Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 19/Nov 03:40

Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster – Review

We’re continuing our hot streak of looking at JRPG remaster multipacks with a bit of an outlier. Unlike Dragon Quest, Tales, or Atelier, the name Anima probably won’t ring a bell, unless you happened to be into obscure tabletop RPGs in the 2010s. While the Anima IP may not be top-of-mind for the general audience, the core tabletop game Anima: Beyond Fantasy eventually expanded into a miniatures game, a card game, and… video games. Unsurprisingly, it’s the latter that we’re looking at today: 2016’s Anima: Gate of Memories and 2018’s Anima: The Nameless Chronicles have received a second lease on life under the guise of Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster. Have the games stood the test of time, or should they have remained locked behind the gate of memories? Story With two games included in Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster, you’d assume that you’d get two stories, but this isn’t the case here. The first game, Gate of Memories, presents a full-fledged story that can stand on its own, but its sequel feels more like a companion piece. That first story introduces us to the Bearer of Calamities, a young woman sent by the secretive order Nathaniel to recover Byblos, a powerful artifact containing prophecies of the world’s end. Byblos has been stolen by a renegade known as The Red Lady, who is connected to an enigmatic figure called The Nameless. In their attempts to recover the book, the Bearer and her companion Ergo, a powerful entity trapped inside a magical book, become stranded in the Arcane Tower, a dimension outside normal time and space. The pair must defeat the so-called Messengers of the End in order to escape the tower, recover the book, and prevent an apocalyptic prophecy. In The Nameless Chronicles, the same story is revisited, except this time around, you’re playing from the perspective of The Nameless. Pivoting to the key antagonist from the first game as the protagonist is an ambitious move. It’s necessary to play Gate of Memories first to make sense of the overarching story, but the way both tales are interwoven feels cohesive and helps fill out gaps in the first tale. It transforms The Nameless from a mysterious big bad into a fleshed-out character that wanders the world of Gaia under a curse of his own. The two games come together to create a single, larger narrative about fate, identity, and the consequences of power. Graphics Prior to the release of these video games, the Anima franchise established itself as a dark fantasy universe that took more than a little inspiration from Final Fantasy. Capitalizing on the wealth of pre-existing source material, Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster benefits from the strong art direction of the series, with memorable character designs and beautiful environments. That said, the age of these games is clearly showing beneath the shiny new coat of paint -these are remasters and not full-on remakes after all. Character animations are stiff and janky, especially in cutscenes, and although Gaia looks pretty, it feels empty. The upside is that the games aren’t particularly demanding, and performance remains solid throughout, with a stable framerate and minimal load times. Sound The one aspect of Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster that completely falls flat is voice acting. Dialogue is delivered in a flat, emotionless manner that completely undermines the writing. One has to wonder why the opportunity wasn’t taken to re-record this, because as it stands, the only performance that is somewhat bearable is that of Ergo. However, the presence of a single playful, humorous, and charismatic voice only emphasizes how phoned-in the other performances are. It is perhaps a little ironic, then, how emotionally charged the orchestral OST is. It alternates between mystical ambience as you explore your surroundings, high-energy tracks in combat, and dramatic orchestral pieces when the story calls for them. The music adds some much-needed punch to the story. Sound effects and ambience, on the other hand, suffer the same fate as the voice acting, feeling outdated and weak. Gameplay Unsurprisingly, there is quite a bit of overlap between Gate of Memories and The Nameless Chronicles when it comes to gameplay. The shared core experience is that of a classic action-driven JRPG that puts heavy emphasis on both combat and exploration. The games stick to a non-linear structure, which sees players tackle different realms from the central hub that is the Arcane Tower. Each realm is a labyrinth with its own puzzles to solve, secrets to discover, and bosses to take on. You can tackle realms in any order, and return to the hub at any point, meaning that if you happen to run into a wall in one realm, you can level up elsewhere and return to take on what stopped you. Combat is at the center of Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster, with progression locked behind boss battles. The flow of combat can be hit or miss: most of the time, it’s simple, readable and fast-paced but there are instances where controlling your character becomes clunky, wooden or stiff for seemingly no discernible reason. Fighting enemies is less about pattern memorisation and more about relentlessly pushing forward. Aggressive and varied play is rewarded, with the game’s rhythm- and meter-based flow penalizing repetition and spamming the same attacks over and over. This translates into an early game that feels limited, but as you unlock new moves on the skill tree, this is an issue that resolves itself. With both games covering the same story, it’s logical that much of Gate of Memories’ world is revisited in The Nameless Chronicles, although the locations aren’t carbon copies of one another. The first game puts more emphasis on platforming to navigate the realms, whereas the second one alters or repurposes parts and focuses on puzzles. Given that the platforming mechanics are fairly undercooked, with awkward air control and harsh punishments for failed jumps, we vastly prefer the second game when it comes to exploration. As a final key difference, Gate of Memories also adds a mechanic that lets you freely swap between Ergo and the Bearer, each with their own health bar and skill tree. It’s a neat idea in theory, but in practice, the movesets between the two characters are too similar to really stand out. Pushing this mechanic to its logical limit would have made a huge difference in making Gate of Memories more memorable. Priced at €24.50, Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster is fairly cheap, though these are fairly short games in the first place. A playthrough of either game will take you between 10 and 15 hours, depending on how much you get sidetracked, so you’re looking at around 30 hours total. Back when these games originally debuted, they would have been full-priced titles too, so by that reasoning, this remaster bundle is a bargain. Granted, over the last decade or so, the average gamer’s standards have changed, and Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster hasn’t stood the test of time particularly well -it’s not a bad game, but it does feel outdated- so we’d say the price point feels fair but not outstandingly so. Conclusion There are a ton of unique and interesting ideas in Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster, but neither game fully commits to them. The dual protagonist setup in Gate of Memories doesn’t get the chance to shine, for example, and although the narrative hook of The Nameless Chronicles feels ambitious, it’s also undermined by terrible voice acting and so-so mechanics. Anima: Gate of Memories I&II Remaster feels like a product of its time. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing in theory, but by modern standards, the gameplay feels more like an exercise in mediocrity and less like a timeless classic.