NC and Dynamis One dropped a new Astrae Oratio trailer today, and it’s the one where the premise finally clicks. It’s the Character Introduction PV, it runs just under two minutes, and the tagline is “The city, the stars, and magic.”
Quick refresher if you’ve only been half-watching this one. Astrae Oratio (everyone just calls it Asora) is a magic-meets-bureaucracy RPG set in an alternate 1889 Tokyo, a version of the city that’s somehow rocketed about a century ahead of where it should be. The hook that’s carried the whole campaign: you don’t play a magician. You play a Shunin, a low-ranking civil servant who gets reassigned to the Special District Office and put in charge of every magic-user in Tokyo. The magical girls fight. You do the admin. That’s the gag, and it’s a good one.
Up to now we’d had teaser visuals, worldbuilding, and one gameplay PV at the start of June. What we didn’t have was the cast. This PV fixes that.
The magicians you’ll be managing
Three of them get proper name-card introductions. Each is pinned to a Tokyo ward, like a district manager who happens to carry a wand.
Tanaka Erin is the rookie, and she plays it to the hilt. Pink hair, a knee-length braid, the slightly panicked cheer of someone who found out she could do magic about a week ago and hasn’t told her mom. “I’m still new to this whole magician thing,” she says, before rallying: she’ll do her best, you can count on her. The keeper is her confession that being a magician is fun but hiding it from everyone is exhausting, capped with “Mom doesn’t seem to suspect a thing, though. Hehe.” That’s the entire game’s tone in two lines. Her ward is Minato.
Mitsukoe Luna is going to be a problem in the group chat. She opens with “Don’t get the wrong idea, Shunin. Magic is not a joke,” and follows it with “You’d better not expect it to end in something beautiful.” Silver hair, a pistol, a great deal of ice, no visible patience. I would bet money she has already reorganized your filing cabinet without asking.
Akitsu Akina doesn’t wait to be asked. She introduces herself as director of the Akina Urban Legend Research Institute (yes, named after herself) with the air of someone who’s been hoping all day that somebody would bring up the Akina Urban Legend Research Institute. Orange side-ponytail, varsity jacket, the grin of a born troublemaker. “I’m always taking requests. Just say the word!” Her ward is Shinjuku, which tracks, and her battle cry, “In my name, I declare this dominion!”, is the clearest look yet at how Asora stages its magical duels.
Bookending all this is your new boss, who congratulates you on a job she already knows is “going to be a headache, right?”, and, right at the end, a kimono-clad figure lit in deep red who murmurs that “Tokyo’s magic is dazzling, indeed” before announcing they’re here on official business. No name card for that one. Read into it what you like.
What the combat looks like
The battle footage is still stamped work-in-progress, so the usual caveats, but here’s what’s on screen. It’s turn-based, with an AP gauge and a command menu, and a combo counter I watched climb past 60. You build parties from several characters, there are auto-battle and fast-forward toggles tucked in the corner (gacha players already know why that line matters), and every skill activation cuts away to a 3D cinematic or a hand-drawn anime insert. The fights mostly play out in real Tokyo: cherry blossoms drifting past Tokyo Tower while pink and violet spell effects go off around the characters. It looks expensive.
In between the fights there’s the story half, dialogue with branching choices and the slice-of-life stuff. There’s a whole summer beat with the cast lounging at a pool that has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with getting you attached before they ask for your money.
The vibe
The shorthand for the look is “someone on this team really loves Makoto Shinkai.” The PV keeps cutting to huge starry skies, kids reaching up toward them, shooting stars sliding over the skyline. Those skies are also the lore. In Asora, magic is a wish you can’t fulfill, spoken up at the stars, which is where the title comes from (Astrae Oratio reads roughly as “prayer of the stars”). The tagline doubles as a plot summary.
The tone is doing two jobs at once. Half of it is cozy office comedy: you, a rubber stamp, and a caseload that doesn’t care about your weekend. Then it cuts to magical girls going off in front of national landmarks under a sky full of impossible wishes. Whether those halves hold together across a full game is what the finished thing has to earn, especially from a studio led by ex-Blue Archive staff whose earlier teasers underwhelmed a lot of people. Most of that early material left me cold too. This is the first trailer that made me want to play it.
The end card reads “Key in the Ignition for 2026,” so the window is still this year, platforms presumably mobile-first with the usual gacha plumbing attached. Credits list Studio Nox for the original work, Dynamis One on production, and NC publishing.
Watch the full Character Introduction PV on YouTube, see the original post from the official account, or dig into the world on the official site.