Anima: Gate of Memories

Genre: Spectacle Fighter / Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Anima: Gate of Memories – Arcane Edition bundle, along with Anima: Gate of Memories – The Nameless Chronicles.)

Anima: Gate of Memories is a Spectacle Fighter with strong Action-RPG elements released on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2018. This game is set in the world of the Anima: Beyond Fantasy tabletop RPG franchise, and focuses on a woman who goes by the name Bearer of Calamities (Bearer for short), who is bound to a irreverent talking magical tome named Ergo, who is able to manifest as a clawed man that Bearer can transform into and back at will. The two are investigating the theft of another magical tome called The Byblos, an investigation which leads them to a cursed tower called The Arcane.

I’ve heard some compare this game to the Nier franchise, but for me I felt like the atmosphere here was trying to imitate the Devil May Cry series, with Ergo’s sarcasm seeming to try to copy Devil May Cry’s Dante, along with marionette enemies, a mansion-like environment to explore, and a dark visual presentation backed by music that ranges from off-key gothic-sounding instrumental music to electric guitar pieces.

To its credit, Anima: Gate of Memories isn’t a bad-looking game, but neither is it an especially great-looking game either. The game’s 3D environments have a fair amount of detail to them, there’s some good lighting and atmosphere, but at the same time cutscenes feature a laughable lack of animation, and during the gameplay some animations like Bearer’s walking animation look outright ridiculous. It also doesn’t help that while this game does a decent enough job of evoking Devil May Cry’s presentation, it doesn’t seem to have a very distinct visual identity of its own.

The gameplay here does have some things going for it – there’s more exploration of the game’s labyrinthine environments here, making this more of an Action-RPG than the traditionally linear Spectacle Fighters tend to be. There’s a good variety in the environments, a decent variety of enemies, a customizable interface, and the ability to instantly swap between two different characters with separate upgrade trees means that players can experiment with different upgrade combinations to make for more variety in combat abilities.

Unfortunately, while Anima has a lot of potential, that potential is brought down by one simple fact – the combat in this game just isn’t very fun. There’s not much fluidity to the movements here beyond a basic 3-hit combo, connecting hits with enemies just doesn’t have a good visceral feel to it, there’s little variety to the sorts of melee attacks you have available to you, and the game seems to place way too much emphasis on using projectile attacks, which are slow to use and can’t be manually aimed. However, as enemies will often swarm you with their own projectile attacks that will knock you on your butt if a single one connects with you, you’re often left firing off a projectile of your own and then dodging until you can get off another shot, a process that isn’t very engaging.

To be clear, that’s not to say that the combat in this game is atrocious. However, when you have a genre like Spectacle Fighters where combat is a focus, combat that is even slightly clunky and unsatisfying is a major flaw.

Speaking of clunky, there is one other issue I need to address here – this game has a very odd control setup for in-game menus, with Y of all buttons acting as “confirm”, and A acting as the cancel button. I suppose this may just be a matter of personal preference, but I think this is a terrible choice as it runs counter to the muscle memory established by, well, virtually every other game on the platform. But I suppose you could eventually find yourself getting used to it.

I feel like Anima: Gate of Memories had some really good ideas, and if its combat were further developed and improved, this could have made for a solid entry in the genre. I was genuinely intrigued with the way this game incorporates exploration into the Spectacle Fighter genre and was interested to see more, but when I noticed my enthusiasm dropping every time I had to engage in combat, I had to admit that this was too severe a problem to ignore, and the result is a game that may still be worth trying for fans of the genre, but I’d warn not to have your expectations too high.

tl;dr – Anima: Gate of Memories is a Spectacle Fighter with Action-RPG elements where players swap back and forth between two characters as they explore a cursed tower to find a stolen relic. There are multiple elements this game introduces to the Spectacle Fighter genre that are promising, but all of that promise is undone by clunky combat that just isn’t very fun to engage in.

Grade: C

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