Yakuza 7 was unveiled just yesterday during a press conference with series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi. Titled Yakuza: Like A Dragon in the West, it aims to be a “watershed” moment for the long-running series, introducing a major change to its usual action as combat switches to a turn-based system akin to JRPG games such as Dragon Quest–which new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga is a big fan of. It’s a surprising and drastic change straight out of left field… except we’ve all been here before.
Developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio released an April Fools video earlier this year that joked that the Yakuza combat would change to a turn-based system. We already knew that Kasuga was taking over protagonist duties after Kazuma Kiryu bowed out of the series in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, so his appearance in the April Fools video wasn’t anything noteworthy. In truth, the prank-filled day is a bit of a nightmare, with hoax after hoax guaranteeing that you can’t believe anything you read or watch. Occasionally a company will put out something funny, but that’s usually as far as it ever goes. The Yakuza video was one of the better examples, elaborately reshaping the series as a turn-based JRPG complete with a four-person party, character levels, and skill moves that drink from a pool of SP. It still had that outlandish Yakuza charm, but framed it in a different way where over-the-top attacks are picked from a menu as opposed to being something you activate with Heat and a weapon in-hand.
Now we know why it was elaborate enough to look like an honest-to-goodness video game: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio was showing us Yakuza 7 the whole time. It’s a bold move, sticking a four-minute video for your next, series-altering game up on YouTube five months before officially announcing it. But it worked. No one suspected a thing and now it comes across as an act of sly genius.
Conan Chop Chop, a hack-and-slash action-roguelike with couch co-op, was also announced as an April Fools joke before developer Funcom turned the joke on us and revealed that it’s actually a real game. The roguelike, starring a cute little Conan the Barbarian, was due out in September but has since been delayed into 2020 while the team expands the game’s scope by adding online multiplayer.
Who knows, maybe Yakuza 7 and Conan Chop Chop aren’t the last games to get the April-Fools-but-actually-it’s-a-real-game treatment. What was once a throwaway day of obvious pranks is now something worth paying attention to. Maybe the next Sniper Elite game is really a visual novel dating sim about love blooming on the battlefield. That Sonic the Hedgehog battle royale game is starting to sound real right about now, right? And we certainly wouldn’t put it past Nintendo turning Kirby square. The possibilities are endless.
Yakuza 7 will release on January 16, 2020 in Japan for PlayStation 4. The game will be released in the West later in 2020.
Imagine that you wake up one morning and, to your horror, discover that you had inadvertently committed an act of infidelity. Think about the kind of confusion and dread that might race through your head at that moment. How did it happen? What the hell are you going to do? How on earth are you going to explain and amend the relationships with all parties involved? What kind of deep-seated anxieties might have led to this moment? In 2011, Atlus’ Persona studio explored this predicament with Catherine, using a peculiar blend of social simulation and Sokoban-influenced action-puzzling. Eight years later, Catherine: Full Body is a remaster that demonstrates how well the game’s distinctive premise and exploration of adult themes still hold up, even if its new additions to the plot don’t fit in seamlessly.
Vincent is a 32-year-old man in a long-term relationship with his girlfriend, Katherine, and at a stagnant point in his life where he isn’t exactly sure what he wants for his future. His core group of friends are in different circumstances, but they share similar dilemmas; being in your thirties is hard. Vincent has recently found himself plagued by frequent nightmares of scrambling up a crumbling tower, and he’s losing sleep and in a constant haze because of them. One morning, after a big night of drinking, he wakes up next to someone who is absolutely not his girlfriend, and what follows is a frantic, weeklong crusade to try and deal with the repercussions and decide what he wants to do with his life before Katherine can discover what’s really going on.
Central to Vincent’s coping process is his aforementioned core group of friends. Every night after work, they all get together at their local bar, The Stray Sheep, to hang out. It’s in these regular social scenarios where Vincent can confide in his friends, talk through his state of mind, sound off on his next course of action, and, hopefully, find a resolution. The conversations between characters are mostly predetermined, though the onus to spend Vincent’s limited time having them is on you. A key component which you do have influence over, however, is your cell phone. Vincent will regularly be contacted throughout the night (by Katherine and his new fling, Catherine), and how you choose to respond to their text messages and calls, if at all, will impact Vincent’s ethical compass–represented as a meter with opaque binaries.
