Anima: Gate of Memories - The Nameless Chronicles

I went into The Nameless Chronicles expecting a forgettable DMC knock-off produced by a skeleton crew, and walked out two playthroughs later having genuinely felt something for a character whose name the game refuses to give you. That is not a small achievement. This is a Kickstarter-born, three-person-team action-RPG set within the same universe as Anima: Gate of Memories, telling a parallel story from the perspective of its antagonist - a centuries-old immortal called, simply, The Nameless. He is hunting to prevent the resurrection of an entity named Baal, guided and shadowed by a body-possessing spirit called Unknown. The whole thing unfolds inside the Gate of Memories, an other-dimensional structure whose zones shift between a burning cathedral, a puppet-filled mansion, and a rain-soaked fishing village, each one storing pieces of The Nameless's buried past. The best storytelling beats land in text-only segments, where the writing reveals who this man was before the centuries ground him down, and at least one of those sequences genuinely hit harder than I expected from a budget release. Combat is the game's most divisive pillar, and the community split on it is honest rather than tribal. The baseline feel channels Devil May Cry - quick sword combos, ranged ki blasts, a stamina bar and a separate mana pool - but the depth never quite reaches that genre's ceiling. The Hand of Thanathos system lets you supercharge any attack to temporarily fuse with death-energy, which can, for example, convert a basic sword swing into a shockwave that stagger-breaks shielded enemies. In practice the modifier rarely changes your combat calculus enough, and most fights eventually settle into a rhythm of attack, dodge, attack, dodge. The skill tree grants two points per level and caps out around level 16, so build variety exists but stays modest rather than expansive. Boss encounters are where the game earns its highlights: multi-phase fights with distinct visual signatures (one memorable battle strips the palette to black and white, using red only for telegraphed attacks) and meaningful pattern-learning requirements. The problem is that the game also labels a huge number of standard enemies with oversized health bars and treats them as de facto bosses, which flattens the impact of the truly creative encounters. The camera is a persistent annoyance that the game never fully resolves. Non-geometric environments and tight corners can trap your dodge and effectively punish you for using the melee playstyle the game otherwise encourages. Navigation guidance is nearly nonexistent - you are dropped into the Nexus hub and largely left to determine which zone to tackle and in what order, which is either liberating or infuriating depending on your tolerance for exploration without signposting. A pseudo fast-travel system reduces backtracking pain somewhat, and there is a light Metroidvania flavour to secret areas that unlock as your abilities grow, so the exploration-minded player will find more here than the critical path suggests. Loading screens are frequent and can be slow enough to break the spell the atmosphere otherwise builds. The lore density is worth a specific warning: this game front-loads world-state information at a pace that assumes either prior knowledge of the first game or a willingness to sit with confusion for a while. The Nameless Chronicles is technically a sidequel, running in parallel to Gate of Memories rather than following it, and characters from that game reappear here expecting you to already know them. Interestingly, at least one reviewer argument runs the other direction - the backstory of The Nameless is richer when experienced here first, before the original. The voice acting is inconsistent, with actors clearly recorded separately and a villain whose name is pronounced differently by different cast members throughout. The soundtrack, however, is quietly excellent: piano-led, moody, and more ambitious than the budget suggests. This is a rough gem, as one critic fairly called it - a game with more humanity in its central character arc than many productions with ten times the resources. The narrative payoff for The Nameless is real, the boss design at its peak is genuinely striking, and the score will stick with you. But the camera, the combat shallowness at non-boss level, and the heavy reliance on recycled zones from the first game mean the whole thing plateaus well before its ambitions. Come for the immortal's ghost story; manage your expectations for the action half. Monika, Scout Team