Astria Ascending is a fun turn-based RPG from the minds at Artisan Studios with a gripping, dark storyline involving a cycle of eight individuals being chosen every three years to become Demi-Gods. The catch? They will die after their three years of service.
This game is a quintessential RPG with plenty of emphasis on exploiting weaknesses, storing up an Octopath Traveler-like battle currency, and even an homage to Triple Triad. That said, there are a few things that the game could explain better and some tips that would be useful to new players.
9 Take Advantage Of Elemental Weaknesses To Earn FP
FP is a very valuable resource in Astria Ascending. You can store up to ten FP at a time and spend four of them during a turn to increase the effectiveness of your abilities up to 200 percent. This will usually be used to pump up the damage of your best moves.
To earn FP you can store temporary points by passing your turn but this will disappear after one round, but it's far better to exploit an enemy's weakness to gain two permanent FP. Dagmar and Kress are great characters to keep around in your party for this purpose, as they both are able to hit a ton of elemental weaknesses.
8 Don't Spend SP Frivolously
Each character in this game has their own Ascension Tree for each of their Jobs. Apart from leveling up, these are the only way that your characters can develop stats and learn new abilities in a manner reminiscent of Final Fantasy 10's Sphere Grid.
Luckily, you can view the entire Ascension Tree with no limits and work out the best pathways to get the abilities you want. SP accrues quite slowly, so knowing what your goals are is very important. High-value early skills include Provoke for Ulan, MP Saver for Eko, and Thief Legend for Arpajo.
Check out our SP farming guide if you want to get a lot of SP in a very short amount of time.
7 Ores And Crystals Are Alchemist Only
As you progress through the game, you are very likely to come across various items that the game says will do elemental damage, such as Ice Ores or Erio Crystals. However, you will likely find out the hard way that you can't use them in battle.
These items can only be used by the Alchemist, which is available as a Main Job or a Sub Job for Alassia and Kaydin. This Job must unlock the ability to use each different elemental Ore and Crystal individually and they are not the most powerful attacks, but they are useful for hitting weaknesses and farming FP.
6 You Must Equip Your Support Abilities
This tip isn't handed to you for quite some time and you might end up wondering why nothing seems to change when you unlock a new ability. Some abilities are support abilities and characters only have a limited number of slots available for them.
Head to the Abilities menu to equip these. You can also unlock more slots in the characters' Ascension Trees and it's well worth doing so as the right support abilities can make a huge difference in difficult fights.
5 Learn How Crests Work
As you progress through the game, you'll end up picking up various crests from the temples you visit. You'll start with Main Job Crests, and then get Sub Job Crests and Support Job Crests. Here's how they work.
- Main Job Crests will let you pick a whole new job for that character. This will change the equipment they use (including their weapon!), their in-battle appearance, and grant access to a whole host of new moves, support abilities, and stat upgrades.
- Sub Job Crests let you pick one of the jobs you didn't choose for that character's Main Job. They'll gain access to this job too, but only its activated abilities.
- Support Job Crests are the reverse of Sub Job Crests. The jobs chosen with these crests will only grant access to Ascension Trees with support abilities.
4 Pick Your Crests Wisely
There are two reasons to think about how you distribute your crests and which jobs you pick when doing so. The first is that each time you obtain crests, you'll only pick up two. This means that you'll get a bigger immediate benefit if you use them on high-quality characters first, such as Ulan, Dagmar, and Eko.
The second reason is that your choices are, unfortunately, permanent. There is no respec function in Astria Ascending and if you are unhappy with a character's new job, you are rather out of luck.
Some recommendations: Guardian is a great Main Job for Ulan to improve her tankiness. Black Mage turns Dagmar into the best damage dealer in the game for a long time. Dark Knight on Kress brings great active and support abilities. Eko as a White Mage is the best healer and light mage in the game bar none.
3 Don't Lose Your J-Ster Tokens
J-Ster is Astria Ascending's love letter to Final Fantasy 8's Triple Triad and it shows. Not only are all the tokens emblazoned with the images of characters and monsters from the game, but there are very similar rules for acquiring the tokens of the game's losers.
When the acquisition rule is All, the loser has to hand over all five of their chosen tokens and this can make a huge dent in your collection when you're vastly encouraged to use only your best tokens. So don't lose - save the game before facing a high-difficulty opponent and reload if you lose.
There are achievements for beating every opponent in the game, and you don't want to end up on a losing streak.
2 Adjust The Difficulty
One of the nicer features in Astria Ascending that solidifies it as a modern RPG is the flexible difficulty system that it has. Not only can you change the overall difficulty of enemies on the fly (which is really nice when you come up against extremely tough hunts), but you can make the game more or less challenging in other ways.
You can customize how XP and SP are distributed, toggle weakness visibility on and off, and even completely disable item and money drops if you want a challenge. Experiment to find the perfect difficulty level for you.
1 How To Use Cosmo Breaks
This is just one of the things that the game doesn't explain very well, unfortunately. At a certain point in the story, you will gain access to Cosmo Breaks. These are limit breaks for your party members that can be used once a character fills up their Cosmo Break gauge.
To use a Cosmo Break, you need to press Up on that character's Attack button. It's an easily missed detail that can be frustrating if you go a few hours without noticing it.