Aselia the Eternal -The Spirit of Eternity Sword- Reviews

Part Fire emblem part Clannad. This game is what set the bar for a great visual novel. The strategy portions of the game actually will effect the outcome of the story, and the interplay of the story and strategy make you pretty invested into the troops. It isn't some generic spirit mook you are fighting with it is the cute and shy Hellion, and knowing about her makes you sad if you can't bring her home safe ;; The one thing I would say as a complaint is some of the missions are too damn long, which is ok for a pure strategy game but as the whole game is pretty much one long war campaign it seems like the missions that are super long could have been subdivided into smaller tasks with story breaking it up. Now there are some that sorta do that... kinda... but it stays in the strategy mode engine which doesn't let you save when they are talking and only gives the profile icons for people talking so it isn't as immersive as the visual novel mode engine, which has voice acting and quick saving. Anyway. The game is great. if you like visual novels or strategy games like fireemblem or super robot wars, this is a must.

I played the game a while ago before downloading on Steam. The Steam graphics are little outdated but good enough. I have a soft spot for it as this was my first VN. The story for me ranks among the best for a VN. There are also a good selections of routes and a mix of story and strategy. The strategy can become a bit tedious, especially when playing through alternate routes as there are not clear branching points to save at. Aside from that, this game is a Masterpiece and would totally recommend.

I played this game before it came to steam and loved it. Now that I'm replaying it in preparation for the sequel that finally came out, and I am finding that I still love it. I will also mention that this game originally had erotic scenes in it and while they weren't exactly removed gracefully, they are few enough that you can easily ignore the hints that the characters got it on offscreen. As for the basics of the game, it's a strategy game where you place and move your units around the map to get into scripted battle sequences when they meet. In between battles, there is a visual novel style story about the main character trying to cope with being brought to another world and forced to fight for a king he doesn't trust. Put simply, I am a huge fan of the story and the battle system was fun enough that I actually turned up the difficulty after each playthrough when I was replaying the game to go through other routes instead of powering through lower difficulties to get the battles over with. The first thing I have to mention is the beginning of the game right after the prologue. I'm going to gush a bit about a stylistic choice made early on, so feel free to skip this paragraph. Now, I've found that very few developers have the balls required to actually have the language of the fantasy world NOT be English (or in this case, Japanese). The foreign characters in this game initially have lines voiced (and written in) in a made up language that, while obviously unknown to the player at first, is very clearly translateable. The main character is implied to spend a very long time just picking up the language when he comes to the world, but the game goes one step further by asking the player if *they've* actually managed to start picking some simple stuff up (That might sound like a horrible decision, but they don't throw you entirely into the frying pan and the results barely matter if you really don't care enough to bother; it's just for scoring a few points with the girl taking care of you). Now, the dialogue boxes eventually switch into English when the main character gets better at the language, and by your first battle, the character voices are all in Japanese instead of the fantasy language, indicating that Yuuto is fluent now. You can also switch character languages to Japanese for the whole story when you get to New Game+, but that entire process shows a level of care and dedication to the story that is honestly very rare in the games and shows I've experiences and I have to give it credit for that. Anyway, the prologue starts us off pretty slowly, but the rest of the story is quite enjoyable with multi-dimensional characters and some fun twists throughout. As mentioned before, I enjoyed both the story and gameplay immensely, though a walkthrough of choices to make to get each ending would probably be a good thing to look up on your second and subsequent playthroughs. Combine this with a multiverse lore that is just ripe for sequels and spinoffs and you have a great game to spend some time with. This is seriously a great game to check out.

Aselia the eternal is a story-driven Visual novel with tactical strategy gameplay elements. It, along with Fate/Staynight was my gateway to visual novels. the story in interesting, the gameplay is engaging, and the characters actually make you care. I take points off for this version being censored, having removed an entire route among other things, but the story more then makes up for it. I recommend this to all my fellow visual novel fans and japanophiles.