Time ticks along as you perform actions in the bar, and its patrons will come and go. You can skip these social sections entirely if you wish, but doing so robs you of the game’s most engrossing component. Vincent’s journey is a deeply introspective one, and though the plot’s major beats unfold in the cutscenes that bookend each day, the nuances of his character come through in his interactions with other people. Managing Vincent’s connection to his phone, and, in turn, how he treats the women in his life from a distance, sways how he might later react to significant plot points and revelations. Getting to know Vincent’s deeply flawed but sympathetic friends, as well as peeling away at the backstories of the other bar patrons as the week goes on, helps to explore themes revolving around maturity and the nature of human relationships. Full Body’s inclusion of the Japanese vocal track also provides an interesting and different take on character performances if you’ve already experienced the English version before.
The ebb and flow of your social actions–chatting to your friends, ordering another drink, checking your phone intermittently, and spending time with Vincent’s idle thoughts–make the ritual of whittling away time at the Stray Sheep strangely satisfying in its mundanity. The evocative soundtrack helps to foster this relaxed contemplative state, as does the game’s holistic but understated audiovisual style. It’s an incredibly pleasant atmosphere to be in, and it succeeds in replicating the quiet delight of spending a night drinking with friends with no particular occasion.
It’s nice to have that safe haven, because when Vincent goes home to bed each night, the nightmares start, and that’s when things get really stressful. What’s causing the nightmares is a mysterious unknown at first, but from the outset, it’s clear that they act somewhat as a lucid metaphor for Vincent’s internal strife. You need to guide Vincent up a sheer, crumbling tower constructed entirely of cubes and other cuboids, sometimes while being chased by a monstrous personification of one of Vincent’s objects of anxiety. The tower is rarely more than three cubes deep, and while its construction might sometimes form a natural staircase for Vincent to climb, you’ll frequently need to create a path upward yourself by pushing and pulling the cubes around in strict, grid-based arrangements.
This task quickly escalates in difficulty, as the sheer tower faces become higher and harder to navigate. There will be fewer pieces to work with, while blocks with unique properties will also appear, such as being immovable or shattering after being stepped on twice. These scenarios stop you from creating an ordinary staircase, and they force you to think of more unorthodox ways to arrange and move around the tower. Vincent can hang on the edges of blocks, and blocks will support each other so long as a horizontal edge connects; both these rules are fundamental to many of the techniques required to work your way up.
Finding that potential path takes careful consideration and forward-thinking, and this can be nerve-wracking. You need to keep up your momentum, lest the stage crumble under your feet and you fall, and the soundtrack–rousing renditions of an inspired selection of classical pieces–ratchets up the urgency of your ridiculous predicament to a high degree. It’s very easy to put yourself in a dead-end situation, even with the game’s generous undo mechanic, and at times you might stare at the pieces you have to work with for what seems like an eternity without any inspiration. But when you do have a sequence of moves in mind, successfully put them into practice, and start flying up the tower without pause, that sense of mastery and accomplishment is incredibly exciting.
This remaster also includes a number of additional difficulty options and assists, however, if reaching those moments of elation are too few and far between. These include, among other things, a “Safety” difficulty level, which eliminates failure, and an auto-climb option that can be disabled on a whim. Catherine’s puzzle difficulty does spike in places, so it’s a boon over the original for anyone who wants to keep up the momentum with Vincent’s story. If you love the puzzles, though (and I certainly do), Full Body also includes a handful of additional modes, which dramatically increase the amount of available stages. The story mode offers a “Remix” variant featuring new block types and stage layouts; the in-game “Rapunzel” arcade cabinet boasts a buffet of new stages in the same vein, too. Babel returns as a discrete puzzle mode with challenging, randomised stages for one or two players, and there’s also a head-to-head competitive mode with local and online options. There’s a lot here, but the biggest addition to Catherine is the inclusion of another potential love interest for Vincent, named Rin.
