by
I just discovered Aidyn Chronicles in space. And it is…
All right. I’ll admit it. I’m in love with absolutely terrible RPGs. This is one of them. Full warning–I’m rating this at Tier 1. This is probably not even close to a Tier 1 title for most people. That being said, here we go into the world of Anachronox.
We’re in future-land, future-time. Anachronox, the city of poison, exists inside a floating Sender in the center of the galaxy. A Sender is kind of like a giant zipline in space that shoots people to other Senders. Apparently they were all built by some alien race that died out long ago and now humans along with all other sorts of alien races have settled down it their hollowed out shells, making use of the space jumps. (Isn’t that the plot of Halo…? I wouldn’t know.) Anachronox itself is filled with gravity warps that let people walk on walls and ceilings, and city itself rests on plates that rotate around on a schedule to deliver parts of the city to certain locations throughout the day. None of this… is why I like the game. I hate sci-fi.
Enter Boots, our protagonist. He’s a beaten down (literally) PI in the future who’s down on his luck, his money and his spirits. Having just been thrown out the window of his two-story office by a loan collector, Boots is looking around for a direction in his life. Contacting his dead secretary that he digitized into a flying palm-pilot form, she kicks his butt into gear to get a job. Boots wanders around a world filled with aliens, robots and ruffians who beat him up and break his gun. This… is also not why I like this game, but some of the ridiculous concepts do make me laugh. Especially the whole dead secretary thing.
Needing to remove the ruffian from his path to continue on his way, Boots trains at Wackmaster Jack’s which teaches the player all the stats and combat actions. It’s a fairly simple system but there’s a bit of interest found in shuffling players around via movement actions and even the ability to interact with objects in the battle screen. You learn how to equip shields, use your dead secretaries skill and throw molotov cocktails at robots with smiley faces on them. The numbers are simple, but raw. Growing from level 1 to level 2 doubles your HP. A few bad moves in combat and you’ll get wrecked with a hard-stop game over screen and you’d better hope you’ve saved. You recharge your devices by grinding up living rodents for energy called… Grodents. This… this kind of stuff is why I love this game. A stupid raw battle system with heart. Ridiculous concepts that make your stuff work. Simple abilities with obvious uses. Stats that need levels to back them up, so that obstacles can be removed. This sort of stuff brings me back.
The whole thing reminds me of Final Fantasy VII or Skies of Arcadia. It was a time when 3-D RPGs were just becoming a thing and developers were trying to figure out how exactly to use them. Weird things were tried, new ground was broken, mistakes were made and graphics were ugly as sin… and again, I love it. The whole thing feels exciting because the whole “quality control” or “balancing” factors weren’t quite nailed down in games yet. It looks like we’re going to get 7 party members. Which ones will I choose? Will one be broken? Will I choose a worthless one? How will they interact together? Simplicity mixed with uncertainty compels a player onwards in these kinds of titles.
