Astral Chain

Every few years an action studio stops iterating and actually swings at something new. PlatinumGames — the house that Bayonetta built, the team that made NieR:Automata play like it cost twice what it did — swung in August 2019, and the result remains one of the strangest things on the Nintendo Switch.

Astral Chain is a Switch exclusive, and that exclusivity is central to reading the game’s reception. Director Takahisa Taura, a designer on NieR:Automata, took the lead here with Hideki Kamiya supervising, and Masakazu Katsura — a manga artist, not a games guy — handling character design. That combination produces something that looks like a late-90s OVA and plays like a fighting game disguised as a police drama.

The setup: you’re a rookie in Neuron, a militarized task force on The Ark, a synthetic island city that is the last habitable place left after extradimensional chimeras started pulling people into the Astral Plane. You and your twin sibling join up; you pick which one you play, and the other becomes the NPC who keeps outshining you. Neuron’s edge is that it has learned to capture chimeras and leash them. That leashed monster is your Legion, and you control it at the same time you control yourself.

• The Legion system: A second character mapped to the right stick and ZL, fighting alongside you in real time. Not a summon with a cooldown. A permanent co-combatant you steer.
• The Astral Chain itself: The tether between you and your Legion is a physics object. Run circles around an enemy to bind it, stretch it across a charging beast’s path to trip it, or pin something to a wall while you reposition.
• Five swappable Legions: Sword (balanced), Arm (grappling and heavy strikes), Beast (tracking and mobility), Arrow (ranged lock-on), Axe (defense and shielding). Each carries its own skill tree and its own out-of-combat utility.
• Sync Attacks: Time a dodge or a Legion command correctly and the game offers a one-button cinematic follow-up. It’s the rhythm the whole combat system hangs on.
• Investigation segments: Between fights you canvass civilians, scan crime scenes with an AR overlay, collect evidence and make deductions — using Legion senses to track scents or spot what human eyes can’t.
• Post-game structure: Chapter-length “Files,” per-mission letter ranks, a harder unlocked difficulty, and a deep bench of collectibles.

The Dual-Control Problem

The pitch sounds unplayable. You move with the left stick, attack with Y and B, dodge with A — standard Platinum. Then the Legion occupies ZL and the right stick, which normally runs the camera. Two bodies, ten fingers, one brain.

It works because Platinum cheated intelligently. The Legion has competent autonomous AI: hold ZL and it attacks the nearest target on its own, tracking and committing to combos without input. Your job isn’t to micromanage it — it’s to aim it. Flick the right stick to reposition it, release to recall it, hold a direction to drag the chain somewhere specific. The game asks you for intent, not execution.

That design choice is the whole review. It’s what makes a genuinely novel control scheme legible to someone who has never touched a character action game, while leaving enough ceiling that a Platinum lifer can mine it for a long time. Most experiments in this space fail at exactly this step. This one doesn’t.

The Chain Is the Weapon

Here’s the part that still hasn’t been copied. In most action games, positioning is about your position. Here, the meaningful object is the line between two positions.

You circle-strafe a chimera and the chain wraps it, locking it in place. A boss charges, you leave the Legion planted and sidestep — the chain catches its legs and dumps it. A flying enemy dives; you fling the Legion past it and yank. Combat becomes geometry. You’re reading attack tells, the shape of the room, and where your tether currently lies across it.

The fluency curve is real. The design is built so that somewhere around the mid-game the buttons fade from thought and chain-thinking takes over — and everything after that is the payoff.

The Legions, and Why Only Two Get Used

Five Legions, five skill trees, mid-fight swapping. On paper, a build game. In practice, the difficulty curve never forces a rethink, so Sword and Arrow cover nearly everything. Beast is an excellent traversal tool and a mediocre fighter. Axe’s shield is superb against exactly the enemies that make you want to use Sword instead.

The skill trees deepen individual Legions rather than diversifying them, and the resource economy is generous enough that maxing your favorites requires no strategizing. It’s a system with more breadth than the game ever demands you use — a luxury problem, but a missed one.

