If you’re familiar with either me or this website, you know that my standards are unreasonably high, particularly when it comes to RPGs. I suppose growing up playing the timeless classics so many games now try to capitalize on people’s nostalgia for ended up spoiling me somewhat, though games in the genre are known for lasting longer than most, and the need to meet an arbitrary expectation of length lends itself to cheap tricks that often come at the expense of pacing. Still, the past year has seen the release of several indie games good enough to stand proudly alongside the RPG classics they’ve drawn inspiration from, and Azure Saga: Pathfinder is yet another title belonging in that category. Don’t get me wrong—there are things that I find absolutely infuriating about this game, but those elements are ultimately outweighed by the amount of brilliance on display here. This is game that makes random battles palatable (at least for the vast majority of the game) while simultaneously streamlining traditional jRPG mechanics and allowing new complexity to arise from those simplified parts of the game. It’s also incredibly player-friendly, with all party members gaining experience regardless of whether they participated in combat or not, but those who enjoy a challenge will be able to find it despite the early content being on the easy side. Really, this is a special game.

The story is good despite minor writing errors

Azure Saga: Pathfinder’s story begins with main character Synch and his personalized android Noide disobeying the orders of their space colony and getting shot down in the process. Crash landing on a nearby planet, they stumble across humans somehow already living there, and are inevitably drawn into a larger struggle while looking for a way to fix their ship. What’s so refreshing about this is that Synch’s motives are anything but pure early on; he recognizes that the viability of the planet as a new home world for his colony means that the natives might have to be wiped out, so he remains detached and spends much of the early game merely playing along to serve his own interests. Even Noide’s clinical worldview comes across as warm and kind by way of comparison. Naturally, Synch grows as a character as he slowly becomes attached to everyone and starts to piece together the history of how people came to be living on the planet in the first place, and this progression is actually pretty believable.

The writing could be said to be both good and bad. On the one hand, it’s consistent and the tone never struck me as being over the top or needlessly melodramatic, but the writing quality has some issues throughout. For example, there are constant typos, missing words/punctuation, inconsistent capitalization, and various issues like that. You might think that this makes the text unreadable, but that’s not accurate, either—the intent of each dialogue exchange is always apparent, ensuring that this never becomes an actual problem. These minor errors are ubiquitous enough that it’s hard to imagine them being entirely fixed, however, and they’re the biggest tell that this is an indie game because other indie writing pitfalls (such as characters all speaking in a similar way) are avoided here. That means that the writing is solid when you take a big-picture look at how it all comes together, and less so when you start analyzing individual lines. Plot twists are built up to believably and given enough of a foundation to work without telegraphing anything, but the errors in character banter can become a distraction.

There was only one time where I had trouble figuring out what the text was saying, and it was little more than meaningless back story to a smaller sidequest. There are a few recurring sidequest characters, and one involves a guy looking for a cure for his dying wife. Long story short, he never finds it, but the last quest I found involving him made it sound like she was still alive despite him talking about burying her. That was pretty funny, actually, though I’m not 100% confident that this wasn’t a case of me reading something wrong because I don’t have any screenshots from this part of the game (for reasons I’ll get into a bit later). There were also a small number of occasions where bugs caused sidequests to be completed randomly, or the wrong dialogue to play once returning to the quest-giver, but these are the types of things that will inevitably be fixed in a patch, and they were only a problem during the optional sidequests.

Strategy, not micromanagement

The reason why I don’t have screenshots for parts of some sidequests is that my screenshot software freaks out when I load up Cheat Engine to use its speedhack feature, and using it is sometimes necessary to speed up the random battles and get through dungeons faster. This is something I only found necessary toward the end of the game, though, and what makes that so disappointing is how well random battles are handled overall. Azure Saga: Pathfinder has 7 playable characters who can be swapped in and out of combat at the beginning of each turn (without penalty, meaning you can swap characters multiple times until you find a configuration you’re comfortable with), and the reason you might want to do so is that specific combinations of red-colored attacks unlock powerful, full-party “united” attacks. These united attacks all vary in power and function, with one united attack silencing the targeted enemy while several others exist to do bonus damage against certain classes of enemies. The large number of united attacks that can be unlocked through trial and error mean that for much of the game, random battles aren’t a pointless distraction providing little more than money and experience, but rather an excuse to experiment with party composition and attacks in an attempt to find as many new united attacks as you possibly can.

The experience combat provides everyone—and again, all party members receive experience regardless of whether they fought or not, ensuring that no one is left behind—is generous enough that it feels like someone is constantly leveling up. And since leveling up sometimes unlocks a new red attack, this opens up the possibility of unlocking even more powerful united attacks. Grinding is largely unnecessary, then, barring one or two difficulty spikes and some incredibly challenging optional bosses who are best faced when you’re close to the level cap of 80. For the most part, beating enemies while trying to unlock united attacks raises your level enough.

Even if you wander into an area with difficult enemies who are at a much higher level than your party, it’s not an impossible task. While the maximum number of characters you can bring into combat at once maxes out at three, you’ll also never face more than three enemies at a time, and having united attacks that the enemies in question are weak to can help you take even impossible-seeming enemies down. That doesn’t mean that united attacks will make you nigh-invincible, though—quite a bit of effort has been put into keeping encounters fresh throughout the game, with a handful of bosses being given abilities that initially look like an unfair advantage. There are some enemies who can only be hit with counterattacks and special attacks that explicitly state that they’re undodgeable, others who put up shields that absorb a certain number of hits, and several who inflict status effects such as stun and silence that can throw a wrench in your united attack plans. This is where Azure Saga: Pathfinder’s complexity begins to become apparent. There are some things you’ll find that you can count on: for example, your party will always attack first, and always in order from top to bottom (so if an enemy is prone to counterattacking, moving your healer to the bottom slot can heal that counterattack damage before the enemy’s actual attack). Each character also has a unique “fury” move that becomes available as they inflict and receive damage, and these are great for inflicting statuses and buffs at a crucial moment.

