Astlibra Revision, the secret, dark horse, must-play JRPG of 2022, has gotten a rare and record-setting discount on Steam, making this the best time to try one of the most memorable games I've played in years.
A 20% discount is small potatoes by Steam sale standards, but $19.99 is a great, all-time-low price for Astlibra Revision. Hell, the full price is a bargain. Plus it's still got a free demo so you can try before buying, too.
I put 58 hours into this game, stopping just short of getting the extremely grindy extra-extra-extra ending, and it wasn't even that long ago, yet I'm still struggling to explain why it's so good. It's a 2D side-scrolling action game with punchy combat, gorgeous sprites, an incredible variety of great music, and hugely engrossing upgrade and magic systems.
That's the surface-level stuff, and it's mostly stellar. Some of the puzzles are '90s adventure game-level BS, a lot of the levels are outright hideous, and not all of the story beats land. But the core combat is so hard to put down that you just power through it all without batting an eye. And underneath you'll find one of the most irresponsibly ambitious stories since Nier: Automata, set in a genre-hopping world that I can't help but take seriously despite so much of it being stupid as hell. Jumping the shark doesn't even begin to describe the time travel shenanigans, but it's so charming that it somehow works.
There's a reason Astlibra Revision now has a whopping 14,769 overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam, putting it in the ranks of giants like Persona 4 Golden and Yakuza: Like A Dragon on the Steam JRPG charts. It plays like a time capsule of tropes and ideas going back more than a decade – a vertical slice of an entire subgenre cherry-picked to support an auteur vision. It's the video game equivalent of a dingy, hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop restaurant with unbeatable food and prices. It has no right to be as good as it is, yet it still occupies my thoughts after six months.
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