An artifical humanoid, an isolated island overflowing with ill explained energy, and a distant creator with an obvious nefarious secret. These are the elements that are presented to you at the start of DarkPigeon and ESDitial’s Awaken: Astral Blade. Tania-104 is an artificially created humanoid tasked by her creator Dr. Herveus to find and unseal an ‘Energy Bursting Point’ to further his research, research that he is quite tight lipped about. The island is crawling with plant and insect-based mutants, but you are equipped with a sword you can manifest at will, and you have the ability to collect Aether, a form of the odd energy that permeats the island.
In short order, your mission goes awry as a bit of land gives way and deposits you deep into a cave system beneath the island. Here you find a much larger mutant and after defeating it, a flower budding from a root. Touching the flower results in an explosion of energy and a new special ability for Tania. A little ways later, after defeating another huge lupine mutant, its ghost appears and speaks about events that transpired on the island over 500 years prior. Continuing on her mission, Tania finds more and more information on the events of the past, as well as a relic of her previous incarnation, a storage chip containing a personality ghost named Cythna who joins Tania and begins to give her advice. After much back and forth across the island, Tania finds the key to unlock the bursting point, unlocks it, and for her efforts she learns that the experiment her creator was performing was her, and then she is suddenly killed, only to wake up in the research lab where she was first created, finding it is now under attack as well. All of that is just the first few hours of Awaken: Astral Blade, with numerous twists, turns, and revelations yet to come.
Awaken falls roughly into the ‘Souls-vania’ style of game. You know the hallmarks, heavy emphasis on dodging, parry and timing based combat, limited healing options that replenish at save spots, enemies that respawn when you save, that sort of thing. I’d say it falls into a “light” version of the genre, given that there appears to be no penalty on death except to get warped back to your last used save point and the game even offers to lower the difficulty if you die repeatedly in the same area or against the same boss. As far as skills go, you start with your standard move, jump, a dash that you can hold to turn into a run, an air dash, and you pick up a double jump very quickly. You also get the ability to climb certain walls, smash certain floors, do a super jump after that smash attack, and a long jump you can execute on the ground or once in air. Most of these are mandatory in the plot, and they’re basically all mandatory for the second ending.
As for combat, you start with a sword. You can use this sword to execute a basic combo, and you can also execute special attacks with it at the end of the combo. A short ways into the game you get access to a scythe which is slower but stronger than the sword, and allows access to different special attacks. You can use scythe specials at the end of a sword combo and vice versa. Very late into the game you access the Gleaming Darts, throwing weapons which are quite strong but technically limited in number between save points and come so late as to be roughly irrelevant to your overall fighting strategy outside of using their extremely powerful finishing move to unleash a torrent of damage. Both the scythe and the darts are necessary to unlock portions of the map as their attacks are the only ones that can destroy certain barriers around the world. All three of the weapons have a special move that can be executed when Tania has built up a store of energy by pressing both triggers, or executed as a combo finisher by switching between weapons at the right time during a combo (also done by pressing a trigger).
That last ability isn’t automatic, you have to buy the skill, which gets me into the designated monetary and experience points, the Aether. One form of the energy that is found around the island, it can be found floating around the world, literally pointing the way towards progress, picked up from defeating foes, or as a reward from completing story and sidequests. The primary use of it is purchasing skills, but halfway through the game you do meet a merchant who will trade useful items and accessories for Aether. Naturally, I strongly recommend getting the passives and the accessories that increase your rate of acquisition ASAP, because you need a lot of it to buy all the skills and passives and eventually to upgrade your weapons.
Speaking of upgrades, let’s talk about upgrading Tania herself. You don’t do it with Aether. Instead you have to upgrade her by finding various items around the world. To increase her HP you find a certain fruit, to raise the number of items you can equip you find another item out in the world. Same with raising the amount your healing flask recovers and the amount of times you can use it between save points. You also need a special consumable in order to upgrade Tania’s weapons in addition to the Aether cost. The only way to directly upgrade Tania’s attack and defense, though, is by interacting with statues around the world to grant her a blessing, or to defeat certain golden enemies and absorb their strength to add to her attack. There are a lot of each type of these items scattered across the world, to the point where Tania becomes a veritable wrecking crew by the end of the game. The only other collectible of note that’s not a quest item are the 12 cats you can find across the island to unlock some QOL features like indicating that a room has an uncollected item, marking all uncollected items on your map (the reward for collecting all 12 cats) and my favorite the ability to- once you have unlocked fast travel between save points – immediately travel to any save point from any point on the map. These abilities can be toggled on or off at the cat statue near the hub location that you get when you make it to the more open ended section of the game. The statue also lets you freely change your difficulty.
One downside to Awaken: Astral Blade, especially given how story driven it is, is the translation. While by no means incomprehensible, it could have used a second pass. There are several expressions in the game, for example ‘ageless friends’ that I have to assume are idiomatic expressions being translated literally rather than localized. There was also at least one misnamed ability in the upgrade trees. You can also buy upgrades for abilities you do not have yet, and there’s no way to refund the Aether as far as I could tell. The game also teases you by showing you the unlockable costumes and their abilities in the equipment screen but doesn’t tell you how to get them, and one of them requires beating the game’s good ending to unlock. Awaken: Astral Blade has a few such inscrutable moments, like the door to one of the unlockable abilities (one of the few technically skippable ones) has a hint for unlocking it that I still don’t quite get.
Both the main and side plots are very good. The current and past dramas are fairly well-written, filled with twists and turns and nearly everything that’s set up has payoff, with the exception that Awaken: Astral Blade never really does anything with a giant earth devouring worm you must escape from several times but which just vanishes without being addressed after its final chase sequence. The difference between getting the bad ending and getting the good ending is about an extra hour’s worth of play time. It took me about 12 hours to do everything in the game – which involves completing one of the game’s major side quests that unlocks another sidequest, which then unlocks yet another quest, and so on to change the outcome of the final battle of the ‘bad’ ending to enable a different conclusion and allow you access to one more showdown with the final boss for the much longer ‘good’ ending. I won’t say what all this involves, save to say you are allowed to put markers on the game’s map, and if you come across a crystal, mark it on your map. You will be glad you did.
The concept of free will and self determination, especially for artificially created beings, is a big thrust of the plot and the resolution. If you like that sort of thing, Awaken: Astral Blade‘s plot and gameplay loop should keep you quite satisfied the whole way through. I know I quite enjoyed my time with the game. Also at no point does an Astral Blade get mentioned in any way. I don’t know if that’s down to the translation or what, just thought you all should know.
Tim played Awaken: Astral Blade with a review code along with his own bought copy of the DLC.
