Astral Chain now available for pre-purchase on the Nintendo eShop, latest official blog post (facial animation)
Starting today, Astral Chain (the latest game from PlatinumGames), is available for pre-purchase on the Nintendo eShop in Europe, North America, and Japan. Its price is as follows:
- Europe: 59.99€
- UK: £49.99
- United States: $59.99
- Japan: 8 618 Yen
If you have a Nintendo Switch Online membership, and if you’re interested, you can use a Nintendo Switch Game Voucher to buy the game. The game requires 9.6GB of free space, and the Japanese version does offer an English language option (because it’s the same SKU worldwide).
Here’s a few more screenshots for the game:
Also, the latest official blog post for the game is now live. This one is from Takahiro Iwagami (the cinematic artist in charge of facial animation), who came to talk about… you guessed it, facial animation. Click here to check out the full thing!
Here’s an excerpt:
The main character of ASTRAL CHAIN isn’t completely unvoiced; you can hear them calling out to their Legion as they fight. However, the main character doesn’t have any dialogue of their own in the main story cutscenes. Before I started animating anything at all, director Takahisa Taura and I discussed what overall impressions each character’s facial expressions should have. Taura told me, “I want players to be able to project themselves onto the player character, so they naturally feel like part of the game. So don’t give the player character any extreme expressions that might give them too much of a predefined personality.”
Throughout my animation career, I’d always taken it for granted that each character should move with a distinct rhythm, and have striking poses that are all their own. This was the first time I’d had to make facial animation for a character with no dialogue – and a main character, at that! Making expressions that met both Taura’s expectations and my own personal standards took a lot of time. Not to mention all the trial and error that went into animating all the other characters’ faces, too!
Astral Chain (Switch) comes out on August 30th worldwide.
