This review contains spoilers
Between the roaring success of Warren Spector's Deus Ex and the embarrassing downfall of John Romero's Daikatana, the third pillar of Ion Storm, Tom Hall, managed to find a different fate altogether for his game, that being obscurity.
There's something poetic about these three pieces and how wildly different the history of each one is, but while people talk to no end about Anachronox's older brothers, no one seems to remember this RPG epic.
Cards on the table, I went into it expressely with the intent of finding something to love about it, an approach I've been trying to apply more and more as my understanding of game development deepens over time. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how, in the end, it didn't really make me dig for that something. There is plenty of good in Anachronox.
Admittedly it's not an amazing game, it radiates the energy of a project spawned from Tom Hall going on a massive Final Fantasy 7 bender in '97 and deciding to make something comparable.
As far as inspirations go, FF7 is sure a great one, but Anachronox doesn't quite stick the landing as elegantly.
Still, if anything, it manages to be extremely unique despite wearing its JRPG influence on its sleeve, being the one true Western JRPG as I like to call it.
Sylvester "Sly" Boots is a washed up private detective living on the alien planet of Anachronox, which is surrounded by a sort of spiked ball that has wormholes at each tip for various destinations across the galaxy.
Being a sort of huge trade center, Anachronox is naturally a pretty shitty place to live, a cyberpunk dystopia of smoke and dark skies where the rich live on an elevated layer from the poor.
While that is almost Final Fantasy 7 verbatim, the tone of the writing here is markedly more sarcastic and adult.
Adult in the "Isn't it fucked old Bertha had to amputate and sell her legs to cover the fees of her nephew's tuition?" kind of way, the way that's hyperbolic yet not far off from what we see here on Earth.
It manages to be genuinely funny in multiple occasions, with some scenes getting the odd belly laugh out of me while sitting alone in my room. Great stuff.
The story kicks in like 10 hours in, in proper JRPG fashion, after leaving Anachronox and witnessing a whole planet get inexplicably rended in half and deleted, our party being the sole survivors of this disaster, destined to become the universe's saviors.
Mechanically, I can make it sound interesting through words, I can tell you that the overworld exploration and progression is handled similarly to a 3D point-and-click adventure game, where reading dialogue and figuring out what to do through logical steps is key and the puzzles make sense, with collectibles scattered around the map.
I can tell you that the combat is FF7 inspired ATB, complete with unlockable limit breaks and a materia-lite system, and that encounters are scripted around the map like Chrono Trigger and not random.
But saying this honestly makes the game you might be picturing in your head sound better than what the reality of Anachronox is, and that's that 3D environments aren't really that fun to explore when all you can do is walk everywhere kind of slowly and regularly take multiple elevators to run errands around the map, and the MysTech magic system is heavily railroaded by characters only really being good at using one specific type, with the combat being very much a formality and incredibly simple.
Despite the game ending up less than the sum of its parts, there is a surprising amount of worldbuilding, and you can tell the people behind it really cared about the universe of Anachronox.
From Democratus, home to a bickering parody of council politics, to Haephestus, inhabited by religious monks who hastily build a theme park after the disaster awakens all the MysTech in the universe and makes it a hot tourist location, the narrative arcs marked by each planet are incredibly strong at making this feel like a truly varied and outlandish universe.
My absolute favorite bit in this whole game was saving Democratus from an invading alien wasp asteroid, leaving it behind as every person in charge of running that planet was evidently an insane democracy fetishist, and then witnessing this feverish scene of the WHOLE ASS PLANET pulling up into the bar you crashed at as a miniaturized version of itself (democratically shrunken down to follow our heroes) and joining your party as a playable character.
This shit just doesn't happen in other games man.
You probably get to know Democratus better than any other party member too, as later on in the story the planet is forced to return to its original size, and your party gets scattered on different zones of the surface, each going through their own solo mini-adventure in the varied locations of Democratus, and I mean truly varied. Some characters get stuck in a desert where soldiers are stationed, others in a forest reminiscent of Star Wars' Endor, or an icy, snow-swept town in the middle of a string of murders. Every party member has a possible substory here (well, except Democratus of course), and you only get to pick 3, so you'll never see them all by design, which is sort of neat.
It's common in videogames that use space travel to generalize a single planet as a sort of monolith, like "this is the fire planet" or "this is the science planet", but Democratus truly escapes this stereotyping, presenting various coexisting facets of the same world, extremely different but all part of the same démos.
I also ended up really liking what the antagonist really is, which, in a development I can't tell if it's giving nod to the original Final Fantasy or not, ends up being Chaos.
The Limbus part of the game lets us confront the forces of Chaos directly, before heading back to Anachronox for the grand finale against Detta, the crimelord turned billionaire that ruined Sly's life years ago, who we need to steal from in order to seal the portal that allows the forces of Chaos to attack the universe.
The saddest part is that, right as the game ends on a massive plot twist regarding one of your party members, and as the battle against Chaos is beginning in full, it ends.
Anachronox was meant to be developed across multiple games, but the collapse of Ion Storm and the failure on the part of Tom Hall to acquire the rights to it leave us with just the beginning of this space opera and the unfulfilled promise of much more.
Not too long ago I asked if Hall himself had any plans to return to Anachronox, and it seems like hope may yet remain.
