The screenshots and description make this sound like some kind of story-heavy tactical RPG - like any number of Atlas games, or the Fire Emblem series.

Well, I just spent two and a half hours reading to get to a part of the game where I could actually do any tactical battling. During that period, I only had a few decision points and I have seen no sign that any of them mattered. Once I did get to the battle, I found it ot be simultaneously too easy and too hard.

* Too easy, because if you play defensively then you can basically be an invincible turtle. And then your post-battle score will be crap.
* Too hard, because if you push ahead fast you risk either running out of skill uses or you'll mess up your formation and get wiped out.

All this might be forgivable if the writing were good, or the visuals were better. Neither of those holds true. The protagonist/narrator repeatedly breaks the "show, don't tell" rule when it comes to describing the people around him. Said people are kinda boring and archetypal, when they aren't outright weird. And whenever anything visually interesting is happening outside the context of a battle, the game rarely bothers to give you more than a token description against a dull image of the setting or a plain black background.

I can see the potential here. I can see how complex and interesting battles could be built with this system. I can see how a compelling narrative about family and suffering under oppression could be told with these characters. I can imagine a really cool anime being made from these visual designs and action sequences. But I feel that potential has not been realized.

Maybe it gets better later on, but I cannot be arsed to find out.

(Also, as a matter of personal preference, I dislike the art style. It's hard for me to get engaged by all the cutesy stuff that happens with the various girls in the game when they all look like inhuman mutants - especially the smaller ones. And that part where an underage girl jumped me in the bath while calling me "Papa!" was just weird.)

An unforgiving, highly tactical SRPG, where your troops persist from one battle to another.

Aselia is quite old by now, but it deserves to be called a classic. The story is grim but captivating and incorporates some unusual ideas, like the protagonist being at first unable to speak or understand the language of the world he's summoned to. The worldbuilding is remarkable. The real meat, though, is the challenging gameplay where every choice matters and which involves absolutely 0 luck.

Aselia has 7 main endings, and fully completing it can easily take 100+ hours. For that, the price point is ridiculously fair.

Norio Wakamoto voices 2 characters in the game. For some, this might be worth it for that alone.

Also worth noting that Aselia is a prequel to Seinarukana, which is coming on Steam later this year, and I recommend playing this before it.

If you don't think you'd like a visual novel, this is the game for you (if you also love turn-based strategy games like Fire Emblem, Heroes of Might and Magic, Disciple II, etc.).

I played the original PC release from JASTUSA years ago (hence the lack of time played here). And by played, I mean obsessed. And by obsessed, I mean I played through every single permutation of the game (colloquially referred to as a 'route') twice. I think the grand total was well over 100 hours of precious life, but it was preciously spent.

Aselia is one of those high fantasy stories that really grips you. It tends to hold nothing back, and is very challenging in both its strategic/tactical aspects and in its themes. The themes of said story are pretty excellent, ranging from social prejudice and slavery all the way to love, obligation, and duty (heehee).

The gamplay portion, which is very significant if viewed through the lens of a typical visual novel, is challenging and diverse. There are units to train, squads to create, buildings to build, and tactical decisions to be made in the face of time limits, finite resources, and the ever-onward march to victory.

The narrative portion of the game, which is still significant, is very excellent. Fans of high fantasy and gritty takes on alternate world transportation will enjoy the plot, while the average anime fan may be surprised at how dark the story goes.

Don't be put off by the graphics; despite the age, this is a top-notch game. The art itself is a style unique to the developer, and while the sprites evoke nostalgia the "cutscenes" and events are well-done.

That they're selling this game at normal price for less than $20 is a steal. If it's ever on sale, buy immediately and kiss your weekends goodbye. Fans of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics will jump right in to the style of gameplay, and everyone else will be pleasantly surprised by the depth of both the tactics and the narrative. Look forward to literally hours and hours of enjoyment.

An extremely awesome start to the game so far! The soundtrack is amazing! The characters all seem to have quite their own personality and vibe about them. The story is developing very nicely, and I love how the original japanese voice acting is incorporated into it for each of the characters. The subtitles are visually appealing and very well-structured. Definitely a game I would recommend checking out if interested in the Visual Novel & RPG genre.

