Astellia Royal (Steam) First Impressions
My feelings about Astellia have never been terribly positive. The initial buy-to-play price of $26.99 and lackluster reviews were an initial turnoff but I kept it on my list of potential purchases nonetheless. I discovered Astellia Royal a few months ago which was plagued by predictable disconnects every 10 minutes due to conflicts between the anti-cheat program and a plethora of installed software on my machine. I figured I’d give this game a chance finally when I saw it appear along with Wyvern and OldSchool RuneScape on Steam. With expectations set to low, how well did this game fare?
The story of Astellia Online revolves around a journey to save your sister from an evil demon army while advancing your Astellian powers in the process. It’s a classic good versus evil tale with a few twists along the way, but nothing that stands out as being exceptionally well-written. It’s a serviceable-at-best story that most will likely skip. There are numerous lore items to discover for those who want to invest more time into learning about the world and story.
The new player experience is fairly average but good enough for the typical MMORPG player. The cut scenes are fairly standard modern MMORPG cutscenes, with the actual graphical quality being on the good side of acceptable and the voice acting mostly being of relatively low quality. Learning the basics consists of a guide to follow (must be completed in order) and quests that force you to do a task successfully to learn the various combat and non-combat systems in game. The location and order of the quests is a bit odd, given I had already completed some of the tasks required by the tutorial by the time I found the quest-granting NPC in the world.
The world itself is gorgeous. Cities are designed properly. Assets appear to have been purposefully placed even if they are repeated frequently. If you love taking screenshots, you’ll have plenty of locations worthy of stopping to take a photo during your travels.
The soundtrack is generally well-composed and thematic, with very few instances of dissonance between the music and the environment. The sound effects are fairly standard and repetitive. When the music is playing, sound effects often drown it out. The Astels often talk to you or amongst themselves during your adventures, spouting cringe-worthy dialogue. The voice acting in general varies significantly, with the bulk of it being subpar at best and a significant portion of it failing to capture the intended meaning of the written text. The voice acting only takes a small snippet of the text and omits or changes a lot of wording, creating a few instances of the written and vocal forms of text seemingly having different meaning.
Character customization includes lots of sliders and choices yet is surprisingly limited in what you can create. At least the classes aren’t gender-locked anymore (they were in closed beta). It’s serviceable and simple, so for someone just wanting to create a decent looking character — it’s not terribly difficult or time-consuming to do so. If you want to create a very specific-looking character, you’ll likely be disappointed.
Classes include your standards: a warrior, archer, scholar (healer), assassin (rogue), and mage. We tried a warrior and an archer, finding the warrior to be a better option for our play styles and the archer to be quite weak, as if I was hitting whiffle balls at the creatures instead of magic-infused arrows. You’ll quickly fill your hotbar with a variety of attacks with a variety of cooldowns, with certain attacks performed in succession creating a combo. It’s your basic holy trinity class system with a tab-target with action combat elements combat system.
Weapon, armor, and item upgrading consists of a few systems including runes, item enhancement via components found in game, and a rune / jewel fusion system that lets you fuse 5 runes, jewels or star jewels to create a new rune, jewel or star jewel. These systems are fairly standard of so-called Korean MMORPGs — especially the older ones.
Astels are one of the major selling points of the game and when they aren’t stuck on an object or bugged, can help add a tactical component to combat. You can purchase items in the cash shop that allow you to utilize more Astels simultaneously and/or utilize them for a longer duration. The appearances of the various Astels generally fall into “child-like females” or animals with humanoid traits. While the bulk of the Astels are in designed in good taste (at least moreso than TERA at launch in South Korea), they still err a bit too far into the realm of “seemingly sexualized” for the personal tastes of many. Collecting and deciding which Astels to use is one of the better aspects of the game.
The community is mostly quiet in general chat except for the same spamming gold sellers. There appears to be some active guilds in game, so it is likely the playerbase consists mostly of individuals who keep to themselves or within their guild or group of friends. It is not uncommon to see multiple languages in general chat as well, with English only being the majority of general chat lines-of-text as a result of the gold sellers using English. I inquired about various aspects about the game on 10 separate occasions and received answers on 6 of those occasions, with 4 of those 6 resulting in multiple people responding. The population average and peak are well-within the triple digit range for Steam players and this version of Astellia has been available for download outside of Steam for months.
Final Verdict
If you love the art style, exploring MMORPG landscapes of a more typical fantasy theme, love pet collection, and aren’t completely burnt out on the numerous other overhyped, same-y MMORPGs released over the past 5 years — this game might be worth checking out. It really doesn’t do anything so terribly poorly to warrant a not recommend to everyone. There are active players as well, but it is uncertain how many of these players are only around for the Steam launch to try the game or are actually planning on sticking with the game for a longer period.
If you hearken for the old days of MMORPGs where people were social and content was streamlined, require a great combat and/or crafting system, must have well-written story and lore, and/or want the ability to test a wide variety of builds that actually play differently, then this game is likely one that won’t be missed if you skip it.
I enjoyed my stay in the world of Astellia but mostly because I enjoyed looking at the scenery. With the exception of the music and the Astel collection system, the game either felt mediocre-at-best and generic. It exceeded my expectations but not by much, even though my expectations were set extremely low.
It’s free on Steam, so the only thing you have to lose is your time if you want to check it out. I’d recommend looking elsewhere, though.