While Katherine is sensible and Catherine is uninhibited, Rin acts as a sheepish but wholehearted personality for Vincent to fawn over. She’s introduced right from the get-go and woven into the game’s existing story beats, both in new cutscenes and into the social segments at the Stray Sheep. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, Rin’s integration isn’t an entirely seamless one.
On a superficial level, story moments involving Rin will often play following whatever cinematics were part of the original game, and with that come some pacing issues. These new scenes have a strong, stylish direction, featuring more interesting edits and creative shot compositions than existing ones, but they unfortunately make the rhythm of cycling between social simulation, nightmare puzzles, and stretches of cinematics feel a little unbalanced. More significantly, though, the integration of Rin completely dismantles the game’s enigmatic sense of mystery.
If you’ve played the original version of Catherine through to one of its many different endings, then you’ll have at least some idea of how Vincent’s real-world difficulties and his nightmarish tribulations are related. However, it was previously hard to get any tangible sense of how things might fit together until the original game’s penultimate chapter. Conversely, as soon as Rin appears on screen in Full Body, it is immediately clear that something is amiss, and this feeling of peculiarity is ever-present whenever Rin is involved in a scene. Even though her arc is an enticing new mystery in itself, and does feel additive to someone who already knows everything about the original Catherine’s narrative, it’s a shame. As soon as Full Body starts, Rin acts as a big, flashy distraction from the largely grounded and plausible story that Catherine revels in during its real-world sequences for most of its running time.
Chasing Rin through the new branching path in the story feels a little inelegant overall, too. Actively choosing to pursue either Catherine or Katherine as Vincent’s ultimate goal always feels like trying to hit a moving target. Trying to push Vincent in a certain direction on the game’s ethical meter was difficult because of how hard it was to decipher which choices represented what–not just in Vincent’s text messages, but also during the series of confronting “confessional” questions that you’re asked in-between nightmare levels (eg. Would you rather kiss an alien or a corpse?). Pursing Rin feels far more blatant–a series of questions are flagged upfront as opportunities to “break” the meter and set off on a whole new path.
Once you do break onto that new path, things go to some fascinating places. But the broad feeling of the new story branch is that it feels, well, too broad. Rin’s enthusiastic earnestness rubs off on the direction of the new content a little too much, and even though the scenarios posited are genuinely interesting to see unfold, it lacks a more grounded subtlety that invites a similar level of contemplation to the existing branches for Katherine and Catherine. What’s more dismaying is that the ultimate conclusion to Rin’s story branch actually feels like it undermines the otherwise positive themes the new chapters work so intensely to convey, seeming to suggest that the kind of love that Rin and Vincent can potentially share is fantastical in nature.
But Rin’s presence still brings an intriguing new edge to Vincent’s crisis, and Full Body still tells a fascinating, personal tale. The nightmarish block puzzles are still weirdly intense and satisfying to surmount, and the Stray Sheep is still a wonderful bar to spend your nights in. Full Body does a great job in refining and refreshing the Persona studio’s fascinating foray into the social lives of adults, and Catherine continues to stand out as a game that feels both incredibly bizarre and authentically intimate.
Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Asia has outlined its plans for the Tokyo Game Show 2019, which runs from September 12 to 15 at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan. Sony will be showcasing numerous games at the PlayStation booth on the show floor, but unlike previous years this is yet another event that won’t feature a Sony press conference.
The company opted to skip E3 entirely earlier this year, marking the first time it has done so since entering the video game industry in the mid-90s. “PlayStation fans mean the world to us and we always want to innovate, think differently and experiment with new ways to delight gamers. As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019,” a PlayStation representative said at the time. Sony also decided not to host its annual PlayStation Experience, so TGS is just the latest event in the 2019 calendar year to feel the absence of a usual Sony press conference.
Sony recently shared some of the first details about its next-gen console–which we’re tentatively calling the PlayStation 5. It’s likely the company is keeping its cards close to its chest, passing on this year’s events until it has something more meaningful to reveal regarding the future of PlayStation in 2020.
Regardless, Sony will still have a show floor presence at TGS. The PlayStation booth will offer playable demos of upcoming PS4 titles such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, Nioh 2, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (which Sony Interactive Entertainment publishes in Japan), as well as featuring PlayStation VR demos for Space Channel 5 VR Kinda Funky News Flash! and Marvel’s Iron Man. There will also be a mega-theatre showing footage from Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding, and Sony is hosting a special match on Modern Warfare featuring members of professional Esports teams.