In my opinion Aselia the Eternal is one of the greatest visual novels ever. It has a beautiful storyline with lots of twists (some of which you don't see coming), fantastic interaction between characters, the choices you need to make to enter a character's route are a bit subtle, so here I recommend using a guide, and most importantly, for me, actual high repalayability value (which isn't true for a alot of VNs). What I mean by that is that each route has a (sub)storyline and missions unique to that route which makes each playthrough different enough from one another that you don't want to just give up on the game and move on. Basically a bit of strategy is required because what worked on one playthrough might not work on another. If you don't understand what I mean, play the game a couple of times and you'll see.

I played this game before it came to steam and loved it. Now that I'm replaying it in preparation for the sequel that finally came out, and I am finding that I still love it. I will also mention that this game originally had erotic scenes in it and while they weren't exactly removed gracefully, they are few enough that you can easily ignore the hints that the characters got it on offscreen.

As for the basics of the game, it's a strategy game where you place and move your units around the map to get into scripted battle sequences when they meet. In between battles, there is a visual novel style story about the main character trying to cope with being brought to another world and forced to fight for a king he doesn't trust.

Put simply, I am a huge fan of the story and the battle system was fun enough that I actually turned up the difficulty after each playthrough when I was replaying the game to go through other routes instead of powering through lower difficulties to get the battles over with.

The first thing I have to mention is the beginning of the game right after the prologue. I'm going to gush a bit about a stylistic choice made early on, so feel free to skip this paragraph. Now, I've found that very few developers have the balls required to actually have the language of the fantasy world NOT be English (or in this case, Japanese). The foreign characters in this game initially have lines voiced (and written in) in a made up language that, while obviously unknown to the player at first, is very clearly translateable. The main character is implied to spend a very long time just picking up the language when he comes to the world, but the game goes one step further by asking the player if *they've* actually managed to start picking some simple stuff up (That might sound like a horrible decision, but they don't throw you entirely into the frying pan and the results barely matter if you really don't care enough to bother; it's just for scoring a few points with the girl taking care of you). Now, the dialogue boxes eventually switch into English when the main character gets better at the language, and by your first battle, the character voices are all in Japanese instead of the fantasy language, indicating that Yuuto is fluent now. You can also switch character languages to Japanese for the whole story when you get to New Game+, but that entire process shows a level of care and dedication to the story that is honestly very rare in the games and shows I've experiences and I have to give it credit for that.

Anyway, the prologue starts us off pretty slowly, but the rest of the story is quite enjoyable with multi-dimensional characters and some fun twists throughout. As mentioned before, I enjoyed both the story and gameplay immensely, though a walkthrough of choices to make to get each ending would probably be a good thing to look up on your second and subsequent playthroughs. Combine this with a multiverse lore that is just ripe for sequels and spinoffs and you have a great game to spend some time with. This is seriously a great game to check out.

It sucks to be the first to downvote a game with a 100% positive rating, but this is honestly how I felt.
If anyone feels like picking this one up, I recommend waiting for a sale, it feels very hit or miss.

Don't be lured in by people saying the game is highly tactical and strategic, even comparing it to Fire Emblem. The gameplay is nothing short of a trial and error fest, after reading the tutorials offered by the game carefully and trying most combinations (which aren't that many) I didn't feel like I had improved or was performing better at all. It's very hard and unintuitive to tell when your defense skill will be enough to block the enemy's attack or not. Some characters are useless and remain so throughout the game (Orpha, Red Spirits in general), and I found myself reloading often to find a combination that would SURVIVE enemy attacks at key moments throughout the story and to keep some of the characters alive, in every fight that mattered, because it felt like the enemy characters were always ahead of the mediocre non main-characters that the game gives you.
The gameplay felt unrewarding and like it drags on for too long, and you have little choices to make other than the order in which you put your troops and which one you're attacking or defending with. The skills you learn are basically pointless as you'll always use the strongest and downgrade if you fight for too long without resting like they're backups, like using Tackle after your stronger move runs out of PP. Each unit can only move one square in the map per turn until way later in the game, and the replacing mechanic generally isn't worth using, there's also times where you'll have to retreat for several turns, very slowly, to rest at one of your towns, and then come back to the fight. There's nothing like items or equipment. You gain no experience by fighting so you must spend a lot of dead turns "training" your characters in towns you've taken, by building a training center which takes another few dead turns, you may only train one character from each unit at a time, each unit can have up to 3 characters, so it takes a good while. The battles are animated somewhat nicely, but take way too long, most characters out of two units of 3 (generally) will say a line before attacking or using their skill, the entire battle takes way too long to resolve, but at least you can speed them up (to ridiculous lengths) by holding CTRL, but this can feel a lot less satisfiying.
By the endgame I had gotten characters powerful enough to solo everything by themselves from the storyline, so the effort put in everyone else didn't even matter.

