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Mato Anomalies lacks any real direction

1K View2023-03-13

Mato Anomalies (Reviewed)

Developer: Arrowiz

Publisher: Prime Matter

Released: 10 March, 2023

Price: $39.99 USD

Mato Anomalies is a turn-based Japanese role-playing game that transports you to Mato, a fictitious neo-futuristic recreation of Old Shanghai.

Here you will Investigate the weird occurrences in the city by controlling the Protagonists Doe and Gram. Collect quests as Doe so that you may inform Gram to allow him to enter rifts to fight demonic creatures trying to ruin the city.

The game offers odd fusion from various other genres, but it lacks a clear sense of what it aspires to be. A mystery? A Novel? Turn Based? Card game?

This game doesn't exactly stand out to me, but it's not bad either, and it does provide some time to kill if you want to skip through the main story and over level your characters by running through a short maze to level up quickly.

Story

Uninteresting

Mato, a metropolis from the future, is having a very large dilemma.

A mystical evil that poses a threat to the city exists alongside the corruption that keeps the elite in power and the hard working and poor beneath them.

Doe, a private eye, and Gram, an exorcist, collaborate to complete these tedious duties by talking to a subject, undertaking their quest, and leading them into the less alluring mazes that practically force you to play with auto-battle.

The game's narrative has a lot of similarities to the Persona series in terms of the forces at war with the real world, but aside from the potential component, it gives out nothing but disappointment as the narrative is uninteresting and dull.

Like making a sandwich without bread, it's missing the core components.

Gameplay

30 Minute Gameplay

Watch the gameplay in this video above to see how it interacts with the story, characters, and overall combat. It's challenging to express what I feel.

The short version is that it's tedious, deficient, and grossly unrefined.

Except from the sporadic, extremely rare opportunity to choose a dialogue or course to take, which ultimately has no significant impact on the story's outcome, it doesn't feel like you are actively involved in how the plot develops.

You move the character, listen to some mediocre dialogue while there is silence and background music, move on to the next place, pet a cat, and enter a rift.

While other games with the exact same type of gameplay or plot have a great sense of what their games want to be to the player, this game has no idea. It makes you wonder why anyone would actually sit through this experience.

What does it want to be?

It appears to be trying very hard to stand apart, but by combining too many elements in an ill-considered manner, it comes out as nothing more than a mishmash of Persona, Cards, Turn Based, and empty monotonous gameplay.

Not to mention the jerky movements of the characters in the streets as they enter a cutscene and suddenly sit down before standing up, with animations either completely removed or not inserted at all making it look cheap.

Saving Graces

Animals

While it feels wrong to state this, it feels like more effort went into adding all the cats and dogs around the city that you can kneel down and pet with a short animation, while everything else just feels plain and non-interactable.

I mind because it claims to be a mystery or detective game, but it does a very bad job at executing the things you would normally see. Ideally gathering information, asking questions.

Visuals

Despite the city's simple graphic design, the cel-shaded figures appear lovely and are generally executed satisfactorily.

Yet it's not enough to keep me around long because games like Ai Somnium Files have similar graphic aesthetic but much better dialogue and gameplay.

Art

Given that this is a visual novel, you can obviously notice the effort put into the comics and the general movements of the characters in the novel scenes.

It's simply too bad that the emphasis given to this was not more concentrated on the other elements of the basic gameplay, as that undoubtedly would have helped develop some better strategies for the game as a whole.

Conclusion

You're practically being robbed

There are currently not many reasons to suggest this game. The story, gameplay, and main character are all incredibly dull with little to show.

The majority of players play the game for the story rather than the filler activities like card games and battles by skipping them entirely.

Even if it is because of lousy translation, the basic gameplay is still not fun.

After four hours of play, the game's weariness and increasing linearity caused me to lose interest in the story and I honestly don't see why you should bother.

You're not getting $40 worth of gameplay, you're barely getting $10.

Are you familiar with the games you may get for this amount of money?

There are several games with excellent gameplay, such as the Frog Detective, Ai Somnium Files, Danganronpa, or Steins;Gate. These are a few that come to mind due to their pricing and deep extensive gameplay that they offer.

This concludes my review of this game, while my opinions may be met with criticism, that's what makes gamers unique, you don't have to like the same things that others do, nor do you have to agree with them.

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- Pawkt

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