The company is hosting a series of stage events over the course of the show, too, with developers showing gameplay demonstrations of upcoming games. These events will be live-streamed so we’ll likely see more footage from titles like Nioh 2 and Final Fantasy VII Remake. The full stage event schedule and further information on the full lineup of games at the PlayStation booth will be announced at a later date.
In other TGS news, Capcom is set to reveal a new Resident Evil game–codenamed Project Resistance–prior to the show, with attendees being able to get their hands on the potential co-op title once the event opens its doors.
The upcoming Joker movie starring Joaquin Phoenix carries an R rating, and director Todd Phillips apparently had to work hard to convince Warner Bros. to allow him to make his more mature vision. He told The Los Angeles Times that it was a lengthy process to get the R rating for Joker. Some people within Warner Bros. were apparently concerned about merchandising, among other things related to the content.
“There were emails about: ‘You realize we sell Joker pajamas at Target.’ There were a zillion hurdles, and you just sort of had to navigate those one at a time,” Phillips said. “At the time I would curse them in my head every day. But then I have to put it in perspective and go, ‘They’re pretty bold that they did this.'”
Producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff said in the interview that it was difficult to get the green light for Phillips’ version of Joker, due in part to “concerns about some of the content.” However, after Warner Bros. agreed to a budget, which was reportedly much lower than typical superhero movies at a reported $55 million, everything got underway more smoothly.
“Once we locked and loaded our budget, they really gave us a tremendous amount of space to do what we needed to do,” Koskoff said. “The passion Todd has for this movie is palpable, and when he starts talking about it, he’s hard to say no to. At the end of the day, he got to make the movie he wanted to make.”
Also in the interview, Phillips spoke about his reluctance to make a comic book movie of his own. He said he’s been offered them in the past, but he always said no. “I don’t watch those movies,” he said. “It’s not because I don’t think it’s cool. It’s just like, quite frankly, they’re always so loud. It was just never something I imagined doing.”
It’s not exactly clear what convinced Phillips to sign on for Joker, but for what it’s worth, the film may not be a traditional comic book movie. He explained previously that his movie doesn’t borrow much at all from the source material.
“We didn’t follow anything from the comic books, which people are gonna be mad about,” Phillips, who also wrote the script, said in a July interview. “We just wrote our own version of where a guy like Joker might come from. That’s what was interesting to me. We’re not even doing Joker, but the story of becoming Joker. It’s about this man.”
Joker premieres at the Venice Film Festival this weekend before its wide opening in theatres on October 4. In addition to Phoenix in the title role, the movie stars Robert de Niro, Zazie Beetz, and Frances Conroy.
Joker is something of a change for Phillips, who previously made the Hangover and Old School comedies. He also wrote for Borat, which earned him his Oscar nomination.
In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day told us when the world would end. August 29, 1997 was designated as Judgment Day, when the machines would rise up against the humans. Clearly, that didn’t happen, thanks to any number of movie sequels and timeline changes. However, the day still holds significance for Terminator fans, and Paramount Studios has chosen to celebrate it with a new trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate, the next film in the series.
The trailer explains what’s going on in this latest sequel. Although Sarah Connor successfully helped change the future in T2 back in 1991, she didn’t change humanity’s fate–which, based on the movie’s name, we’re guessing is pretty dark. There’s also an iconic Terminator line at the trailer’s end, so it’s worth watching all the way through.
While Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return for this movie shouldn’t come as much of a surprise–he’s yet to miss an installment–Dark Fate does see the return of two vital people. James Cameron is back producing the film, his first time being hands-on with the franchise since 1991’s Judgment Day. Also returning for the first time since T2 is Linda Hamilton, reprising her role as Sarah Connor.