The world and storytelling are charming, I enjoyed those the most, the fantasy world builds its own language that it uses regularly until a certain point in the story where the character gets used to it, it's all voiced, although it honestly sounds extremely awkward to hear people trying to speak a made-up non-native language as opposed to when the game starts using Japanese speech. My enjoyment of the story still felt muddled down by the "gameplay", and the art is mediocre at best, you get used to it, but it has some consistency issues; some of the splash arts look amazing while the regular character portraits look terrible. MC's sister looks better than everyone else, like it was drawn by a different artist altogether or like no effort was put in other characters.
And a random highly subjective issue, the end the route I followed (Lesteena's) felt incredibly unrewarding to me. The story did touch some interesting topics, such as racism (spirits and humans) and the world being wasteful with its resources, however it did feel like it had very few noteworthy moments, I rarely felt moved or invested in the characters or plot, and I'm the kind of person who can easily get emotional and into a good story.
I expected to see how each surviving character ended up in the epilogue, sort of what Fire Emblem has done many times. And I did! ...but the text scrolls by so fast that I wasn't even able to read through at my leisure, missing some parts of it. And after I worked so hard to keep everyone alive :( .

After 44+ hours I honestly feel unsatisfied and like I spent a lot more time being frustrated by the bad gameplay than enjoying the story and world building the game had to offer. I'm sure there are some other more satisfying routes to be played, but I honestly don't think I want to spend that much time suffering through the "gameplay" again. I'm looking forward to the sequel and hoping it will have solved some of these issues when it comes out though.

Aselia the Eternal is a visual novel / SRPG hybrid. Both parts are executed really well, with the visual novel parts maybe taking up an a bit bigger portion.

The introduction of characters and setting, and the build-up towards the first battles may feel a bit long, but once you get there you're rewarded with highly strategic (zero randomness) , turn-based RPG, which also boasts a great story. And once it gets started it really picks up pace, both in terms of story and difficulty.
Since this version of the game also includes the expansion it allows for a total of 7 different routes and 9 endings.

The battles quickly become very tough, combined with perma-death (and a straight game-over if a main character dies) you may end up requiring several attempts for certain battles. Especially on the higher difficulties one poor battle can see you losing characters, which becomes all the more painful thanks to all the side characters having their own story and background.

Also of note is that this is the prequel to Seinarukana: The Spirit of Eternity Sword 2, which just saw it's official 'English release and will be released on Steam later this year. Definitely a recommendation if you're a fan of SRPGs and like a good story to go along with it.

They made an entire fictional language. What's more, it's entirely voiced. I totally expected the voices to swap to Japanese after the protagonist learned it enough, but nope - it's actually consistent, or at the very least what appears inconsistent at first is given an explanation.

Once you pass the prologue of the first hour or two, the story becomes rather engaging through its attention to detail and setting, to the point where even the everyday slice-of-life parts manage to become more engaging than those of Clannad, at least prior to its full-on nakige/crying game moments it's known for. The gameplay elements, while not frequent enough to be the only reason to play if you want to ignore the story (which would be very unfortunate) manage to be challenging enough to remind me of a simplified version of the cores present in games such as Etrian Odyssey or the SMT franchise.

Definitely worth a purchase. The art quality is shaky even compared to others of its era, but if you can get past that, it's a great game that manages to stand tall alongside similar stories at least twice its price. As an introduction to the genre something like Katawa Shoujo might be less difficult, but if you're interested in VNs at all I feel at ease giving it a recommendation from my current experience.

Being a fan of both visual novels and SRPGS i decided to give this a shot and i have been pleasantly surprised how much i love this unforgiven game. The story has pulled me in and the combat is fun and sometimes brutal. If you like either of those genres as well then you will enjoy this game. The game does show its age though so as long as you can look past that then i dont see any flaws with this game at all.