: one of your options during fights is to see your enemy. Yes, you read that correctly. See what the enemy looks like. Because much of the time in battles is spent with nothing but text windows on a black screen.

The enemies in these battles take hit after hit after worthless hit from your incompetent, overmatched band of warriors. And this is one of those obsolete RPGs where you select attack targets for your characters at the beginning of each round, and if their target gets killed (or, in this stupid game, runs away), they lose their turn completely rather than moving on to a remaining creature. When you finally win, remember that another battle is literally just a step away!

The walking slowly stuff even becomes a pain in villages. Did you think you would be allowed to save and heal in the same spot? Hell no! The respective buildings are often at the opposite ends of town, meaning you have to trudge S-L-O-W-L-Y from one to the other. If you aren't familiar with the layouts of the poorly drawn towns, this can take quite a while. And watch out for "obstacles": I once encountered a SHADOW that my character bumped into and was unable to pass!

The inconvenience doesn't end there. Want to sell an item in a shop? You can hold plenty at once, and items you take off (say, an old suit of armor that you just replaced with a new one) get placed at the very bottom of the list. You can't just push down on the control pad to move through the items; you have to press down repeatedly. And you can't sell more than a single item at once. So if your whole party just got new stuff, selling the old stuff can take forever. And you can store things in a certain type of building, but that would mean slowly walking to the building in the first place, and then "scrolling" through the stuff you want to store (or retrieve). Hell, simply talking to a townsperson requires you to bring up a window and select a command.

Then there's the camel. Desert sands are too hot for our poor heroes, so they need to buy and ride a camel. For some reason, after each random battle that occurs, your character resumes play OFF the camel. So if you're accustomed to just getting on with your travels after battles, you'll find yourself walking away from your camel (and getting scorched in the process). Then you'll have to walk slowly back to him (and get scorched in the process). You will likely be attacked again on your way back, even though you probably aren't more than two steps away.

During one stretch of camel riding, I kept getting attacked over and over and over and over to the point where I LITERALLY was moving BACKWARDS. Finally I got off the stupid camel and charged ahead, not caring about the damage from the hot sands. I found some building and acquired an item that let me see the battle spots in the desert. Practically the entire screen was covered with battle spots. It was so insane that I just laughed ruefully and shut off the system.

You'd think a game that concentrates so much on music (the heroes play instruments to perform their magic attacks) would have a decent soundtrack. Of course, this one doesn't. It's quite bad, in fact. The enemy art is also awful.

All of these complaints I've expressed so far... these were gripes I had after playing through a mere 10% of the entire quest. I did eventually beat the whole damn thing, and it really is horrible, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't develop a certain fondness for it. Part of that has to do with me being "proud" of myself for defeating such a hellish game, but the adventure does take you through some neat sequences if you suffer long enough to experience them. There's a town with living, breathing snowmen; a large tree that plays host to a family of talking birds; a funny hot springs scene; and an upside-down continent.

There's also a beautiful cinema depicting a sword buried in snow with reindeer prancing about--a very memorable scene in a CD game sorely lacking in cinematic moments.

Heck, even the basic concept of traveling musicians as opposed to the usual warriors and wizards is pretty neat; by having them "jam" together you can pull off special attacks, a few of which are quite useful and one of which actually looks pretty cool.

The best part of the game by far is an area consisting of small islands separated by vast stretches of sea. You make your way from one bit of land to the next by jaunting along on top of sharks who stick their heads above water and make for a pretty darn cool method of travel. The enemies here still attack frequently, but some of them actually give you lots of XP and gold for your troubles. Plus, the music suddenly decides to rule, while it's poor or mediocre for almost the entire rest of the game.

Unfortunately, every single time I started to like Astralius just a bit, something would happen to remind me what an awful job IGS did with it. Of course, engaging in battle ten or more times while taking twenty slow steps is rather unbearable, especially when the enemies in each and every fight are strong and brutal. Sometimes those enemies will "curse" your characters (read: reduce their attack power to nothing), and believe it or not, the "collision detection" for the enemy's curse spell is horrid. In other words, one character will be marked as cursed while it's really the person next to him who's screwed. And I couldn't possibly forget the expansive final maze, which features a seemingly innocent staircase near the end of the labyrinth that took me right outside the structure with no way of getting back to where I was, forcing me to begin my trek anew. And then there's the time I was making my way through an enormous dungeon only for a random pillar to suddenly fall down and crush my flutist, abruptly wiping out thirty minutes of progress.

For those who decide they're tough (or insane) enough to accept Astralius' challenge, I can at least tell you that the early desert stretch is by far the most tedious and annoying segment of the game. If you survive that area, you've got a shot at winning, though there will still be many hours of severe hellishness yet to come. Thank goodness my benevolent cousin Zigfriedozlov wrote up an Astralius walkthrough, which can be found here: http://www.honestgamers.com/guides/faq/22367/1693/Mateki-Densetsu-Astralius.html .