The new film, from director Tim Miller (Deadpool), picks up 27 years after the events of Terminator 2, as Sarah and the original T-800 cyborg Schwarzenegger played in the first film come to the aid of a cyborg-human hybrid (Mackenzie Davis), who is trying to save a woman (Natalia Reyes) from being killed by a liquid metal Terminator (Gabriel Luna), sent from the future by Skynet. It should also be noted that Dark Fate is a direct sequel to T2 and is not connected to the franchise’s other installments–so don’t worry if you happened to miss 2009’s Terminator Salvation or 2015’s Terminator Genisys.
The movie will also reportedly flash back to the 1990s, with body doubles stepping in for younger versions of Schwarzenegger and Edward Furlong (John Connor). The doubles will likely have their faces digitally replaced by CGI versions of both actors, as Bloody Disgusting points out.
Terminator: Dark Fate arrived in theaters on November 1.
One of the common features across stylish-action games such as Bayonetta or Devil May Cry is a system that grades your performance in combat. It’s motivation for playing better and using your suite of abilities to its full potential, which often leads to better rewards. Nintendo Switch exclusive Astral Chain does the same if you play on either Platinum Standard or Platinum Ultimate difficulty, but it works a bit differently this time around.
Astral Chain’s combat scenarios conclude by giving you a letter grade from D (lowest) to S+ (highest), and there are several factors that go into the grade you get. The number one thing to keep in mind is to use your variety of Legions and different skills as much as you can. Another important tip is to always hit your sync attacks and sync finishers; these account for a good chunk of points at the end of combat. Getting multiple chain binds and consecutive critical backstab hits also heavily factor into point totals.
Essentially any sweet move you can do in Astral Chain contributes to the overall score you get (10,000+ being the requirement for S+ rank). Time to complete the combat scenario is also part of your score calculation so its best to be efficient, too. There is nothing that will explicitly take points away from you since there are no negatives in the calculation, just points you leave on the table.
However, Astral Chain differs from its contemporaries in a big way; its scoring system does not account for damage taken. That’s right, you can take as much damage as you want (though you don’t really want that) and still get the coveted S+ ranking–even using up your AED revives won’t prevent a top tank. The way damage can hinder your score is if your combos or abilities constantly get broken up, preventing you from pulling off the moves that add points to your overall score.
Though the game doesn’t make it explicitly clear what the conditions for achieving certain awards are, you can get a general idea of what they require based on their names. The following is a long list of the awards I’ve commonly earned in combat:
Legion Skill
Legion Skill Master
Chain Bind
Multi Chain Bind
Backstab
Perfect Call
Finishing Touch
Legion of Legions
Long Range Only
Running On Empty
Accident-Prone
Medicine Master
Dodge and Sync
Sync Attacker
Drop and Sync
Sync Attack Master
Naked Eye
Stunning
Full Arsenal
Multiple Legions
Item Hoarder
Chain of Command
At the end of the day, there are many ways to achieve S+ ranks in Astral Chain. It’s not exact science but in my experience, hitting multiple sync attacks, juggling between at least three different Legion, and using cool down attacks have been enough to earn consistent S+ grades. There comes a point in the game (especially in the endgame combat missions) where success is only really possible by playing in this manner; you’ll inherently earn top rank most times.
For more on Astral Chain, be sure to check out all our coverage and content:
Platinum Games’ is a developer known for creating satisfying combat mechanics, and Astral Chain‘s has continued this tradition with a unique and exciting combat system. While it has a decent opening tutorial system to help you along, there are several tactics and maneuvers that the game doesn’t quite tell you early on. To help you become the ultimate anime cop, we’ve gathered some handy tips below.
Hopefully, these combat tips will give you the fighting edge against the vicious Chimeras! Those beasts can be a handful if you’re not careful, so definitely study what we’ve highlighted to ensure your survival during the game’s tougher encounters. For a look at how S+ rank combat looks, watch the video above. Otherwise, refer to the table of contents below to jump to the tips you want to hear about most.
For the uninitiated, Astral Chain is the latest from Platinum Games, a studio most known for its work on top-tier action games like Bayonetta, Nier: Automata, and Vanquish. It’s possibly one of the developer’s best titles; GameSpot editor Michael Higham gave it an X/10 and said: “Astral Chain’s underwhelming story doesn’t overshadow what it does best. It’s an incredible execution of a fresh take on the stylish-action foundation. And its own anime-inspired swagger makes the satisfying battles all the more exhilarating.”
