The controls also feel floaty and unrefined. When combined with level design and camera placement that often hides huge traps and pitfalls from you, this causes you to go tumbling into bottomless pits at a fairly frequent rate.
Forgive me, Father, for I have played another mediocre WiiWare game.
Anima: Ark of Sinners has a solid sense of style. It’s got a nice-looking, sword-wielding female lead who’s been trapped inside an immense and ancient city – the now-deserted remnant of a once thriving and advanced civilization. The mystery of what happened to the people who lived here is intriguing, and so Anima seems set to succeed from the start.
The gameplay is just so basic, though. Our leading lady Celia simply hacks her way through undead foes that spawn in self-contained battling areas every 30 seconds or so, with paint-by-numbers platforming sequences linking each fight to the next.
The visuals are solid, as Anima taps into a gothic look that seems like Konami’s Castlevania series could attempt sometime in the future. The adventure takes place on a strictly 2D plane, but 3D backgrounds often extend well into the distance to give each setting added depth. That’s nice. And the sound achieves an appropriately spooky ambiance too, though the tracks loop far too often.
But any strengths in storyline or presentation can never truly outweigh the negative feeling of a game that’s just not that much fun to play, and Anima simply isn’t.
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