Developer: ThinkingStars
Store Link: Steam, PlayStation
Genre: Action-Adventure
Release: 17th, March 2022
It's one thing a game deceives you, it's another to play through that deception, and be still enticed to continue playing it because you found other reasons to like it. Not every game has to perfect, some games have what you want, even if it's not the kind of game you'd recommend to anyone or sing high praises for. It just scratches that itch.
What seemed like a high concept game turns then into an aesthetic cruise, you just play through to enjoy the game for what it mostly imbues; a Cyberpunk game with anime chicks, fighting against Saturday night cartoon goons and villains to save someone in her family. You're not globetrotting to save the world, you're just cruising in a small sliver of a Cyberpunk world. For a more subdued story.
Does that sound like a good game to you? Well, I want to elaborate more on this, so do follow the next few passages, I really want you to know what I found really fascinating about this one.
Playing as Ann, a female badass who is an agent that works with someone, friends with his adopted father from her adopted family with 3 other siblings. Because how else would she stand out from everybody else in the game? I mean, she's like female Adam Jensen at this point, or Major Kusunagi with family.
Nothing about this game made me feel uncomfortable, expecting some droves of anime cliché to hit me on the face at first, no, the writing and visual presentation with the charming characters had me pretty invested. I thought this game felt it was trying to be a good homage to other works out there. Largely inspired by modern Otaku culture, but also like taking ideas from 80s and 90s anime.
There are good moments of levity and left field stuff that really had me engrossed with some narrative beats, like this game wastes no time trying to get you invested into its strange world. The side quests are choke full of peculiar people with peculiar situations, but also serious things like the one I did where I had to solve an apartment murder, only to realize there are cults involved.
And then, there's this, a corn man is asking me to fight on the streets in order to, ah, help him promote his corn brand.
Was a lot for to do, interacting with this world and learning bits of intricacies around its denizens. I got to learn different classes, how much of a struggle the economy of this world is, and other things like Ann having a car that also flies. She looks cool in it too.
Production wise, it's not perfect. There's missing lip sync or lip sync gone wrong, it's obviously not put out in the best condition. Visual art style can be a beat of a hit or miss, but I kind of dig the blend of 2D low polygonal rasterized visuals, juxtaposed with 3D graphics. I mean, it's a 2.5D game after all, it's not the most graphically demanding either.
Writing is good, for the most part. Not a fan of the few flaky anime archetypes out there, they kind of break the flow. Other than that, I really love how much this stuff reminds me of Alita, and Armitage III. They really did try their damnest here for an indie studio from Shenzhen, China.
Ah yes, what is a video game if it doesn't have gameplay? Well, I don't have many good things to say here. There are a number of things that are amiss, and feel like they didn't work out, the world-building, characters, and story part of the game works, the game mechanics don't.
It's well conceptualized at best, but also janky and cookie cutter at worse. There isn't much depth, and the RPG parts where you grind for weapon parts and unlock them takes some time to getting there. I already played through half of the game and man, I didn't like how much my character has progressed.
You unlock talents, and passives while buying or upgrading your weapons. Seems to be good, but gameplay execution being pretty anemic and underwhelming, I stopped kind of caring about it. I can see people being turned off by this after the first 3hrs of playing or so.
But the big question remained, why did I keep playing this? Well, the first passage should be enough, it is teeming with pop culture references and Cyberpunk cultural galore. The game was mostly chill, even with the underwhelming gameplay design and mechanics.
I was ok with going on a main quest to save the protagonist's step-brother from impending doom. While experiencing the bizarre things and unveiling a globetrotter conspiracy, that goes deeper than some capitalist agenda to make lower classes miserable. Also, weirdly reminds me of games like Cloudpunk, people should play that too.