Equipment looks simple, but can do a lot

There are no weapons and armors to buy and equip in this game, with the only equippable items present being the types of trinkets that would ordinarily be considered “accessories.” That’s to say that rings and bracelets can be equipped as well as gems and pieces of technology, and while this doesn’t serve much of a purpose early on (characters constantly join and then leave the party for the first half of the game, causing equipment to frequently be unequipped), don’t let that fool you into thinking that equipment is superfluous or somehow tacked on. For all intents and purposes, there are two kinds of accessories: those that provide smaller stat bonuses but unlock a secondary slot that a gem can be socketed into, and those that provide larger stat bonuses and don’t unlock that second slot. Neither is better or worse than the other, as equipment is largely situational. Gems mostly exist to increase damage inflicted on and reduce damage taken by certain classes of enemies, but some equipment has a bonus effect that’s only triggered by socketing a certain gem into it. These effects range from an improved critical hit chance to allowing the wearer to resist a specific status effect. Other equipment provides a resistance to a status effect without the need to socket a gem. The brilliance of all of this is that you have 7 characters who may need to be swapped in, and not enough equipment to make everyone resistant to everything. Preparing for harder boss fights becomes a strategic minefield where you have to weigh united attacks, fury attacks, and equipment while ensuring that everyone also has a way of restoring HP. Surprising complexity arises from these simple mechanics.

Bugs, weirdness, and some other questionable stuff

The most troublesome bug I encountered over the course of my playthrough was one in which you’d get hit by a random battle while transitioning between stairs, causing your position to shift and stick you out of bounds or in a wall, but a recent update appears to have fixed this. Another bug that’s seemingly been fixed is one that caused a menu to get stuck open after saving, softlocking the game. That was an entertaining bug since it only ever happened after you saved, so you didn’t technically lose a single step of progress (you can save anywhere in Azure Saga: Pathfinder, and the saves record your exact position). Then there are the bugs that might be fixed but that I can’t check, such as completing one sidequest automatically completing every other sidequest you have. That just leaves minor bugs such as stage elements sometimes flickering out of existence for a split-second, though I did find another softlock that occurs on the current 1.0.2 patch. Thankfully, areas have blue crystals that allow you to teleport between them (but only to crystals that are in the same area, and even then only the ones that are on the same floor), and these autosave whenever you brush up against them.

Bugs aren’t the only issue here, sadly. Little things like your three-person party of active characters being the only ones who can be healed tend to slow the pace down quite a bit as you have to stop and cycle characters in and out of the active party in order to use health and mana potions before a boss encounter. This is mitigated somewhat by campfires that you can use (provided you’ve purchased flint) to restore everyone’s HP and MP at once, but they’re not always close to boss fights.

That ties into another problem that’s exclusive to the late-game dungeons, and that’s tedium. All cities and dungeons in the game are made up of smaller rooms, and early on there are always a reasonable number of rooms. Dungeons toward the end of the game, however, are giant, sprawling labyrinths full of dead ends and teleports. Sometimes you’ll go out of your way to explore and be rewarded with a totally empty room. Other times, the room isn’t actually empty, because some item-dispensing objects don’t glimmer for some reason. That means that anyone wanting to obtain absolutely every item is going to have to spend a sizable amount of time brushing up against everything, inevitably getting interrupted by frequent random battles.

I brought it up earlier, but the random battles start to become tiring toward the end. Once you’ve reached the level cap or are somewhat near it, dealing with enemies 20 or more levels under you serves no real purpose. I’d appreciate some kind of random battle toggle when traipsing around areas where enemies pose no threat to you, because that way you could still unlock new united attacks without constantly having to deal with unwanted interruptions while exploring. I know that random battles can be turned off, too, because a small handful of puzzle rooms (but curiously, not all of them) do just that. Speaking of puzzles, there are some truly infuriating ones to be found here. The most enjoyable variant has you activating switches to move platforms around until everything is in place, but there are also a number of them where you’re thrown in a room with a 3×3 grid of floor buttons that can be toggled on and off and left to brute force the combination. If there are hints for these puzzles, I certainly never found them anywhere.

Nothing—and I mean nothing—is as bad as the maze, though; a little under halfway in, you have to find your way through a forest maze in a place called Ilfrigwood where the rooms are eventually randomized. There are so many visual elements here that it’s virtually impossible to figure out what specific parts the two vague hints you can find are referring to, so I had to save/load my way through it. This took something like three hours, which is unreasonable considering the game itself is between 20-30 hours long. Far too much of my play time was spent struggling to understand the rules of this single awful maze. As it turns out, the hints refer to the color of some tree leaves that are easy to overlook amid the constant statues, bodies of water, moving fog effects, and other such distractions. This maze was so bad that I legitimately considered ragequitting.

Azure Saga: Pathfinder looks and sounds great

The art in this game is of the highest quality in every respect, and I have absolutely nothing negative to say about any of it. The detailed cutscene art is great, the isometric dungeon art is like a modern-day take on the kind of stuff found in something like Final Fantasy Tactics, and the combat art gives all of the characters and enemies plenty of personality. Even the music is great, serving its purpose of creating atmosphere without ever coming across as derivative, phoned in, or forgettable. I have a special fondness for the music that plays when sleeping at an inn, which might be my favorite inn jingle ever. Really, everything about the music and visuals in this game are great.

*A Steam review key for Azure Saga: Pathfinder was provided for the purpose of this review

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