If you enjoyed this Astral Chain guide and want more, be sure to let us know in the comments below. And don’t hesitate to discuss any additional tips you’ve found while out on the battlefield.
Organize Your Squad
In Astral Chain, one of your primary weapons is your Legions, which are living weapons that stand beside you. They’re central to combat, each possessing their own unique attacks and abilities that help you dispatch enemies. As you progress the story, you gradually gain more Legions, ending up with a total of five. To switch between these Legions, you can either hold Y to bring up a menu, or tap Y to quickly change to the next Legion.
If you want to fight more effectively, learn to layer and combine Legion skills that complement one another. Once you get a flow of which Legion’s attacks and abilities best follow up another’s, reorganize them to suit your strategy. This way you can tap Y to seamlessly switch to your Legion without pulling up the wheel menu–though remember that you’ll switch between them in clockwise order. Organizing your squad to create preset skill combos can help you unleash devastating attacks that maximize crowd control and damage output.
Unleash the Beast
Every Legion can learn a skill called “Hit Rush,” which unchains the Legion to attack autonomously. While underwhelming since it removes control over the Legion, it’s incredibly useful because you can summon another one to the field while the other is engaging on its own. Use this combat technicality to your advantage when you’re looking to unleash absolute hell on your enemies, or if you need to put aggro elsewhere and retreat when you’re near death.
Must-Have Legion Skills
Two of the most valuable skills you can access early are Axe Legion’s Blue Shield and Beast Legion’s Howl. Both are essential in buying you time to heal, set up a combo, or attack an opponent without risk of getting interrupted during tougher battles. Blue Shield allows you to tank three hits without taking damage, allowing you to plow through the enemy without worrying about being interrupted. It can also be used defensively to ensure your healing animation is uninterrupted.
The power of Chain Binding weakens after subsequent uses on the same enemy, and by the third Chain Bind, they’ll be unaffected. Unlike chaining an enemy, however, Howl’s effectiveness does not weaken upon each use and can be used throughout the fight for offense and defense, making it an invaluable skill.
Learn the Unique Attacks
As fun as it is to wail on the ZR button and smack enemies around, there are more efficient and flashy attacks in your arsenal. As you upgrade your X-Baton and Legatus, you’ll learn multiple unique command attacks to perform with your Legions, such as a spin attack, delayed attacks, and charge attacks.
The Sword Legion’s spin attack or the Axe Legion’s delayed attack are some of the more impressive offensive maneuvers. There are many unique weapon and Legion combinations, so go to the training hall and experiment with them to get a better grasp of how they work.
Become the Chain Master
Be sure to practice managing your chain’s multiple abilities in a fight. Having smooth control of Chain Dashing, Chain Binding, and Chain Pulling is essential in combat. Also, some skills cancel if you dismiss your Legion, so sometimes it’s better to chain pull your Legion out of danger and send them back out. Learn the ins and outs of chain control to manage the fight.
The Runaway King: Ride the Beast Legion
Although the Axe Legion can shield you while you heal, in a pinch, riding the Beast Legion to reposition and stall may be a better option. While mounted on the Beast Legion you’re almost invincible, automatically dodging every attack without you touching the controls. You can also use this tactic to timer scam the enemy and let your skills recharge, or retreat to a better spot farther away from all of the mayhem.
Be Ability Efficient
As you progress, you acquire ability shards that you can use to customize your Legion with unique traits, such as increased chain range or the ability for a Legion to self-destruct after running out of energy. These abilities rank from one-to-three stars, but each possesses additional perks that improve your stats and characteristics.
While you might be tempted to equip powerful two-to-three-star shards, it’s better to slot in one-star shards that have two bonus perks. Higher-star shards may be powerful, but they quickly eat up the five points worth of shards you can equip. If anything, it’s quite difficult to find a 3-star ability that’s worth the slots. You’re better off fitting five one-star shards with great complimentary perks to maximize your Legion’s potential better.
Cheese Damage with Cutscene Animations
Some Sync Attacks go into cool one-to-three-second animations, which are surprisingly beneficial during fights. You’re entirely invincible during these attacks so that you can deal damage without worrying about getting hurt. Try using Sync Attacks to your advantage while in a hectic situation!