I just finished Esperia's route and even after 80 hours of gameplay I still want to jump back in. It's definitely not for everyone. I appreciate the visual novel and turn-based strategy genres, and this one is a very happy medium. I'm a bit surprised that more choices weren't available on the visual novel side, but it made the choices I did have more meaningful. + All of the main character's love interests have their own different sort of charm. Liked them all. + I found the story to be engrossing, for the most part. Some of Yuuto's dialog, internal and external, was a bit childish... but hey, so was mine as a teen. Translation seemed to be great. A few spelling errors on occasion, but I forgive. + RNG doesn't exist. The combat can be tough, but I never had that feeling of "I screwed up everything and have to reload from last chapter." If I was getting beat it was because I ignored the game mechanics or overlooked something important. Something like "Whoops, that skill was out of uses!". + Even though the game has to be played on a low resolution, the art and sprites were beautiful to me, if reused frequently. + Plenty of mysteries remain even after the first playthrough. It is easy to get your money's worth from this game if it's your style. + Back and Skip functions helped a lot. Especially the "L" key with battles. - Moving units around became tedious at the end. Too many nodes in the final area made navigation a chore. - There is no technical support. The game doesn't like newer PCs. I had to figure out how to enlarge the window on my own. Any attempt to Alt+Enter or change the game to "Fullscreen" in the options caused a crash for me. Having Steam resize the window upon launch didn't do anything, either. ** At first, I used the tried-and-true Windows Magnifier (Win and Plus key). Works decently. Eventually I fooled with it a bit more. Right-clicking on the icon in the taskbar, going to Properties, then locating an option to run the game in 640x480 res. Smooth sailing after that; never had any other crashes. - Not too many musical tracks, and they get repetitive quickly. - I suppose this is part of the difficulty, but it could be hard to predict what worked and what failed. For instance, gold-lettered skills were more powerful than their face value indicated, but coming up with how much more powerful was often a guessing game for me. Not to mention the Ice Banish skills. Seemed like they arbitrarily determined that "Level X Ice Banish" works on "Level Y Support Skill" and didn't tell the player. I read somewhere that "equal level Ice Banish works on equal level support skill" but if that's actually true, then I wish it was a bit more specific. The "level" of the skill can mean any number of things. Several numbers assigned to the skill in the status screen could be construed as its level. Ice Banish 5 doesn't block Ether Sink 5; this I found out the hard way. For me there ended up being a lot of finding things out the hard way. It's an older title, but definitely worth it if visual novels and a bit of turn-based combat are up your alley. I played without adult scenes and I didn't feel like I missed out on anything. I'm really happy to have found this series on Steam and I'll get around to playing #2 pretty soon. Update: I'm playing through Aselia's route, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how much content differs from one route to another. This game really has a huge amount of content if someone played through all of the routes. Also, I *think* I have a better handle of Ice Banish. Compare Ice Banish "Target Level" stat with the actual level of the skill being used that I'm trying to block. IceB t-lv >= SupSkl Lv = successful block.

The story is a big focus in a game like this. Everyone and their mom has written something about it, so if you're interested in that, check out someone else's review. What I'm going to focus on is the actual gameplay. I'm about halfway done throwing a guide together for the missions and mechanics of the game as of writing this review, so I won't go too much into what strategies are optimal or anything like that, here. I would reckon that if you're not familiar with permadeath strategy games a-la X-com and fire emblem, you WILL have trouble. The game will make you pay for every mistake you make, and there's very little foreshadowing on what you need to have and when. There will be times where the game spits an enemy at you with a spell too high for you to counter without you having any ability to see it coming. Your whole squad will eat ass and you'll get very familiar with the game over screen by the end of your first playthrough. SAVE OFTEN. S A V E O F T E N. I can't say this enough. Experimentation is key to success here, and sometimes things don't work out. Losing lots of progress sucks, and there's 50 save slots so go nuts. In terms of progression, there's no indication of who gets what spell at what level. Check the forums for a Google Doc which can help guide your character growth if you don't feel like experimenting. The game uses negative feedback rather than positive to get you to try your best. There's big rewards for winning in a timely manner, and failing to do so can make it difficult to progress later on. One thing the game does an AWFUL job of telling you is that every 10 levels your characters get a class-up, and these class-ups can make the game a LOT easier. The details for this are in the Dakkodango guide for the game, so make sure to take a look at it. There's all sorts of hidden stuff in the game that really doesn't feel very useful until after normal mode. Most of the guardians will eviscerate you if you bother to face them when they first pop up (but are pretty manageable at the end of the playthrough), and mana crystals aren't worth your time early on. The game gives you more characters than you can use after a certain point, and inevitably a few are going to get sidelined. A lot of the best characters don't really show their utility up front, and require heavy investment to really shine. Failing to invest wisely in your characters can cause a lot of anguish. This game is fun, but the difficulty mainly comes from a lack of polish. Going in blind is how I did it when I played the fan-translation of it over 8 years ago, and there's definitely fun to be had that way, but a lot of people don't groove with that. If you've read this far, here's a big tip: The "L" key will skip combat sequences in game. It works during battles during cutscenes, too, so don't hesitate to take advantage of it.

