Anima: Gate of Memories

I went into Gate of Memories half-expecting a rough Kickstarter curio and came out with genuinely conflicted feelings, which is honestly more interesting than indifference. The setup is strong on paper: you play as The Bearer of Calamities, a nameless woman bound by pact to Ergo, a wisecracking demon trapped inside a floating book. The two are tasked by a holy order with hunting down a traitor called the Red Lady, and the world they move through - Gaia, adapted from the Anima: Beyond Fantasy tabletop RPG - carries the kind of dense lore that suggests someone loved this setting long before they built a game around it. Each boss character, referred to as a Messenger, arrives with their own identity and scattered memories to collect, which gives the structure a genuine rhythm. The story pacing swings between cheesy banter and unexpectedly dark moments, and if you read every document and pay attention to NPC dialogue, some of the environmental puzzles reward that attention in a way that feels earned rather than arbitrary. The combat is where things get complicated. On paper, the character-switch system is clever: you can flip between The Bearer and Ergo at any point during a fight, each with separate health bars and distinct spell sets, to chain combos and adapt to enemy vulnerabilities. In practice, individual characters cannot reliably link combo strings, the hit detection is inconsistent, and the lock-on system struggles badly when multiple targets are present. The camera is an independent problem - it gets snagged on geometry during platforming sections and occasionally seizes control to shift the perspective to a side-scroller or top-down view, which works once and then repeats the trick with diminishing returns. Boss fights carry inflated health pools and AOE attacks that stack on top of each other, so the intended read-and-dodge loop often collapses into attrition. A combo threshold system does reward clean, uninterrupted attacks with stacking damage bonuses, and when it clicks, there is a satisfying loop buried in there - it just takes patience to find it. The worldbuilding is where Gate of Memories earns its cult following. The Arcane Tower hub, the varied wing designs, the observational puzzles that require you to actually read collected lore fragments to unlock doors - these are the things that kept me from putting it down. The soundtrack, composed by Damian Sanchez and Marc Celma with a doom-metal edge under the orchestral surface, is genuinely excellent and sets a tone the moment it starts. Visually the cel-shaded aesthetic is serviceable rather than striking, and the voice acting ranges from flat to unintentionally theatrical, with Ergo's dialogue veering between charming and cringe-inducing depending on your tolerance for a demon who thinks his own jokes are funnier than they are. Mac users on Catalina or above should note the game is not compatible with those versions of macOS. Who is this actually for? Players who liked the original Nier for its ambition and strange tone rather than its combat polish will find a similar kind of roughness here. If you go in expecting DMC-tier responsiveness or a narrative that rivals the writing in a Disco Elysium or Planescape, you will be disappointed. But if a lore-rich world built by a team of three people, five different endings, and a lead dynamic that grows on you appeals more than it repels, Gate of Memories is worth the ask. Just keep the map open, accept the camera as an adversary you manage rather than a tool you trust, and save the skill points until you understand which abilities actually connect in boss encounters. Monika, Scout Team