Little things ruin this game for me

[Chucklehead]

1) No English voice acting, and subtitles are useless because half of them are onscreen while the action is happening so you can't really look down to see what is going on. So you miss half the plot.

2) Ludicrous difficulty spike starting in chapter 5. Chapters 1-4 are a breeze, then the 5th boss takes me 20+ tries and the 6th boss I am still finding impossible after 30+ tries.

3) The fact that you can't move the focus cone to track enemies seems like a big oversight in the controls.

4) Chapter select tied to difficulty for some reason so I can't even switch to easy mode to see the ending without playing through all the chapters again.

5) Game never seems to exit normally, the process always lives on and I have to kill it via task manager.

Other than that, great game. Maybe the best of its type I've ever played.

[[deleted]]

1) This game was developed by Japanese doujin/indie developer Edelweiss and the very own Japanese voice actors are names I have NEVER heard elsewhere, so I assume there was a budget problem involved. About the subtitles, that is one thing that can't be helped. The only reason I know what's going on is because I completed the game a total of 60 times (3 on Easy, 13 on Normal, 44 on Hard - the reason for that is I'm going for world record on hard mode) and that's not counting the restarts (amounting to a total of 797 playthroughs). BUT there's info on the lore that's unlocked once you beat the game (on Normal, I think) if that suffices.

2) Strange, I always thought the third stage was the hardest. And that's kinda justified, because on the demo version of the game, Stage 3 was the last stage. I see that a common problem between people who start playing the game is Asymptote Void, the Stage 5 boss, and if there's something I discovered out of all the playthroughs I've done is that if you spam Blade you are immune to the spinning lasers. The Spin EX Attack is a powerful defensive option, so aiming to bullet cancel the yellow ones with the Blade is a good survival strategy. The Blade Dash as well, because it has invul during active frames despite the long recovery.

3) That is nailed on Arrange Mode on the PS4 version of the game, which is a somewhat different take on Astebreed when it comes to its mechanics. There is auto fire for Shot and Blade, the lock-ons are mapped to the right analog stick and the Spin EX Attack can be performed even with lock-ons.

4) That is a standard in most games I've played that belong to the shmup genre. Playing a stage in different difficulties is never the same.

5) This is a problem I somehow don't have, Cheru (mod, developer) might be able to help you with this.

I'm kind of in a hurry now, so I'll link a video to the STGWeekly episode on Astebreed below, it's a talk show that Aquas (STGWeekly staff) interviewed me and Zaarock, respectively placed #2 and #3 on the worldwide rankings for Hard mode with Xbreed, and we really go in depth on the game mechanics. That might help you. *Warning: Video is over an hour long.*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdjaJxAB7FI

[cheru]

Regarding 5:

You should be able to exit the game by pressing Esc and selecting Exit. That will take you to the title screen where you can exit the game.

It shouldn't be lingering on in the background, if it is, please verify your game files to see if something wasn't right with your game files.

[Chucklehead]

Hotaru:

I assumed there were budgetary limitations, but if you're going to have subtitles, you need to create lulls in the action so I can actually read them!

You really think level 3 is the toughest? Playing through levels 1-4 I died maybe 2 times in total. Playing through levels 5 and 6, I have died around 50 times and I haven't beaten the 6th boss yet. That doesn't seem like a reasonable difficulty curve. What bothers me most about the 6th boss is the length of the fight and that there is no mid-boss checkpoint. I'm at the point where I can get past the 1st phase of the fight pretty much 100% of the time, and playing through it over and over and over again is just getting ... boring.

The game does linger on the the background after exit, and I have to kill it with the task manager. I will verify the installation but I think it has happened every time, even on my first play.

[Chucklehead]

I have to say I have much more appreciation for Astebreed after playing Crimzon Clover, which was the very next game I purchased. Astebreed makes a real effort to have an interesting storyline, beautiful graphics, and some real genre innovations like the shifting perspective. Crimzon Clover is just a straightforward absurdly difficult shooting gallery. It's all stick, no carrot.

[Chucklehead]

I did finally beat the game, but I'll be damned if that final boss wasn't one of the hardest things I've ever done in gaming, to the point where I think it detracted from the game. The only thing in recent memory that rivaled it for me was the Shrine of Amana area in Dark Souls 2, which I don't think I could have finished at all if not for the feature where enemies stop respawning after you kill them 15 times.

[Lu2]

you should try raiden 4 :D

[Ricky the "No Guard"]

Originally posted by mrandoc:

I have to say I have much more appreciation for Astebreed after playing Crimzon Clover, which was the very next game I purchased. Astebreed makes a real effort to have an interesting storyline, beautiful graphics, and some real genre innovations like the shifting perspective. Crimzon Clover is just a straightforward absurdly difficult shooting gallery. It's all stick, no carrot.

The thing is that gameplay is the carrot, and Crimzon Clover is all about gameplay. It's also not "absurdly difficult", by the way, Crimzon Clover is one of the most player-friendly games of its class.

If you're putting effort into Astebreed for the plot or the aesthetic or other non-gameplay things, you're committing self-harm and you're doing a great disservice to the game. These things are just dressing on that carrot to make it a little more appealing than it already would be, and all the dressing in the world cannot save a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ carrot. Any problems with Astebreed's gameplay require the kind of research taken by K. H. to figure out, and the subject is not something anyone can kneejerk to.

The shifting perspective is not an innovation at all. It comes straight from this developer's previous game, Ether Vapor, and the concept itself is the legacy of the 1986 arcade game Salamander. The Revolver360 series also directly competes (as much as anything in this genre can anymore) with Ether Vapor and Astebreed on this level.

[green_abobo]

i have no idea about the story either but man is it visually stimulating for a cheaper indi game.