The latest from developer Platinum Games (best known for the Bayonetta series) is the Nintendo Switch exclusive Astral Chain. It shares a lot of similarities to its stylish-action relatives, but Astral Chain separates itself with a unique, thrilling combat system–you control a player-character and a Legion simultaneously. This makes for some incredible fights, and it’ll take some time to wrap your head around all its intricacies. There are systems layered on top of the tandem chaos, like Ability Codes and a skill tree to upgrade for new attacks, and we’ll point out some key things to pay attention to.
While we’ll help you with some basics to keep in mind during battle, there’s a lot more to the game than combat. Within segmented story chapters, you’ll explore semi-open hub areas side missions, investigations, and other optional content. Primary objectives are fairly straight-forward, but to get the most out of Astral Chain, you’ll need to do some poking and prodding to reveal hidden quests.
Not All Quests Appear On The Map
IRIS Is Your Best Friend
Accessing Ladders
Understanding The Chip..er…Ability Code System
Premium Material Codes Are A Premium
The Quirks Of Dodging
Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply
Red Matter Boosts Legion Energy Past Max
Rank Doesn’t Account For Damage, But Style
Listen For Meowing, Save Cats If Pawssible
Put Up Your Blue Shield
The Power Of Two Legions
Beast Legion’s Auto Dodge And More
Experiment With Legion Abilities
Astral Chain is out now, and chances are if you’re looking through this compilation of tips, you’re already set on playing the game. But if you’re interested in reading some detailed thoughts on the game, be sure to read my Astral Chain review, or check out my breakdown of how long Astral Chain takes to beat. For more advanced pointers, read through (or watch) our compilation of in-depth Astral Chain combat tips.
Not All Quests Appear On The Map
Each chapter (or File) in Astral Chain contains a number of red cases and blue cases. Blue cases are made of simple activities like solving a puzzle or finding certain objects/NPCs in the world. On the other hand, red cases are comprised of combat scenarios that are subsequently graded for performance counted towards your overall chapter grade.
While red cases include the primary objectives, not all of the red cases are readily available; clearing out all the ones marked on your map doesn’t mean you’ve done everything possible. You’ll have to do some diligent exploration, which can be tedious, but thankfully you have the IRIS scanning ability that’ll help highlight where to find these hidden objectives. For example, you can reveal a huge Chimera footprint in the environment that’ll lead to an astral plane entrance where you fight to complete a red case.
At the end of each chapter, you get a report that will show that you which cases you missed. It gives a general indication of when in the chapter that case lies, which helps narrow down where to look if you replay it.
IRIS Is Your Best Friend
Not only does IRIS highlight important clues within the environment and help you trace hidden Chimera presence in the world, it also reveals enemy health, including bosses. It’s easy to forget in the midst of the hectic battles, so be sure to pull up IRIS to track enemy health gauges since the game doesn’t automatically do it for you.
If you come across an invincible enemy that’s glowing purple, flip on IRIS to help reveal the location of the target they’re tethered to. While not as critical, IRIS will also highlight junk piles that the Beast Legion can dig up, certain pieces to puzzles, and chest locations to make things easier to find.
Accessing Ladders
You might easily intuit this tip, but anytime you see a ladder that hasn’t been unfurled, look for a big red button next to it. Pull out your Arrow Legion, go into its aiming mode, and hit the button with an arrow to get the ladder to collapse. I wish I’d realized this sooner…
Understanding The Chip..er…Ability Code System
The Ability Code system is a new version of the Chip system that was in Nier: Automata. These consist of items that grant perks and buffs to attach to each of your Legions and make them even stronger. This can range from increasing their chain length, boosting critical hit damage, or preventing stuns and burns.
You pick up Ability Codes throughout your adventure and they’ll take up a certain amount of slots, which usually correlates to how effective they are. However, you’ll definitely want to use ones that have additional perks attached to the single code. Stacking the right codes on any one Legion could Additional slots for each Legion have to be earned through their own skill trees, but it’s worth working towards since Ability Codes can drastically change their usefulness.
