Ashen - Review @ COG

COGconnected has reviewed Ashen:

Ashen Review

Ashen is full of nonsense. I don't mean its gameplay. The fighting, exploring, advancement and traversal mechanics are all well thought out and a ton of fun. I'm talking about the story. Every time a character in Ashen speaks, my eyes start to glaze over. Then I snap back to attention and realize that the story isn't boring at all -- it's totally bonkers.

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Because I realized that much like Ashen, Dark Souls and Bloodborne are games of utter nonsense. The stories of the land of the undead, or the cursed city of Yharnam, or the revivification of the bird of light are more impressionistic than anything else. They are stories revealed through gameplay and exploration. A single line of a dialogue, or an item description, or the way an area is lit tells you more about the world than the inscrutable cut-scenes. And this is why I think Ashen is going to be a hit. Its gameplay is familiar and fun, but its world is like nothing you've ever seen. You have to work to see it all, and you'll want to.

Score: 86/100

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I picked up this game. Trying to get into it... it hasn't quite grabbed me. I'm not giving up just yet. I've put in maybe 2 hours I'll put in at least another 8 before I give up.

Let us know please;I'm thinking about picking it up and many reviews are good but the lack of weapons and magic makes me say no right now.

redman5427 said:

Let us know please;I'm thinking about picking it up and many reviews are good but the lack of weapons and magic makes me say no right now.

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It's not a plus for me too, and medieval Japan is even a negative. I played more than MadGamer but I failed fully enter into it. The cause is mainly the combats, a sort of variations of those of the Banner Saga. It's certainly good, but hard to appeal me. At some point I lost track, probably started play something else, wait too much, and now it is in my "to play" list, I'll have to restart it from scratch.

Otherwise I found the blueprint much better than in Banner Saga 1., the world map, events, more, but I only remember it was much better not the details lol.

On base they had a very weird idea to copy so much Banner Saga and on its base, try implement variations in each design area. For example the combats look a bit similar, but are quite different. There's the same roster approach with simplified classes, the depth is coming from the roster not from each character/class, it looks very similar, but classes are very different. And it's for everything, two travels groups, events, mildly historical/realistic lore, and so on.

The result is they get bashed for that by principle, in fact they still made everything different so they don't worth the bash, but what they did is very weird anyway. I'd wish that at least for combats they did something fully different.