Anima: Gate Of Memories I & II Remaster Review – Dementia Memoria

There are some TTRPGs which have, for one reason or another, fallen into a liminal space between obscure and cult classic. Anima: Beyond Fantasy was one such TTRPG. The rules were arcane, but the setting seemed pretty cool. It’s not entirely surprising that somebody thought, “Hey, instead of shooting for the Dungeons & Dragons license, let’s try this thing instead!” But much like its pen-and-paper progenitor, Anima: Gate of Memories seemed to have slipped between the cracks, garnering mixed reviews when it originally came out in 2016. Its semi-sequel, Anima: Gate of Memories – The Nameless Chronicles, came out two years later and with little more in the way of fanfare. How this spurs one to decide to put out Anima: Gate of Memories I & II Remaster, essentially a slightly updated re-release of Anima: Gate of Memories – Arcane Edition, is perhaps as baffling as the TTRPG which inspired it.

Anima: Gate of Memories puts you in the dual role of a young Inquisitor for the Order Of Nathaniel and the demonic demigod she’s tied into. When a renegade Inquisitor steals a book with the potential to bring about the end of the world (for real, this time!), it’s your job to make your way through a labyrinth of nightmarish prisons and alternate dimensions to confront the monstrous entities holding the final boss back from kicking off an apocalypse. Anima: Gate of Memories – The Nameless Chronicles puts you through a similar wringer as Nameless, an immortal being that you come across in the first game, only stuck in the “other” end of the maze. As you progress, you’ll take on mobs of strange enemies, brutal boss fights, sometimes abstruse puzzles and slowly build yourself (in all three incarnations) as a surly god-slaying badass. Well, that’s the hope, anyway.

Visually speaking, Anima: Gate of Memories I & II have an aesthetic that feels like it was dated probably when they first came out. The level geometry has the sort of rough curves and blocky building designs one would expect out of a PC game just after the Millennium or a PlayStation 2 title on the tail end of the console’s lifetime. Character animations are certainly fluid enough, and fit the fast paced action/beat’em-up paradigm we’re presented with. The characters themselves, however, are something of a mixed bag. We’ve got pseudo-anime-styled protagonists and major antagonists, we’ve got some suspiciously Ghibli-esque NPCs floating around, and we’ve got grunts who don’t seem to be especially inspired by… anything. Visual effects are certainly flashy and over the top, even a little distracting in spots. Certain glowing seals on pillars and walls tend to lead the player to believe they might be interactive before getting up close and discovering the truth. Sometimes, they are interactive, but the rest of the time are purely decorative. The UI is legible enough, though there are occasional font choices which strain the eye a little bit. One might be forgiven for thinking Anima: Gate of Memories is closer to twenty years old instead of less than ten.

As with the visuals, so too with the audio. The soundtrack for Anima: Gate of Memories certainly has nice composition and performance, though it feels a little underwhelming at times. Sound effects are done in a workman-like fashion: clear but unremarkable. The biggest stumbles are in the voice acting. I don’t expect Neil Newbon or Laura Bailey on every video game project, but the voice acting here swings between mediocre and terrible. It’s cleanly recorded, and more’s the pity because the characterizations only rarely reach the level of “middling.”

When it comes to gameplay, Anima: Gate of Memories falls squarely in the “action/beat’em-up” category. It’s just a bridge too far to call this an action-RPG. It suffers from the same problem which plagued Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood: a complete and total renunciation of the source material’s mechanics and systems. Granted, the Anima TTRPG can unequivocally be described as “arcane” compared to systems like GURPS or Cyberpunk RED. But we’re not given any meaningful sort of RPG mechanics, just ability trees with character level thresholds which will inevitably get completely filled out with enough grinding. We don’t even see any difference in character equipment until The Nameless Chronicles actually shows a character wielding the weapons we come across in our explorations. The actual combat flows like a less limber version of Batman: Arkham Asylum, allowing you to lock on to targets, but requiring a lot of dodging before getting a clear shot at one mook, or countering magic projectiles with your own projectiles. Occasionally awkward camera angles when facing certain fights or going through certain puzzles only adds to the frustration.

From a narrative perspective, Anima: Gate of Memories just completely falls flat. Part of that can be laid on the voice acting’ it’s hard to really care about your avatars when their dialogue is so badly written and the interactions with other characters so painfully stilted or so over-the-top that it devolves into histrionics. And from there, it follows that the stakes for the story do not feel particularly earned or inviting. When your reaction as a player to the revelation of impending catastrophe is “Screw it, let it burn,” you know that the developers have dropped the ball. There’s a lot of dense backstory tied up with the various end-level bosses as well as our avatars, but it’s just sort of shoved in our face instead of built up organically. We as players are as disconnected from the world under threat as our avatars, which doesn’t make for a compelling reason to play. It’s like being told you don’t get dessert until you finish your chores, but the chore is stopping the end of the world.

As much as I believe in the idea of preserving gaming history and keeping older titles playable on newer platforms, there are times where that belief is sorely tested. Anima: Gate of Memories I & II Remasters is one of those examples. Maybe it’s just a sense that this was too soon, that it hadn’t really been out of print long enough to become a cult classic. Or maybe it just feels like a shameless attempt at squeezing a little more money out of a title which wasn’t warmly received the first time it came out. Safe to say that this one can probably go into the memory hole for a while.

Axel reviewed Anima: Gate of Memories I & II Remaster on PlayStation 5 with a purchased copy. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.