By Xchel Nakamura
Anime video games are one peculiar genre of video games that only a few of us can understand. Asterisk War: Phoenix Festa is no exception. Based on the light novel The Asterisk War: The Academy City on the Water. The anime adaptation made its debut in October 2015 and ended on June 2016. The game takes you on the quest for the Ultimate Tournament, the Phoenix Festa games, where one pairs up with another student and goes from battle to battle to achieve the ultimate goal: being granted any one wish you want.
The game starts off as you are given two options to begin the game: you are given the choice to make your own character or picking Ayato Amagiri (the protagonist of series). Naturally, you always want to start off by playing the main hero in these type of games, but instead, I chose the former. The game seemed fun at first being able to customize and make my own avatar that I am able to control in the game. (Pretty neat if I might add.) Where the game falls short is how fast you go through it. To be fair, you start off with no stats at all. Not that it is a bad thing, though with the different types of training, it’s hard to know what to level up.
The six ways you can level up is by Life, Prana, Speed, Attack, Insight and Defense. Now while I could go into detail of what they each are, some of them are self-explanatory. I will cover 2 of these for a better explanation of what they mean:
Prana is basically your AP/Cooldown stat. Just like in most RPGs, it’s a meter that allows you to perform your combat actions. Insight in this game, boosts Prana regeneration as well as attack and defense. Now, majority of the time, you concentrate on performing 2 actions. Whether it was training, going to your job or setting up a date. The game didn’t give you enough time to maximize your character to its full potential. Meaning, you had to really think and choose how to use your actions carefully. Days in the game went by too fast and got too repetitive quickly. Having to decide whether to train, go shopping or etc. made the game just a bit tough to deal with in this aspect.
Now on the other hand, when you choose the main character, everything is pretty much given to you and your stats are close to max. To some players, this is actually a good thing as they don’t have to work as hard and they don’t have to worry about leveling up as much as they would creating their own character. In other words, they can enjoy the story at a leisurely pace. However, to some of us players who really like to work for our stats and weapons by playing the protagonist, it takes away from doing anything else that you want to do because, as I mentioned earlier, you are given the tools to pass the game. The game in this mode still goes too fast, and again it gets very repetitive.
Asterisk War: Phoenix Festa does have good graphics, but nothing that we have haven’t seen before in this genre. The character interactions within the game seem very simplistic, but at the same time, offer a little splash of comedic banter and cute factor. It is better if you watch the anime based off it, The Asterisk War. This will get you familiar with some of these characters and it does help because you get to learn a little bit more about their backstories and what the actual story is behind this game.
Overall, this is still a good game to play, especially if you’re into the series and it will expand on the universe that is The Asterisk War. If you’ve yet to see it, it’s still very easy to jump into and enjoy while trying to court one of the many girls.
Rating: 3.5/5 Atoms
Review code was provided by publisher.
from Nerd Reactor
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