In my opinion Aselia the Eternal is one of [b]the greatest[/b] visual novels [b]ever[/b]. It has a beautiful storyline with lots of twists (some of which you don't see coming), fantastic interaction between characters, the choices you need to make to enter a character's route are a bit subtle, so here I recommend using a guide, and most importantly, for me, [u]actual[/u] high repalayability value (which isn't true for a alot of VNs). What I mean by that is that each route has a (sub)storyline and missions unique to that route which makes each playthrough different enough from one another that you don't want to just give up on the game and move on. Basically a bit of strategy is required because what worked on one playthrough might not work on another. If you don't understand what I mean, play the game a couple of times and you'll see.

[h1] A Review By an Old Fart for Old Farts [/h1] (Disclaimer: Don't look at the hours I have logged on the Steam version of this game. My hours belong to the version sold by www.jlist.com.) This game is designed for people in one of three categories: 1) Those who have oceans of patience and actually WANT to be micromanaging dozens of statistics every moment 2) Those who wake up, look in the mirror, and marvel about how Earth is blessed to have someone so great as the person in the mirror 3) Those who like immersive role playing games. If you belong to one of the first two categories, please read a different review to this game. On the other hand, if you belong to the third category and NOT the other two categories, I invite you to continue reading my review. (Aside note: Many thanks go out to Theonegod for making a cheat tool that allowed me to enjoy Aselia the Eternal despite being an average gamer. See Cons section point #1 for details.) Pros: + This game presents a very immersive experience. The starting few hours really pulls the gamer into the world of the game. + Very few games have tried to do what this game tries to do. In other words, this game is rather unique in the world of PC games. + If you take the time to understand the game system, you will hopefully come to understand the genius of the game. The game is very well crafted. Cons: - It would not have been terribly difficult for the game maker to make a difficulty game option suitable for the average gamer, but the game maker did not do so. Therefore, if you are an average gamer, I HIGHLY recommend you go to URL: http://dakkodango.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=151. - Game design decisions were made with one thing as the first priority: the gamer should be handicapped in a truly absurd number of ways. Because of that game design priority, there are many parts of the game that are not consistent with the lore of the game world. - The game preaches about the evils of war and wanton use of natural energy for the sake of convenience. The preaching gets old REALLY fast, but it persists long after the messages have been absolutely and positively drilled into the audience. - The game seems to be designed for lolicons. Prepare to see and hear very young girls in your army tearing sinew, breaking bones, and ripping the earth a new one. You have been warned. - *** Extremely Important *** The skip button will skip ALL scenes between battles. Sometimes there are a dozen scenes and I only want to skip 6 out of the 12 scenes. Aselia the Eternal was made prior to the convenience of a settings screen that has options such as "skip one scene" and "skip all scenes". FYI Knit-picking gripes (feel free to ignore): *) Disclaimer: I gripe because I am a fan of the genre and I would LOVE to see the genre get better. However, since the world economy is slow, better games aren't getting made. Therefore, games like this continue to stand out as being exceptional. Don't take my gripes the wrong way. 1) How many times must gamers endure a complete and utter lack of proper reward for difficult tasks? I turned the air blue with profanity when I received the same mana for the second dragon as what I received from the first dragon. The second dragon was 4 times the fight (at the very least)! 2) Black spirits are only truly useful for the enemy since the enemy has so many more troops than the protagonist. This violates the lore of the game, but since game difficulty is more important than game lore, black spirits become bench warmers for the protagonist. To the Abyss with that filth! 3) I am continually amazed at how many difficult JRPGs have VERY secret requirements for the good endings to the game. Seriously, is it not enough that gamers suffer through the steep difficulty of the actualy strategy part of the game?! 4) [spoiler] Why do the spirits at the end of the game act like they are not swallowed by their swords? It would be closer to the lore of the game if the enemy spirits in the Empire were all obsessed with duty, discipline, and death. Instead, many enemy spirits are still preaching about how evil war is. Get off it already--the gamers have received the message, oh Almighty Game Design Team! Honestly, it reminds me of being thumped with a Bible at church. Nobody wants that. [/spoiler] 5) The scripted battles add nothing to the game. In fact, they defy game lore as well as game mechanics. They detract from the overall presentation of the game. Scripted battles are nothing new to JRPG lovers, but they are always unnecessary. Scripted battles are a cheap cop-out for game makers, and therefore they will continue to be used. Oh well. 6) If the game is going to have scripted blocks in the road, the game should (expletive) TELL YOU THAT! Instead, you must make decisions without really knowing what the game expects you to do. This game is one of the very worst I've played in that one single regard. 7) Even with unlimited resources, training units is a total and complete pain in the backside. For some people, this translates into just one of many handicaps given to the gamer. For me, it GREATLY detracts from my desire to play the game through a second time. Yes, I could play the game through a second time in Normal mode. But the game offers enticement for those that play the game in Hard mode. But if the gamer does that, the player will be once again forced to train their units again. See the end of the PDF guide to learn what the enticements are for those who decide to deal with the irritation of training their units again. (Hint: it is in the Io's Boot Camp section of the guide.) Cheat tool suggestions (see Cons section point #1 for URL): 1) At the very least give yourself a boatload of currency (999999 Ether). Doing this more than once during the progression of the game will still provide the average gamer with more than enough opportunity to save spam. 2) Setting the turn counter to 1 is also VERY useful for missions that don't have story events pre-programmed to occur at set turn numbers. Look at the PDF guide for the game to know which missions have story events embedded in the middle of the missions. 3) If you don't constantly wish to be micromanaging the skills of your individual units, set the skill usage cheat for all units. Final recommendations: 1) (See Knit-picking gripe #3 for the reason for this entry.) If you have a waifu you want to see "the good end" for... [spoiler] use the PDF guide for the game and hit every single +1/+5/+10 mind or love choice for that particular waifu. Of course, you will need to complete the game twice if you want to see "the good ending" for Kyouko or Tokimi. And if you want to see "the good ending" for Uruka, choose all the subspirit options as opposed to choices for Aselia, Orpha, or Esperia. [/spoiler] *** Very Important *** To get a particular waifu ending, you also must SLAY WHOLE ENEMY SQUADS with Yuuto/waifu team 2) (See Cons section point #1 for the reason for this entry.) [spoiler] There are seven "good endings" for the game. I would also estimate that the gamer gets 10 percent or less than the resources the gamer really needs (if the gamer is an old fart like me). Because of those two things, I am guessing that the gamer is actually expected to play Normal mode more than once prior to moving onto Hard mode and then to play Hard mode more than once prior to moving onto Absurd mode (which is my word for the game mode as opposed to the game maker's word for it). If you read the bottom of the PDF guide, you will see the level caps for Normal and Hard mode. Keep those level caps in mind when you decide how much Ether to give yourself while cheating. OR you can decide to set the Ether pool at 500000 every time you boot up the game. [/spoiler]

