Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan

I don't have an option for English? Hard to understand this game at times.

[table] [tr] [th][h1] My Playthrough [/h1][/th] [th][url=https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTZKn1hLlcQMYUI_sMZpIC2qORU5DNu-2] Youtube Playlist [/url][/th] [/tr] [tr] [td][h1]The Review[/h1][/td] [td]A really fun action RPG with beautiful art and story. Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan has really likeable characters and interesting world building. The only problems I have with this game are technically issues: getting stuck on some geometry, framerate randomly getting low is some areas, and the poor English translations. I enjoyed my time with the game and if you can overlook the technical issues you will too.[/td] [/tr] [/table]

The game felt great overall but gets held back by some glitches and crashes. The music and story are amazing and it is always great to see an African fantasy setting in games. For the gameplay it felt serviceable. At first I tried playing the game like a Beat Em Up/ Character Action game and looked for heavy combos. But the game felt more like an RPG where you use skills, hit enemy weaknesses, and do basic crowd control. It felt stale at the beginning but once you get to the part where you can fuse your Legacies, that's when the gameplay and the story started to get interesting. The best strategy was to just charge your AP and spam special moves. This made the battles where you fight lots of enemies fun but the boss battles were more lacking. I ended up cheesing the final boss by just hitting him on wakeup with Pirogue Strike. The one negative point that holds the game back is just the bugs and crashing that happens while you play. If change audio like unplugging your headphones, all the audio except the music will stop playing forcing you to close the game it fix it. Sometimes the game will slow down to like 5fps and potentially crash. It happens if there are alot of enemies …

Wanted to like this, but it is just so very tedious and slow. Let me also clarify there, not in the story department, which itself sorta zips along a rather standard JRPG trope route. The setting is very nice, art is unique. The game has a lot of things going for it that makes it stand out. Then you get INTO it and just...ugh. Its almost like fighting itself over how it should be and how its presented. The combat can be very ...interesting, but will be one of the things that makes it so sluggish. Every fight, every time is a drawn out deal. Even after a few hours into the story and your "power up" you dont FEEL powered up. Especially as long as a boss fight can take. Combine with some QoL features that will make you sigh, like some awkward platforming bits in maps to get around in zones to get around to...zones. Its just...slow. That is in the end, as i said at the top, the sad part in the end. You want to like it. From the start you get hooked and then once its in you almost immediately go "Oh, wait...ugh maybe this improves" The art style however is solid, but you can't rest a game entirely on that alone.

It is a JRPG-style beat'em up game with Wakada forever aesthetic ( I know, this one is at least 10 years older than the reference). The hand-painted characters look nice, but not long after the start, they already feel outdated, and the animation style feels like the early 2000s. The gameplay is repetitive and mostly action-oriented button-smashing. It gets old pretty fast.

Looks awesome and fun to play.