Premium Material Codes Are A Premium
Later in the game, you’ll start to accumulate Premium Material Codes. This is an important upgrade material that’s fairly hard to come by so you’ll want to spend these wisely. Upgrading your X-baton and Legatus to their highest levels will require Premium Material Codes, but we suggest saving them to get deeper into Legion skill trees since the material is required to unlock their best abilities.
The Quirks Of Dodging
One of the keys to surviving battles against swarms of Chimera is timing your dodges and dodging in the right direction. Perfectly timed doges will get you out of harm’s way, but that may be hard to pull off at every moment. Against huge enemies like the Homunculus bosses, you can dodge underneath them to avoid their powerful attacks and remain within striking distance.
You may also think that dodging would break an X-baton combo if you’re in the middle of it, but you’re allowed to dodge once and pick up right where your combo left off. This is important for working towards sync attacks, which require you to combo without interruption.
Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply
It might be a confusing system at first, and you’ll want to know this sooner rather than later. Astral Chain separates healing items into two separate categories, field supply and your own personal supply. Items under field supply are temporary and found within each level; they only remain in your inventory throughout a single chapter. These are designated with a small flower symbol within the item icon.
You have to buy or earn your own personal supply. Money isn’t really an issue towards the end of the game, but early on when your budget is tight, it’s important to use up your field supply before dipping into your own.
Red Matter Boosts Legion Energy Past Max
Those floating red crystals scattered across the environment are red matter, and part of your duty is to clean up the mess. It requires your Legion to hover over the red matter, but as a bonus, it feeds your Legion’s energy gauge past its maximum. Remembering this is especially useful when you go into the astral plane since you’ll constantly be in combat encounters amidst your exploration.
Rank Doesn’t Account For Damage, But Style
If you play on either Platinum Standard or Platinum Ultimate difficulty, your combat performance will be graded. Unlike other stylish-action games however, Astral Chain’s grading system doesn’t account for damage taken. You can still earn top marks (S+) as long as you get fancy with your attacks and Legion usage. Points are racked up based on pulling off different tactics, chaining combos, hitting sync attacks, among other things. Just don’t worry if you get hit.
Listen For Meowing, Save Cats If Pawssible
In each chapter, there’s a stray cat to save and adopt to keep at your dad’s safehouse. There isn’t a truly compelling material reason to find the cats, but I mean, you wouldn’t just leave a cat out in the wild during a Chimera invasion? When you come back to the safehouse and have cat food in your inventory, you can feed them and get an item in return as a small bonus.
IRIS will help find the stray cats since they’ll be highlighted, and if you start hearing meowing sounds, then a cat is surely nearby! :3
Put Up Your Blue Shield
You don’t unlock the Axe Legion until late in the game, but once you do, be sure to upgrade it and unlock Blue Shield in the skill tree. It’s incredibly useful since it grants you protection from damage and knockback for three hits. It’s one of those abilities you’ll want to use as soon as it’s done recharging from cooldown.
The Power Of Two Legions
Hit Rush is an ability that all your Legions can learn early on. While each Legion will have its own variation on the Hit Rush attack, the ability unchains the Legion for the duration of the combo giving you the opportunity to summon another Legion at the same time. Using this tactic effectively will burn down tougher enemies a bit faster.
Beast Legion’s Auto Dodge And More
The Beast Legion has a host of useful abilities. Its Howl skill is an AOE stun that opens attack opportunities and mounting it lets you move across the battlefield faster than any other method. These abilities give you breathing room when necessary, and another great perk is that you will automatically dodge any enemy attack while in mounted mode. Keep in mind that auto-dodges consume Legion energy, but it’s incredibly useful for navigating tougher fights in more open areas.
Experiment With Legion Abilities
Astral Chain gives you so many possibilities in combat, and as a result, there’s no single right way to go about fighting Chimera. We’d encourage experimentation and testing out different cooldown skills in the police headquarters training room, and get a feel for how you want to create synergy between all your different Legions. If you want a few more tips on how to do more advanced stuff, be sure to read our in-depth Astral Chain combat guide.
If you’re running an Nvidia GPU you should consider a G-Sync monitor for more fluid gaming. They can be a bit pricey, so here’s our rundown of the best cheap G-Sync monitors.