If you don't think you'd like a visual novel, this is the game for you (if you also love turn-based strategy games like Fire Emblem, Heroes of Might and Magic, Disciple II, etc.). I played the original PC release from JASTUSA years ago (hence the lack of time played here). And by played, I mean obsessed. And by obsessed, I mean I played through every single permutation of the game (colloquially referred to as a 'route') twice. I think the grand total was well over 100 hours of precious life, but it was preciously spent. Aselia is one of those high fantasy stories that really grips you. It tends to hold nothing back, and is very challenging in both its strategic/tactical aspects and in its themes. The themes of said story are pretty excellent, ranging from social prejudice and slavery all the way to love, obligation, and duty (heehee). The gamplay portion, which is very significant if viewed through the lens of a typical visual novel, is challenging and diverse. There are units to train, squads to create, buildings to build, and tactical decisions to be made in the face of time limits, finite resources, and the ever-onward march to victory. The narrative portion of the game, which is still significant, is very excellent. Fans of high fantasy and gritty takes on alternate world transportation will enjoy the plot, while the average anime fan may be surprised at how dark the story goes. Don't be put off by the graphics; despite the age, this is a top-notch game. The art itself is a style unique to the developer, and while the sprites evoke nostalgia the "cutscenes" and events are well-done. That they're selling this game at normal price for less than $20 is a steal. If it's ever on sale, buy immediately and kiss your weekends goodbye. Fans of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics will jump right in to the style of gameplay, and everyone else will be pleasantly surprised by the depth of both the tactics and the narrative. Look forward to literally hours and hours of enjoyment.

An unforgiving, highly tactical SRPG, where your troops persist from one battle to another. Aselia is quite old by now, but it deserves to be called a classic. The story is grim but captivating and incorporates some unusual ideas, like the protagonist being at first unable to speak or understand the language of the world he's summoned to. The worldbuilding is remarkable. The real meat, though, is the challenging gameplay where every choice matters and which involves absolutely 0 luck. Aselia has 7 main endings, and fully completing it can easily take 100+ hours. For that, the price point is ridiculously fair. Norio Wakamoto voices 2 characters in the game. For some, this might be worth it for that alone. Originally released in 2003. Also worth noting that Aselia is a prequel to Seinarukana, which is coming on Steam later this year, and I recommend playing this before it.