It’s odd. Astonisha Story is odd. On the surface it seems to be an ordinary RPG with all the usual stuff you’d expect: leveling up, turn-based battles and dragons; it’s also got its own little nuances that set it apart and slightly down from every other RPG.

The story isn’t all that different from anything you’ve played before: a young knight called Lloyd (the most popular name in RPGs today) is escorting a magic staff when his party is attacked and slaughtered, and the staff is stolen. And so begins his adventure in getting the staff back. Of course, this unfolds into even more familiar ground when it turns out that the staff is one of six magical items in the world which are being collected by an evil queen in order to keep herself young and youthful. Rather predictably, this comes at a price and the whole world has been put in terrible danger!

Not that that matters too much as the world is very small and the game can be completed in around 15 hours. Well, it is after all a basic port of a PC game released in 1994. The battles are pretty limited and set out in a similar fashion to a Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics game, so you have to move your character then select your attack or spell and hope that the enemies’ energy goes down far enough so they don’t get a chance to attack. Unfortunately, they usually do get the opportunity to stick a knife in your ribs and as such the battles can go on for a very long time, especially later on when there are up to eight enemies on the battlefield.

The characters themselves are a familiar mix of mages, weapons guys and of course a karate guy. But as you guide them round moving from town to town, after you’ve activated the next plot line (which only happens when you speak to the correct person in the correct order) you never really begin to feel attached to them. Well, that’s true until you get to the bit where everyone is literally calling each other ‘bastards’ for about 15 minutes. We’re not sure if this was intentionally funny, but the bits that try to be intentionally funny… aren’t. It can get too postgenre and self-referential, for example when Lloyd admonishes a character for suggesting the game should use a password system to stop videogame piracy. Consequently, we didn’t find this very astonisha or interesta. See what we did there?

Tim Empey