Lately, I’ve been playing a whole lot of Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan. As a matter of fact, it’s probably one of the longest titles I’ve played in a long time. Much like the RPGs that have played inspiration to it, it’s a bit of a whopper; and like the best remembered of it’s predecessors, it’s a rollercoaster that keeps going as the story unravels and the stakes rise.
There’s a lot to say about Aurion, and I’m going to save a lot of it for the review – which I expect I’ll have up over here early next week. However, I want to talk for a moment in the way of comparisons, and a few things that the game has made me think about.
I feel like I’m missing something with the art style, and I know exactly what it is. Although I might, in fact, be completely wrong about the connection. The connection -at least in my mind- is anime, specifically Avatar and Legend of Korra. There’s something about the character proportions and style that remind me of the fleeting frames I’ve seen of the series, and I mean that only in kindness.
The second major connection that I drew was to a favourite title of mine, Tomba. Now, if you’ve played either of the two Tomba titles you might be crunching up your brow, but let me explain. Tomba (Tombi over here), specifically the first one, had an amazingly well defined art style, and the developers weren’t afraid to slip between in-engine renderings of the 2D Platformer, to alternate camera viewpoints, or even jump into wonderfully animated video sequences.
Aurion isn’t afraid of any of this, amazing animated sequences fill the gaps between gameplay, ending or starting many of the game’s battles, The game is between the side-on and isometric viewpoint, with one of my main complaints immediately obvious in how awkward the 8 directional movement system clashes with the two directional animation (left & right). But, this, much like the awkward isometric sections of Tombi, are entirely forgivable. In Aurion’s case this is because those same animations are shared with the combat, but I’ll get onto that in just one more moment.
One more thing that Tomi manages to do -other than be name-checked more times than the subject of the article- is to combine traits prominent in two genres in a way that makes it feel natural; Platforming and Adventure, with the character actively bounding around to best foes, but the whole thing has area and equipment progression like any classic adventure titles, and the backtracking too.
Aurion, then, does that also, merging the 2D fighting genre with RPG. It takes the sweeping, globe-trotting story of an RPG -as well as the leveling up, and equipment management- and adds in a fast-paced fighting system, one rife with several special bars and a partner system.
It’s impressively innovative, and while I wasn’t initially sold on how the game was going to maintain a skill (rather than statistic) system as opposed to a stat-based one, as the game continued and further powers were unlocked, and enemies became stronger, the battle system that makes up the core of the game really shone.
It’s definitely that battle system that I’ll be talking about the most in the review, although massive kudos needs to go to the setting as well, it’s cited by the developer as the first African Fantasy RPG, which certainly checks out; in addition the story’s depth and lore appears to have been so impressive that its managed to get the developers a movie deal(–).
Hosting-transfer issues aside, you can expect our Aurion review sometime next week, keep your eyes peeled.
waw thanks for the very kind pre-review