So let us see if the forgotten third wheel of Ion Storm may one day finally earn the recognition it deserves for its uniqueness and inventiveness, this one-of-a-kind world sprung from the collision of JRPGs and WRPGs. I know it deserves it.
There's something poetic about these three pieces and how wildly different the history of each one is, but while people talk to no end about Anachronox's older brothers, no one seems to remember this RPG epic.
Cards on the table, I went into it expressely with the intent of finding something to love about it, an approach I've been trying to apply more and more as my understanding of game development deepens over time. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how, in the end, it didn't really make me dig for that something. There is plenty of good in Anachronox.
Admittedly it's not an amazing game, it radiates the energy of a project spawned from Tom Hall going on a massive Final Fantasy 7 bender in '97 and deciding to make something comparable.
As far as inspirations go, FF7 is sure a great one, but Anachronox doesn't quite stick the landing as elegantly.
Still, if anything, it manages to be extremely unique despite wearing its JRPG influence on its sleeve, being the one true Western JRPG as I like to call it.
Sylvester "Sly" Boots is a washed up private detective living on the alien planet of Anachronox, which is surrounded by a sort of spiked ball that has wormholes at each tip for various destinations across the galaxy.
Being a sort of huge trade center, Anachronox is naturally a pretty shitty place to live, a cyberpunk dystopia of smoke and dark skies where the rich live on an elevated layer from the poor.
While that is almost Final Fantasy 7 verbatim, the tone of the writing here is markedly more sarcastic and adult.
Adult in the "Isn't it fucked old Bertha had to amputate and sell her legs to cover the fees of her nephew's tuition?" kind of way, the way that's hyperbolic yet not far off from what we see here on Earth.
It manages to be genuinely funny in multiple occasions, with some scenes getting the odd belly laugh out of me while sitting alone in my room. Great stuff.
The story kicks in like 10 hours in, in proper JRPG fashion, after leaving Anachronox and witnessing a whole planet get inexplicably rended in half and deleted, our party being the sole survivors of this disaster, destined to become the universe's saviors.
Mechanically, I can make it sound interesting through words, I can tell you that the overworld exploration and progression is handled similarly to a 3D point-and-click adventure game, where reading dialogue and figuring out what to do through logical steps is key and the puzzles make sense, with collectibles scattered around the map.
I can tell you that the combat is FF7 inspired ATB, complete with unlockable limit breaks and a materia-lite system, and that encounters are scripted around the map like Chrono Trigger and not random.
But saying this honestly makes the game you might be picturing in your head sound better than what the reality of Anachronox is, and that's that 3D environments aren't really that fun to explore when all you can do is walk everywhere kind of slowly and regularly take multiple elevators to run errands around the map, and the MysTech magic system is heavily railroaded by characters only really being good at using one specific type, with the combat being very much a formality and incredibly simple.
Despite the game ending up less than the sum of its parts, there is a surprising amount of worldbuilding, and you can tell the people behind it really cared about the universe of Anachronox.
From Democratus, home to a bickering parody of council politics, to Haephestus, inhabited by religious monks who hastily build a theme park after the disaster awakens all the MysTech in the universe and makes it a hot tourist location, the narrative arcs marked by each planet are incredibly strong at making this feel like a truly varied and outlandish universe.
My absolute favorite bit in this whole game was saving Democratus from an invading alien wasp asteroid, leaving it behind as every person in charge of running that planet was evidently an insane democracy fetishist, and then witnessing this feverish scene of the WHOLE ASS PLANET pulling up into the bar you crashed at as a miniaturized version of itself (democratically shrunken down to follow our heroes) and joining your party as a playable character.
This shit just doesn't happen in other games man.
You probably get to know Democratus better than any other party member too, as later on in the story the planet is forced to return to its original size, and your party gets scattered on different zones of the surface, each going through their own solo mini-adventure in the varied locations of Democratus, and I mean truly varied. Some characters get stuck in a desert where soldiers are stationed, others in a forest reminiscent of Star Wars' Endor, or an icy, snow-swept town in the middle of a string of murders. Every party member has a possible substory here (well, except Democratus of course), and you only get to pick 3, so you'll never see them all by design, which is sort of neat.
It's common in videogames that use space travel to generalize a single planet as a sort of monolith, like "this is the fire planet" or "this is the science planet", but Democratus truly escapes this stereotyping, presenting various coexisting facets of the same world, extremely different but all part of the same démos.
I also ended up really liking what the antagonist really is, which, in a development I can't tell if it's giving nod to the original Final Fantasy or not, ends up being Chaos.
The Limbus part of the game lets us confront the forces of Chaos directly, before heading back to Anachronox for the grand finale against Detta, the crimelord turned billionaire that ruined Sly's life years ago, who we need to steal from in order to seal the portal that allows the forces of Chaos to attack the universe.
The saddest part is that, right as the game ends on a massive plot twist regarding one of your party members, and as the battle against Chaos is beginning in full, it ends.
Anachronox was meant to be developed across multiple games, but the collapse of Ion Storm and the failure on the part of Tom Hall to acquire the rights to it leave us with just the beginning of this space opera and the unfulfilled promise of much more.
Not too long ago I asked if Hall himself had any plans to return to Anachronox, and it seems like hope may yet remain.
So let us see if the forgotten third wheel of Ion Storm may one day finally earn the recognition it deserves for its uniqueness and inventiveness, this one-of-a-kind world sprung from the collision of JRPGs and WRPGs. I know it deserves it.