Anode Heart Review

It's been quite some time since my last review, but as a fan of Digimon I knew I had to talk about this one. A little over a year ago a friend of mine was playing through a bunch of indie game demos, and I was watching to see if any seemed interesting. One in particular stood out to me, mostly because of how much I love monster taming/collecting RPGs. A game called Anode Heart left me wanting to try out the demo myself, and in less than an hour I'd moved to the full game. I got sidetracked and didn't get very far, but this Winter I thought I'd give it another go, so was it worth it?

Story

The game is set in a semi digital world and stars an amnesiac robot named Seek, who explores Stack Island alongside creatures from the Net called Tama that have begun to materialize in the world. Your goal is to figure out your identity and prevent some kind of catastrophic event with the help of the creatures you've raised. Along the way you'll help to build the town of Kernel Dump up from a couple people to a thriving community.

Gameplay

This game is very clearly a love letter to the Digimon franchise, particularly the Digimon World games. And if the setting doesn't make that clear enough, the gameplay really drives that home.

First off is the main town, Kernel Dump. When you first start the game, the town is nearly empty. A couple generic robots and the guy who gives you your first Tama. But as you explore the island and complete various tasks, you can gather new residents to the town, which will allow you to both progress further along, and make more services available in the town, like a shop, a meat field, and more.

And of course, the Tama themselves. A variety of creatures originally born in the Net that have somehow managed to materialize outside of it. When you defeat one, it has a chance of joining you, and then you can raise it. They can level and be fed, and will gain or lose weight depending on what they're fed. And upon meeting certain requirements, they can even evolve. The requirements to evolve can be as simple as reaching a certain level, being above or below a certain weight, or having certain stats above or below a certain amount, and some Tama even have branching evolutions.

Sometimes an evolution may seem impossible, as a Tama's maximum level may be too low to reach the required stats or level, but that's where another feature reminiscent of Digimon comes in, the ability for a Tama to be rebooted. When you reboot a Tama, it will return to level 1, but maintain some of the power it had before, have a higher maximum level, and gain experience more quickly than during its last life. At first this can only be done once per Tama, but as you progress the amount of times a Tama can reboot increases as well, allowing the same creature to be reborn over and over, stronger each time, just like a Digimon.

Being that this is an RPG, I of course need to talk about the combat. I won't go into a ton of detail and just cover the basics. The game has turn-based combat; your Tama can use various moves that have both a limited amount of uses per battle, and an energy cost, with your Tama's max energy per turn determined by their speed. There are status effects, type advantages and disadvantges, and different types of damage, as well as various passive abilities Tama can have.

Visuals and Sound

The game's style is very reminiscent of the SNES era, so I definitely have a bit of nostalgia bias toward the visual style, though it does do some additional post-processing to sell the idea that the world is partially digital. The score evokes a similiar amount of nostalgia, and would certainly be at home on the SNES or a GBA title. And of course, the designs of the creatures themselves range from really cool to utterly adorable. If you aren't particularly into pixel art styles, there's a good bet that you won't take well to the look of this game, but as someone who likes them quite a bit, I'm a fan for sure.

Overall

All in all I am a very big fan of Anode Heart. It's been quite some time since I enjoyed a game as much as this one, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone that's a fan of the Digimon World games, or of monster collecting RPGs in general. I've only given a very high level overview here since I think anyone interested should get a chance to experience it for themselves. But if you don't want to take my word for it, the game has a free demo, so go ahead and give it a shot yourself!

VERDICT: Recommended