On Astro Bot & The Art of Celebration

October 3, 2024

Written by Jamie Galea

There’s a lot to love about Astro Bot. As a platformer, it’s second to none, with absolutely satisfying movement and control. The level designs are a delight, always managing to find a new way put a smile on my face. It doesn’t hurt that it looks and runs fantastically, and makes great use of all the features of the PS5 and Dualsense. It’s one of the highest rated games of the year for good reason, and a perfect alternative to Playstation’s obsession with cinematic action games.

One thing that it doesn’t do so well, is how it celebrates 30 years of Playstation. The previous Astro Bot game, Astro’s Playroom, featured these lovingly recreated renders of old Playstation hardware, with some iconic characters recreated as Astro Bots. Its the inverse with Astro Bot: lots of Playstation characters, both exclusive and formerly exclusive, with some references to old hardware. There’s hundreds of characters recreated in the Astro Bot style, and while it’s cool, it’s a part of the game that comes across more as undercooked.

There’s a lot that’s been written about how being reminded of all this under-utilised IP is frustrating, but to me, I’m more annoyed by Team Asobi’s approach to these characters. Whenever you find one of these special bots in the world, they’re identified with a name vaguely refers to them, plus a witty line to go with them. As an example, coming across the Joel special bot names him as “Dependable Smuggler”, with the tagline “Tells the occasional white lie”.

To go with this, there’s an in-game gacha you can find that will unlock special items to go with these bots, giving them a unique animation and pose in the hub world. If you were able to find the Ico & Yorda bots in a level, plus getting the stone bench in the gacha, then you’ll see them hanging around in the hub on the bench. It’s the same with pretty much every one of the special bots, who all get a little something.

Astro doesn’t know the secret trick to win here.

The problem with this approach is that it relies upon you knowing who these characters are, and why the item associated with them is important. It’s not a problem for most of the recent Playstation IP, because of how easily accessible they generally are. You can take one look at the Nathan Drake or Kratos special bots and you just know what they are. It’s not the case with every Playstation character you’ll come across, there’s more than a few that haven’t had a new game in decades, let alone been re-released in and around the same time.

It’s when it gets to the more obscure characters or characters that aren’t as immediately iconic, it becomes a bit of a problem. I’m someone who grew up with Playstation consoles, and by rights I should know most of these characters. Yet there’s been more than a few where I’ve needed to look up because they get really obscure. There’s one in particular I found way too obscure, and that’s only because only one game in that series ever made it out to PAL territories, and even then, it was already super obscure to begin with. Arc The Lad, in case you’re wondering.

The Ico & Yorda example is a great representation of my frustration with all this. Not so much the inclusion, because ICO absolutely belongs in a celebration of Playstation. The thing is, ICO hasn’t been available to purchase in nearly 15 years. As I’m writing this, there’s no way to play this celebrated game on any modern Playstation, and it’s an awful feeling. It’s the same case with a lot of the special bots, unfortunately.

There’s absolutely a scenario in which you might want to check out Astro Bot because of how well it reviewed, but you see most of the special bots and feel nothing, because you lack the context. Especially since the game doesn’t want to tell you anything about the characters, let alone not tell you who they are unless you’re already aware of them. It feels awful to be left out in what’s supposed to be a loving tribute, and if the game doesn’t want to give me a reason why I should be excited when I see a robot dressed like Reiko Nagase from Ridge Racer, why should I be excited for this? If you want me to point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio, you’ve gotta give me something meaningful to point at.

You can now hear a nasally American with a deep voice saying “HELLO. AND WELCOME TO VIDEO GAMES.”

It’s even more galling because there have been games that have solved this issue, and did it nearly 25 years ago. Super Smash Bros, to me, is the ultimate example of how to do a big IP crossover and treat it with the respect it deserves, and a lot of that has to do with its Trophies. When you unlocked a trophy in Melee, Brawl & Wii U, you’d not only get the full proper name of the character, but also what game/series they belong to and even a little description as to what the trophy is and why it’s cool.

There’s a good mix of trophies for everyone, but also plenty of obscure picks, but Smash never shied away from telling you about these obscure things and why they’re cool. When Smash Ultimate replaced Trophies with Spirits, it wasn’t anywhere near as appealing. I get it would’ve been far too difficult to write something about the literal thousands of spirits, but it’s hard to get excited over a PNG of a F-Zero character without context.

For instance, Melee has an unlockable trophy for Ayumi Tachibana, one of the protagonists from the Famicom Detective Club games. At the time of Melee’s release in the West, none of the Famicom Detective Club games had any form of English localization, fan or official otherwise, making it the first time audiences would’ve heard of the character and series. Nintendo could’ve very easily changed the trophy to be more suited to Western audiences, but they didn’t, and I really do appreciate that.

Infinitely cooler than a PNG. Melee rules.

 

But that’s Masahiro Sakurai’s MO to a tee. He loves games and wants to share that love. It’s why his YouTube channel is such a delight, or any time he’s allowed to go on camera and do a deep dive on a Smash Bros character. He knows so much and wants to share his passion with you, giving you a lot of context as to why this medium he loves is so important to him.

The thing that worries me is that this isn’t the first time Team Asobi have done something like this. Astro’s Playroom has these lovingly recreated Playstation consoles and accessories, but won’t tell you anything about them barring a witty quote. You at least get the names of the hardware, and I’m sure there’s probably not that much they can say about the Playstation Mouse, but having some context or anything would’ve done wonders. They went to so much effort to model this and show it off, but I want to know why it’s so cool!

I don’t doubt that Team Asobi have an absolute passion and love of the medium, and were more than excited to dive into 30 years of Playstation to create just about everything about Astro Bot. I do doubt Team Asobi’s approach to showing off their love of the medium in their work. If you want people to be excited, give them more than the bare minimum to be excited!

“If you know, you know” isn’t an approach to showing off an IP collection, it’s something you throw out on Twitter because you can’t be bothered explaining yourself.