Hey all I’m back with a review of a game that tries a bit too hard at being too many things at once. It’s Masters of Anima!
Plot Synopsis: Once upon a time there were bad golem things which gave humans a bit of a rough time, you see. That is, until a kindly Goddess took pity. She blessed us with the gift to control our own supernatural warriors, using the power of Anima. This well-timed present helped us to defeat our rock-headed foes. Skip forwards a millennia or two, and suddenly some bad dude comes along to screw everything up.
Plot: The plot is so incredibly lackluster that I’m ashamed to even have it inscribed into my memory. I’ll be searching for a way to brain bleach it out as soon as I’m done writing this review. Honestly, it’s atrocious.
Characters: Our main hero and character we control, Otto, is a loser. I mean his fiancé is the best user of Anima in the world and this guy is like the biggest super senior in Middle School. He lacks any real depth and I quickly grew to hate him. If I had the option to play as the bad guy in the story I’d probably have taken it just to beat the crap out of Otto repeatedly. The rest of the cast is little better, with Anna our heroine being a damsel in distress. Despite the fact that she’s supposedly the biggest bad ass magic user in the world, she sure becomes that damsel rather quickly.
Gameplay: The gameplay is a mix of both Diablo and Pikmin. That might sound like fun, except the controls are hardly intuitive and neither is it really engaging. I quickly learned to summon and de-summon my little minions to fight against all my foes and clear the lackluster puzzles. I even got into the habit of just running around a battlefield and just summoning my enemies to attack, then when they started to get hit just desummoning them only to resummon them back to me and repeat the process over and over and over again.
It got better once I was able to summon archer minions. But even then, I still kept repeating the same process as before with my melee minions. It allowed me to keep a high stock of “Anima” that allows you to summon more and more minions.
Even worse was the fact that I repeatedly couldn’t perform the “special” actions for each type of minion. I kept getting into range of my minions to perform their special move and only ended up taking damage as I tried using it over and over again. I eventually just gave up and just did my little summon and de-summon Zerg rush spam. It wasn’t satisfying and quickly became grating.
Music: Honestly this is just as forgettable as the plot, and not any better. Even worse the voice acting was truly bad, with our main character Otto being voiced by someone who sounds like he was reciting the lines into the microphone while staring at paint drying, or I don’t know, playing a better game on their phone. Emotion was hardly conveyed, and it felt like the voice actor was just doing this to get some quick cash and move on to better work, like busing tables at a fast food joint.
Art: This looks like it could’ve been made eight years ago, and that’s not a compliment.
Overall: Skip this game, while it has complexity, it lacks a refined control scheme that allows you to play with that complexity satisfactorily. The plot is even worse than the control scheme and the artwork and musical score are no better.
For those who like: Low Quality Diablo Clones mixed with Pikmin.
Not for those who don’t like: Either of the above, or those who hold themselves to even the most basic, minimal standards for their games.
Developers: Passtech Games
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Steam, Xbox One