Outside of combat, your Legion helps with more mundane tasks, like jumping over long distances by pulling on your chain and catching perps. As your abilities and your Legion's grow during the game, and as more types of Legion partners become available to you, the combat's possibility space continues to expand, and it never stops being immensely satisfying. It's a lot to juggle, especially on less-than-optimal Joy-Con inputs, but when it flows it feels sublime in a way few combat systems do. As a normal human fighting alongside a supernatural creature, you have to figure out the precise timing necessary to pull off joint attacks and perfect dodges while keeping both of you focused and in fighting shape. It attacks automatically when within range of an enemy, and while you can tell it what opponent to focus on, I always found that it had a bit of a mind of its own. Instead, especially during combat, you just guide it. With the exception of a few more precise moves, you don't control your Legion, exactly. The joy of Astral Chain is in the pursuit of harmony. The joy of Astral Chain in the dispatching of monsters, not people.
Nothing exceptional, but it has the same over-the-top sheen and joyful presentation as just about everything Platinum does. In doing so, you unravel a cliched but interesting enough anime plot about monsters, human evolution, and family.
You wield your Legion at the end of a spectral, glowing blue chain they're both a prisoner and a pal attached at all times to your wrist. Your power is the power to use the enemy's weapons against them. Your Legion is a Chimera too, actually, just one that you're able to bond with and harness. That's help you're going to need, as monsters from the digital-y other world-the Astral Plane, as it's called-are invading the Ark in bits and pieces, overrunning zones of the city with creatures called Chimeras that wreak havoc and turn normal people into monsters themselves. As a member of Neuron, you're equipped with a special piece of machinery that lets you bond with a Legion, an otherworldly creature you need to learn to cooperate with to do everything from fight to investigate crimes to simply navigate complex space. The fact that no one knows your name apparently not an impediment, you quickly join up with an elite special unit called Neuron. You play as one of a pair of twins-either the male or female character, with you naming your own and the other becoming a character named Akira, leading to weird situations where only one of you ever gets named in dialogue, y'know, Akira and, uh, Whatserface Howard. In Astral Chain, you play as a police officer in a megacity called the Ark, the apparent last vestige of human civilization. And while this game doesn't quite reach the same heights of excellence as Nier: Automata (what game does, though?), it's still an enthralling ride. As an imminently playable action role-playing game, one which combines cyberpunk and anime sensibilities with intuitive but challenging combat, Astral Chain feels like an extension of the design language Taura worked to build in his collaboration with Taro. I mention Taura because Astral Chain, PlatinumGames' latest, developed for the Nintendo Switch, is his directorial debut, and a familiarity with his output immediately makes the game more legible. Working largely in the background, Taura is responsible for helming the moment-to-moment gameplay in one of the best games in the decade. His work paid off, and Automata's combat was a slick, hypnotic alchemy of the high-energy action Platinum is known for and the darkly thoughtful role-playing games Taro is known for. His work was to translate the ideas of scenario writer and director Yoko Taro into systems that fit both Taro's eclectic style and Platinum's pedigree of sharp action.
Taura, who has worked with PlatinumGames for the past decade, was one of the lead designers on Nier: Automata. In the pantheon of important modern game designers, Takahisa Taura might not be a name you're familiar with. My monster moves like one of my own limbs, and I move like one of hers. We fight in concert, beast and blade, cutting through every creature foolish enough to challenge us. But I'm safe, and powerful, here, with my own pet monster-my Legion-at the end of a chain. The whole place is brimming with monsters, and the air is thick with the power that makes them. All red and black, with polygonal platforms of obsidian silicon and jagged bursts of crimson crystals.
It's an abstract world, half digital and half material. In Astral Chain, the world beyond the gate hums with a strange sort of energy.