Review: Anima: Gate of Memories - The Nameless Chronicles (Nintendo Switch)

Review by Harvard L.

It's difficult to think of Anima: Gate of Shadows as a game which came out only nine months before Nier Automata. It’s so convincingly similar to a janky, late-PS2-early-PS3 era game which nobody remembers but has just enough redeeming value to be interesting; and that sentiment runs through not just the mechanics but also the narrative, graphics, sound, level design, voice acting and more. Perhaps due to the game’s adorably modest original Kickstarter goal of $90000 (by comparison, Shovel Knight asked for more than three times this amount) or its source material: a Spanish gamebook series designed with fervent admiration towards 90’s anime tropes – the finished product taps into a David Lynch-esque “surrealism because we ran out of money” design philosophy which is objectively terrible, but also enchantingly interesting.

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