Anachronox Retrospective Review
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Two of the role-playing enthusiasts over at RPG Codex have teamed up to crank out a retrospective review of Anachronox, the sci-fi and JRPG-inspired classic from the talented team at Ion Storm. A couple of paragraphs to get you started:
Deuce Traveler: Characters develop by levelling up, with their abilities increasing in a static manner. There is no way to choose how your characters develop, so the only way to customize them is with special abilities that can be learned through side quests, and by using equipment that modifies their offensive and defensive abilities. Some of the special abilities that you find can make your characters quite powerful. For example, Paco can learn a special area attack, which is much more impressive than the single enemy attack he starts out using. Equipment works the same way. PAL, for instance, starts as a melee fighter, but picks up a stronger weapon later on that allows him to attack at a distance. For characters that I failed to level up sufficiently by the end of the game, I felt that MysTech helped make up for their weaknesses somewhat and so I used them as primary '˜spellcasters'. Still, the more developed characters had better special abilities which greatly surpassed MysTech by the end of the game, especially when it came to area of effect attacks.
VioletShadow: Anachronox's levelling system works well, with party members becoming satisfyingly powerful towards the end but not absurdly overpowered. Each character has a total of four unique combat skills and weapons which can be upgraded from barely working all the way to excellent. I like how the use of each character's World Skill is integrated into their weapon and combat skill progression, such as Boots finding a combat skill by lockpicking a chest, or Grumpos yammering nonstop until some monk gives him a better weapon. It's possible to buy upgrades from a store later in the game, but exploration and side quests are the main way of obtaining them. Most of the companions can just use the item that unlocks their combat skill right away, but not all. A couple of them require extra steps that make sense in the context of the character, such as Grumpos needing to meditate using the skill item at the Pay2Pray, or Democratus' upgrade plans having to be taken to the engineer. It works so much better than '˜character leveled up, skills unlocked'.
