You are taking other people's treasure, when protecting your own.
If the Scale of Destiny favors a soul, it destroys the fate of another.
Will you change this balance, or cast your eyes aside?
Is it true that your choices, bear no responsibilities?
Is it true that you committed no crimes?
Astlibra is a 2D side-scroller action RPG, first created as a hobby project by indie developer KEIZO in 2007, and released as freeware with the title Astlibra: Proof of Life in 2011. KEIZO continued to develop the game in their free time for the next ten years, and its final updates as freeware were released in March of 2021.
Your home is under attack by demons. You and your friend Anulis are fleeing the razing of your village, only to be surrounded and struck down. When you come to, you find yourself in an isolated cottage untouched by the invading demons, with Anulis missing. You've been brought there by a mysterious talking crow, who appreciates the company even though both your pasts are a little fuzzy - he can't remember who he is, and you can't remember where your hometown is. Your only remaining link to the outside world is the ribbon Anulis gave to you.
Naturally, finding Anulis and returning home are more important right now. You leave the crow behind and run off into the unsettled frontier, which goes as well as you'd expect. The crow drags you back and explains the situation; this cabin is the only sign of humanity's existence he could find after days of searching the area by air, and he really doesn't want you to leave him all alone.
But Anulis is supposedly out there somewhere - after all, you were both attacked together and you survived. After eight years of peaceful living with the crow, who takes the name Karon (after the author of the books in the cottage), you both resolve to journey into the frontier together, hoping to find a sign, any sign of humanity, and just maybe find a lead on where your friend might be. But after retrieving a pair of magical scales said to belong to a god of fate and time from a cave, and returning from said cave to a nearby village that was definitely not a Ghost Town when you entered, it swiftly becomes clear that finding Anulis won't be so simple after all...
Astlibra plays similarly to games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Dust: An Elysian Tail, with real-time combat sections that make use of a hit-counting combo system and a magic meter that fills with every hit, creating a satisfying back-and-forth between flashy multi-hit chains and unloading powerful spells that you will definitely need if you want to survive. In addition to experience, levels and attribute points that are easy to reassign to match your build, progression revolves around the accumulation of various flavors of experience points to unlock nodes in a labyrinthine skill tree. You also have access to the Libra system, where you must attempt to balance the items you find on your journey on Astraea's scales by their karmic weight to ensure the buffs they give are as strong as possible.
On October 13, 2022, following KEIZO partnering up with publisher Whisper Games and Vanillaware artist Shigatake, a definitive version of Astlibra was released on Steam, titled Astlibra: Revision. A port of Revision was released on the Nintendo Switch on November 16th, 2023. A DLC titled Astlibra Gaiden: The Cave of Phantom Mist was released in February 13, 2024. Set during the events of the main game, it focuses on the Baker's Daughter as she tries to save her sister with the help of Polin.
Astlibra contains examples of:
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Once you synthetize an item, it becomes permanently recorded in the Synthesis book so you can synthetize items there instead of doing that in your inventory.
- One of Karon's skills is Rapid Fire, which allows you to attack endlessly by holding a button instead of mashing it over and over.
- You can return to previous stages via the backroom in your house, in case you need to buy another piece of equipment or find missing chests, recipes, Small Metals and crystals. If you jump above the bar's rooftop and walk to the right, you can find a treasure chest with an item that allows you to fast travel to any previously visited save point in the game, as long you're not in the middle of a chapter.
- Bittersweet Ending: The normal ending. Anubis is destroyed, the demons are no more and Anulis is finally free of her suffering. But Karon is gone again (he gets better), the Guild is no more, Kai and the Scales are destroyed, the hero is stuck in future Tokyo with no way to return back to his time and the world is doomed to face a slow death. And just when the game seems to end, Astraea reacts to Anubis' destruction. Cue the final chapter.
- Brought Down to Normal: Late in the game, you (temporarily) lose Karon, the source of much of your power and abilities. You get him back, fortunately.
- Death or Glory Attack: Using the Berserk ability triples your damage output, but also makes you die on taking any damage. Slightly mitigated by another ability you can acquire that lets you take one free hit after a screen transition.
- Doomed Hometown: Of course. However, you get to return to it and find that it has been rebuilt by the survivors.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: More than a few characters comment on the hero's...attractive feminine features. This becomes an important plot point in Chapter 4.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: AND HOW. After all the hell the hero goes through, all the deaths, tragic losses and going through a time loop the second time, not only does he manage to save the world from Geas and restore Gaia to its original state, but also managed to create a timeline where Everybody Lives. And if you gave enough Love to Anulis, not only she recovers her memories, joins the Guild and ends up declaring her love to you, you also saves her from Geist before he pulls a fast one on you.
