Legion

What grabbed me about Astral Chain wasn’t the premise—it was the creative lineup. Masakazu Katsura handled the character design. He did Zetman and Video Girl Ai, both with this gorgeous kinetic energy that just moves on the page. Takahisa Taura is directing, and he came up as a game designer on NieR: Automata. Hideki Kamiya, who created Bayonetta, is involved. That’s a specific enough combination that the game stops feeling like a generic cyberpunk announcement and starts feeling like a genuine creative vision.

A future city, glaringly bright and constantly blinking, is under siege by creatures pouring through portals from another dimension. You’re part of a special police unit called Neuron trying to hold the line. Your partner is Legion, a humanoid weapon that fights alongside you. The combat is built around that partnership. You can attack the same enemy together, split up and handle different threats, or let Legion take the lead while you support it. It’s not the usual companion system where an AI just tags along. Legion is integral to how you fight.

Platinum Games knows how to make action feel tight and responsive, and the visual excess here—that constantly blinking metropolis—is exactly what you’d expect from them. Whether the game underneath actually holds up is another question. The partner synergy angle can either feel like a genuine tactical choice or like babysitting an AI. But I’m curious enough to find out. Late August, exclusive to Switch.