The Detective Detour

Then the game stops.

Astral Chain spends real time on investigation: talk to civilians, scan the environment, match evidence, guess the suspect. Conceptually it’s the right call — it builds The Ark as a place with residents and grievances rather than an arena, and the Legion-as-bloodhound conceit is a smart reuse of the core mechanic.

Executionally it’s thin. The deduction sequences have one correct answer and near-zero penalty for guessing, which makes them a formality rather than a puzzle. And a nonzero chunk of the “police work” is fetch-quest filler: locate a lost item, find someone’s cat, clean a restroom. Yes, really. First-time through, these segments read as texture. On a replay, they’re a wall between you and the combat you came back for.

Ranking, and the Missing Pressure

Platinum’s ranking systems are usually the game’s real content — the thing that turns a solid campaign into a long-term obsession. Astral Chain’s is too generous. S+ ranks fall out of competent, unremarkable play. When the ceiling is easy to touch, the incentive to master the chain evaporates, and a combat system this deep deserves a scoreboard that pushes back. The harder post-game difficulty helps. It arrives late, after the ranking habit has already set.

On-Foot Movement

The single most consistent complaint, and it’s fair. Outside combat, your character controls like a mid-weight vehicle — a slow acceleration curve, floaty jumps, and platforming sections in the Astral Plane that ask for precision the movement model can’t deliver. The camera compounds it, clipping and swinging in tight interiors. In a fight, the Legion masks all of this. In a corridor, nothing does.

Katsura’s character work gives Astral Chain a face — clean-lined, unmistakably late-90s anime, a deliberate rejection of the mo-capped realism everyone else was chasing. It pairs with a neon-and-concrete Ark that lands closer to Ghost in the Shell than Blade Runner, and an Astral Plane rendered as red geometry floating in void — alien, and a hard visual break from the city that makes both read better.

Technically, this is a Switch game and it accepts the trade-offs that implies: a capped frame rate well below Platinum’s faster stablemates, dynamic resolution leaning on the lower end, and aggressive environmental detail culling in the city zones. That cap is the honest cost — an action game this twitchy at half the frame rate of its stablemates is a real compromise, and the dodge timing is tuned tighter than the hardware comfortably serves. The UI is the weak link. Menus are busy, the skill trees are navigated with a fiddly cursor, and the Legion status readouts crowd the HUD at precisely the moments when you need to parse a screen full of chain, chimera and particle effects.

Switch-only, for the whole life of the game, and the hardware shapes the experience in both directions.

Handheld is where it hurts. Text — mission briefings, investigation evidence, skill descriptions — is sized for a television and gets hard to read on the small panel. Combat visibility suffers too; the chain is a thin line in a screen full of effects, and shrinking the display shrinks your most important piece of information.

Controller choice matters more than usual. The right stick does double duty as Legion control and camera, so Joy-Con stick precision is a real factor. Drift that’s a nuisance elsewhere is a combat liability here. A Pro Controller is close to mandatory if you intend to chase ranks. HD rumble is put to good use signaling chain tension.

The flip side: the File structure is near-perfect portable design. Each chapter is a self-contained unit with a clean stopping point and a rank screen. Few action games commute this well.

Astral Chain is the rare experiment where the wild idea isn’t the flaw — it’s the only part that’s flawless. The Legion works. The chain works. Nobody has meaningfully copied either since, which tells you how hard it was to get right the first time.

What surrounds that idea is less assured. A studio this good at combat let a third of its runtime go to investigation segments with no teeth, capped its own skill ceiling with a ranking curve that rewards mediocrity, and shipped a protagonist who handles worse walking down a hallway than fighting a huge chimera. Those aren’t small things, and they’re why this falls short of Platinum’s very best.

We recommend it anyway. Push past File 03, where the pacing is at its slowest, and get to the point where you stop pressing buttons and start drawing lines through a room. That moment is worth the price, the frame rate, and every lost cat on The Ark.