- Guide Dang It!: Some treasure chests are very well-hidden, and unless you equip the skill that tells you how many chests are in a given room, there's often no clue they're even there. Which is one thing when they have things like magic crystals or Small Metals, but these chests can also contain key items like the bow, the fast-travel item, and the backstep skill. And what's worse, there's often little to no indication these things are even in the game, meaning players can very easily have no idea they're missing these things.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: An interesting play on the idea. The player character has a name which you aren't allowed to choose - you're just never told what it is. When you travel to the volcano for the first time, the narration even makes mention of how your name found its way on a memorial for all those who died in the eruption.
- Hero of Another Story: During the demon invasion, a long female voice can be heard off-screen in a locked-off area going toe-to-toe against multiple bosses. If you decide to help out and kill the bosses (by using ranged attacks to bypass the barrier), you'll come across a very shy girl hiding behind a tree who gives you some baked goods and a Love piece as thanks. In the final chapter, she (revealed to be the baker's daughter, if it wasn't obvious) goes on off-screen demon subjugation quests against "larger demons" with the dog, Polin, who joins the guild. She gets a major role in Gaiden as the main protagonist of the chapter.
- In the End, You Are on Your Own: By the time Chapter 8 starts, every member of the Guild is dead in the past with no way of undoing their deaths after Anulis destroys the Scales. And later in the chapter, Kai sacrifices himself to destroy a horde of automata, leaving the hero and Karon to deal with Anulis on their own.
- Killed Off for Real: While this game avoids this trope thanks to time travel, one character in the game can be killed permanently depending on your choices: bringing Shiro alongside you in the Demon King's castle in the past during Chapter 5 will result in her being killed off by the fake Demon King. And even if you leave her at the entrance, killing the real Demon King before talking to her will result in her being erased from existence.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: The Steam's page for Gaiden outright spoils Polin's return, which is something that happens during the Postscript.
- New Game Plus: An interesting variation. After you obtain the Scales of God, the hero and Karon goes back in time. As in, back to the beginning of the game, when they first met, but with all their memories intact. This gives them a chance to undo certain events that couldn't be changed before.
- Randomly Generated Loot: After the loop, you start finding tablets which not only makes any weapon deal more damage than the strongest weapon you can find before the loop (even the stick) but also gives you a set of four pairs of traits from which you're allowed to choose one each, ranging from simple stat upgrades to completely changing how a given spell functions.
- The Chessmaster: The real Karon. A great many seeming coincidences and plot points are revealed to be all part of the grand plan he has been working on with Astraea, which will see the eventual rise of a hero strong enough to finally break the cycle of death and rebirth the world is trapped in.
- The Time Traveller's Dilemma: Both the hero and Karon are aware of the Scales' power, but sacrificing something to undo the past is daunting for them. As the game goes on, the hero starts expressing some concerns about traveling in time, to the point where he considers destroying the Scales to make sure no one ever uses them for their own needs. Subverted when he acquire the Scales of God, which allows them to change the past with no negative repercussions.
- Insistent Terminology: Karon becomes irritable when people call them a crow. They are a RAVEN.
- Wham Shot:
- In Chapter 4, after repeatedly using the scales to change the past, a mysterious white-haired boy sends you and Karon to what he calls 'the end of time', which is revealed to be... a futuristic city.
- Once you reach the Demon King's castle in Chapter 5, the hero enters a corridor filled with tubes, each of them containing enemies fought in previous chapters. Later on in the chapter, we see another set of tubes... and they contain growing copies of Anulis, the hero's childhood friend. And to make things interesting, one of the tubes is broken.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Treasure chests no longer require keys to open it, possibly due to how tedious it would be to grind for key molds alongside lottery tickets and magic stones.
- The arena will bump your level to 10 to give the player a fighting chance against the bosses. That is, if your base stats are high enough to fight them.
- Interquel: The DLC is set between the events of Chapter 5 and 6 of the base game. It then skips to the Postscript after the fifth stratum and then after the ending for the rest of the story.
- Roguelike: The game takes the same formula used in the final dungeon of the base game and refines it as the basis of the DLC.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: After the Baker's daughter was forced to kill the Hero, she became the temporary bearer of the Scales. After the Scales are activated, she went back to the start of the DLC, prior to the Guild leaving the town to enter the cave. This gave her a chance to rush to the cave's entrance and cause a cave-in, thwarting Geist's plans, saving both the Guild and the town and setting the rest of the base game's events back into motion.
- The Story That Never Was: This is a story that takes place during the events of the base game, yet it was never referenced during the story or its characters. Because it was retconned from existence.
- Unexplained Recovery: For some reason, Polin returned from the dead after the events of Chapter 2, even though he was retconned out of existence by the Hero and Karon until he was brought back during the Postscript and the DLC doesn't explain why until you reach the halfway point, when he reveals that he's still dead. His soul was bound by the Cave thanks to Geist.
- Wham Shot:
- Once they venture further into the Cave of the Phantom Mist, the Baker's daughter, Polin and the player finds something that was never supposed to happen at that point in the base game's story: Kuro's corpse, reduced to a skeleton, on the floor.
- After they deal with Geist, the Baker's daughter and Polin expect things to go back to normal. However, the cave starts shaking and something else happens: the Scales are activated.
