Aselia the Eternal -The Spirit of Eternity Sword-

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.

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 tr...

[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...

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.

An extremely awesome start to the game so far! The soundtrack is amazing! The characters all seem to have quite their own personality and vibe about them. The story is developing very nicely, and I love how the original japanese voice acting is incorporated into it for each of the characters. The subtitles are visually appealing and very well-structured. Definitely a game I would recommend checking out if interested in the Visual Novel & RPG genre.

The store page suggests that this is a 50+ hour deep, engaging RPG with multiple characters, branching paths, and tons of skills to pick and choose from. What I got was a 50+ hour visual novel, with a strange, unengaging strategy game shoved into it. I feel lied to. As long as you go into this game knowing ahead of time what it is, you'll probably enjoy it. I'm just looking for something in this game that isn't here.

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 en...

sometimes you want a peaceful game. sometimes, you just want to incinerate hordes of angels as a loli. sometimes you want a strategy game with new game plus. sometimes you want a drama. why not all of the above?

The screenshots and description make this sound like some kind of story-heavy tactical RPG - like any number of Atlas games, or the Fire Emblem series. Well, I just spent two and a half hours reading to get to a part of the game where I could actually do any tactical battling. During that period, I only had a few decision points and I have seen no sign that any of them mattered. Once I did get to the battle, I found it ot be simultaneously too easy and too hard. * Too easy, because if you play defensively then you can basically be an invincible turtle. And then your post-battle score will be crap. * Too hard, because if you push ahead fast you risk either running out of skill uses or you'll mess up your formation and get wiped out. All this might be forgivable if the writing were good, or the visuals were better. Neither of those holds true. The protagonist/narrator repeatedly breaks the "show, don't tell" rule when it comes to describing the people around him. Said people are ki...

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 ...