XBOX REVIEW | Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster

I’ve seen Anima: Gate of Memories on the Microsoft Store before, from the images I’ve seen there, I wasn’t quite sure what kind of game it was, but I was curious about it. Now that this remaster was released, it was the perfect time for me to get to know it. At first, I thought it was a hack ‘n’ slash inspired by Devil May Cry, and I see now that I was pretty far off, despite my understanding of why I thought that in detail now. So, shall we delve into the world of Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster together?

Things I liked!

• Stylish Art Style | The first thing I can point out about this remaster is that it has a strong art direction. By comparing the original and the remaster, I could see that they have maintained the artistic vision quite well, enhancing it with more details, better lighting, and visual effects. The anime-like graphics are charming, the characters and enemies are well made and interesting to look at.

• Orchestrated Soundtrack | While I don’t think the soundtrack was upgraded, as the trailers don’t mention it, it is quite a good one. It maintains an epic feeling throughout the whole game, with an opera-like female voice being frequent in it, which reminded me of the Persona series soundtrack a bit. It does feature an orchestra, which should give you an idea of the kind and quality of the music.

• Interesting world | Anima: Gate of Memories has a deep backstory, in which a secret order has long fought against supernatural creatures and dark forces lurking in the shadows, with monsters and dark entities being central to the world. The protagonist, known as The Bearer, is a woman who wields the power of a book containing a dark entity called Ergo Mundus. The reason why the protagonist’s name isn’t “public” is because the book erased her name from her memory when they made a “pact”, and no one but the entity in it knows it. I only found out about this game being based on a tabletop RPG called Anima: Beyond Fantasy after I finished the game, which helped me understand why the world feels so complex and engaging.

• Cool Gimmicks | The main gimmick from the first game is switching between protagonists at any point. Each one has their own equipment, abilities, skill trees, and even separate health bars, which means you can switch between them to survive difficult encounters. On the second game, the protagonist has a different gimmick, his attacks are slower but considerably stronger for a limited time, and that is tied to a bar which fills with each regular attack you hit. There were also sections with different camera angles, like top-down or 2.5D, those were a welcome change of pace.

Mixed & disliked!

• Somewhat Clunky | Anima: Gate of Memories I&II is an Action-RPG, which means there’s a lot of combat. For the most part this was fine, but there were moments where the game didn’t feel well play-tested, such as parts with some enemies and bosses who didn’t give you enough time to fight back, which forced my hand to lower the difficulty to progress and finish the game quicker, so I could write this review. The whole first game felt like a rollercoaster, with the first boss feeling too hard, while the second one was too simple, repetitive, and easy. There were also some platforming parts, and those did not feel good, as the controls were not very precise; thankfully, they weren’t always required for progressing, but quite a few were. I constantly had an issue where my character would keep moving to the side when I wasn’t moving anymore, and this only happened in these platforming sections, which made it a lot more frustrating. Sometimes sound effects felt cut short and maps weren’t very accurate in neither the first or second game, some corners showed places that didn’t exist, which made me think it was copy-pasted from a different section. Lastly, it only happened once, but I was forced to restart the game completely once, I couldn’t move my cursor, unpause or anything else.

• Reading | Look, I used to read as many books and notes as I could in RPGs, and the more interesting ones still make me want to read them. However, I believe that most of the world-building shouldn’t be included in those, instead being spoken by NPCs talking to themselves, or to you. Anima: Gate of Memories I&II both had collectables that offered backstory for the bosses and even the main characters, I didn’t feel too inclined to read them all, as they were quite extensive, but I did feel mixed with this choice of presentation.

• Bad voice acting | There were quite a few times when the voice acting was comically bad, some lines were cringeworthy, laughable, or even completely unnecessary. This wasn’t always the case, but it was fairly frequent in the first game. The second game felt a bit better to me in that regard, with a different tone, better writing, and better-delivered lines, despite technically following the same story from the first one, only from a different perspective.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 22h49min
How long to beat the story? 20h-25h
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 34/48 – 740G
How long to achieve 1000G | around 30h
You’ll love this game if you like these | Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy

CONCLUSION

Score: 70/100

Anima: Gate of Memories I&II is an attempt to revive a franchise that wasn’t well received at the time, but became some sort of cult classic, likely thanks to its fanbase. I have to say that I understand why both of these outcomes occurred, as it is a game with a very interesting world and story, charismatic characters and strong art direction and soundtrack. However, it still suffers from clunky controls, overwhelming bosses and unbalanced gameplay at times, despite this being a re-release.