Exist Archive’s dozen gods can’t save its side-view dungeons

Twelve young people die in a Tokyo explosion and wake up on another planet. That is the hook of Exist Archive: The Other Side of the Sky, and it is a good one. What follows is a dungeon crawler that developer tri-Ace built for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in 2015, published by Aksys Games and Spike Chunsoft.

The game carries a published critical score of 6.7 out of 10 across 10 outlets. Exist Archive is not a failure and not a triumph. It is a competent, occasionally striking role-playing game that never quite decides what it wants to be, and the seams show.

Trailer, via Aksys Games Official.

Protolexa and the Other Side of the Sky

The setting does the heavy lifting early. Modern-day Tokyo sits on one side of the story. Protolexa, a fantasy world on another planet, sits on the other. The dead are bound to it. Exist Archive calls this place “the other side of the sky,” and the phrase earns its keep: the game is about distance, about a world you can see but cannot reach, about a life that ended in a blast and resumed somewhere colder.

The twelve protagonists are not ordinary survivors. They are evil, soul-collecting gods, embroiled in the issues of all gods. That is the premise, and it is a strange one to build a party around. You are not saving a kingdom. You are a pantheon of small, nasty divinities trying to work out why you died and what you have become.

Dungeon Crawling From the Side

The main focus is dungeon crawling, and the perspective is the most distinctive thing about it. You explore from a side view. Characters appear in 3D at chibi size. They jump, dash and use other skills to solve puzzles, which turns traversal into a light platforming exercise rather than a top-down grid march.

Enemies are not randomized. They appear on screen before battle, so you can see what you are walking into and decide whether to engage.

The side view is the design choice that separates Exist Archive from a crowded field. It gives the dungeons a shape most of its peers do not have, and it makes the jumping and dashing the thing you remember.

Twelve Gods Is a Crowd

Here is where the game loses its footing, in this paper’s reading. Twelve protagonists is a crowd, and the game treats it like one. The premise promises that bonds shape fate, but a cast that size struggles to carry the weight the story places on it. You get types instead of people, and the game moves them around like pieces.

The mystery is the engine: why did they die, what is Protolexa, what does it mean to wake up there. Exist Archive is genuinely interested in those questions. It is less interested in giving any single character enough room to answer them in a way that lands.

That is the central problem. The game has a dozen chances to make you feel something and takes none of them far enough.

The Puzzles and the Skills

The characters carry a set of skills — jumping, dashing and more — and the game puts them to work on puzzles inside the side-view dungeons. That is the loop the game asks you to run. It is a modest toolkit, and the game builds its exploration around it.

Whether that toolkit holds up over a full playthrough is the question the published scores leave open. The 6.7 across 10 outlets suggests most critics found it serviceable rather than special.

What tri-Ace Gets Right

The combat and the dungeon loop are solid. The fundamentals here are not sloppy. The chibi presentation keeps the tone light even when the story is about death and gods, and the on-screen enemies mean you are never ambushed by a dice roll.

The dual-world structure is the best idea in Exist Archive. Tokyo and Protolexa sit against each other, and the game keeps the tension of two places that should not touch. When it leans into that, it is memorable.

Where the Game Sits

Exist Archive arrived in 2015 on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, and it reads now as a game caught between two eras. The Vita wanted portable dungeon crawlers. The PlayStation 4 wanted spectacle. Exist Archive is neither small enough to be a handheld habit nor large enough to be a console event. It is a side-view RPG with a dozen gods and a score of 6.7, and that score is not an insult. It is an accurate description of a game that does several things well and commits to none of them.

Exist Archive: The Other Side of the Sky is worth playing if you want a side-view dungeon crawler with a real premise and you can accept a cast that never becomes more than a dozen sketches. It is not worth playing if you need the story to match the ambition of its opening.

The 6.7 is the right call. It is not a score for a broken game. It is a score for a game that had a dozen gods and could not serve one of them.

What matters most here is the side view. That is the thing Exist Archive does that most of its peers do not, and it is the reason to remember the game at all. The chibi characters, the on-screen enemies, the jumping and dashing through Protolexa: that is a real design, and it works. What does not work is the promise that bonds shape fate. Twelve protagonists cannot bond. They can only queue.

Exist Archive is a 2015 role-playing game from tri-Ace, published by Aksys Games and Spike Chunsoft, and it is available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. It is a single-player game. It is fantasy. It is a dungeon crawler with a side view and a dozen soul-collecting gods who died in Tokyo and woke up under another sky.

dungeon crawler · Exist Archive · JRPG · PS Vita · PS4 · tri-Ace