Anode Heart Reviews

I would highly recommend Anode Heart on Steam. I’ve been so sick for the past few days with barely any strength to get up. I used to turn to older handheld Pokemon games to keep me company and help me pass the time… but I can’t even look at any Pokemon content these days without feeling immense frustration and disappointment. Enter: Anode Heart. It scratches the itch while offering new things that I’ve never experienced before in a creature collecting game. A lot of people say it’s more akin to a Digimon game than Pokemon. Either way, I’ve found some new monsters (called Tama) to keep me company when I’m sick and sad. The shark Tama and the spider Tama go so hard!!! They’re my friends now.

Absolute unmitigated banger. Yes, it's Digimon World. but it's also pokemon and mario and a trading card game and the story gets unexpectedly deep and there's some glitchcore horror at the fringes and it's just an incredibly well made game all told. Battling has some depth to it, although you can certainly just push through digimon style with better stats than your enemy. Raising is simple on the surface, but you have a lot of control over lifespan and you can fuse mons to inherit moves and you can learn moves from basically anything by seeing it in battle, and there's a Shin Megami Tensei ish recruitment system where you can give gifts in battle to get new mons. There's a day/night cycle and a timer and you recruit inhabitants for your town and there is just overall a stupendous amount of game in this game. Support works like Anode Heart. This kind of thing should be commercially successful. Edit: I actually don't like the card game. It's very "either you draw into your engine or you brick," and this makes it obnoxious to play with the starting cards. I do think it works well once you've got most of an element collected and you can do 4x copies of all its bread-and-butters and 1x of the key rares, but that doesn't happen for a *while*. Being at the mercy of the gacha doesn't help either. I like that you can't just purchase spam packs, but it makes getting to a viable deck a massive slog. 2nd Edit: It's not what you would go to a game like this for, but the writing really is superb. A lot of clever worldbuilding that tinges on the existential without losing its thread as an adventure story. The characters are fun, but there's kind of a masterclass in show vs tell going on in the background. 3rd Edit: There is real serious depth to the monster raising and battling that only starts to hit about 50% of the way through the game. Up until then, you can just have more levels than an enemy and win, but by the time you're doing castles this is NOT true and the actual battling starts feeling as good as in stuff like Monster Sanctuary. 4th Edit: I've gotten enough cards that my experience of the card game has changed. Now it's "you draw your counters or you brick." There's no sense in playing a particular element's strategy, since they all require building towards specific cards and this means you are more vulnerable to disruption. Instead, you just run lots of disruption and card draw yourself and unless you don't draw your card draw (in which case you brick) and your card draw doesn't get disrupted (in which case you brick) you counter your enemy until they run out of cards and then you use your resources to get x3 shard draws and summon 4/4 training dummies. There's theoretically counterplay to this---you can do all your resourcing and summoning from behind the firewall and make big monsters that way---but again, you need multiple cards to do that and your opponent only needs a targeted delete or a board wipe or w/e to take you out. Yugioh uses things like untargetability and immunity to destruction as ways of keeping big monsters relevant, but I haven't really seen any of that here. All told, I think this is why only 5% of players did the first card tournament. It's very close to being a good card game, but the ways in which it's held back are super duper frustrating to push past. 5th Edit: I think I'm at a level of completion that I'm happy with. I've rolled credits on the main story, done a bit of the post game, and I'm *certain* there's more secrets but also there's sort of an underlying plot thread about how we don't need to know everything so I'm going to abide by that thread and stop here for now. This is a really wonderful game, and easily one of my favorite monster catchers and/or cyberpunk jrpgs. I'll absolutely be following whatever the developer does next---all my griping about the card game aside, this is a wonderful title. Get it at full price, and get a copy for your friend.

TLDR: limited systems for the sake of it. Useless or unused systems. Unnecesarily long and tedious. Bad open world design. No QoL. The good parts only go as high as mediocre. There are many better monster collector games. I don't understand how this game has such a positive score with how many faults it has. I am incredibly dissapointed. It's full to the brim with annoyances, lack of QoL and unnecesary grind and backtracking. The only things I liked are the graphics and the story setting. Wish good luck to the devs with their next game Layer Null and hope it's good because the potential is clearly there but this one it's a mess. ·About monster and combat: -Combat is boring and has a forced timer mechanic that starts dealing damage to you as you deplete the very limited move uses, but there are bosses that can stall you making you kill yourself. There are a lot of status effects that you have to see in battle first to see what they do. -If there are items to heal status effects I haven't found any. There are some equipments that prevent SOME of them but in certain fights they are forced on you anyway so they are mostly useless. -Monsters are OK in design but some of them do basically the same function than others but worse, making the complete set of options quite limited. -To level up monsters you need to get them up to a certain limit and then reset them to level 1 with no stats, but extra growth. This means you can't reset your full team at the same time because then you are stuck with useless monsters, so you need to waste time staggering the levels up. It also makes trying different monsters a chore. Max amount of resets is gated by story progress. Monsters get way less EXP if they are benched. -Defense formula makes items that gives defense/magic defense completely useless, as they give you something like +3%. -You can get through the game like a breeze. Then you get to the final boss fight. Overleveled and with a full bag, best moves possible, full equip, all the resets possible. And then you are laughted at because it doesn't matter: it's an evasion chance based fight that requires very specific strategies or you have no chance of winning at all. ·About game systems: -It's full of systems that they don't explain fully or you have to go out of the way to talk to some random NPC to get a hint if they explain at all. E.g: they send you to capture a monster for the first time but don't tell you how to do it exactly. -It has a whole system with a shovel that you only use once and then never again. No hidden treasure or quests or anything meaningful that I found. -There is a big open area where you can use a vehicle to travel but the controls are so bad that I ended up just walking. Just like the speed bike in Pokemon Emerald. -There is a crafting/upgrade system with almost no info ingame about it. You also need to grind A LOT just to make one item upgrade due to very low drop chances, long respawn timers and low amount of monsters to kill, which makes it useless. -Straight up useless breeding/fusion system. -It has a very nice CCG minigame but you can't buy cards or packs. They mostly drop from an enemy that you have to fish randomly, or by winning battles. -The worst thing about the game; it's very open but in a bad way: -There are two types of quick travel: one is limited to very select places and the other, more complete one, makes you travel a maze with limited visibility, dead ends, and road blocks. Hello??? -Unnecesary backtracking even with teleports at the end of some dungeons due to the useless quick travel system. -You can sequence break very early and get access to the second travel system by paying money to an NPC, making everything even more confusing. -You can get locked out of a big four part area and it's contents simply by following the story, without warning, until you finish the game. -To complete some quests you only get a vague hint. Good luck finding the random NPC on the other side of the world that has nothing to do with the situation. -You can very easily go to places out of order and you will find huge level discrepancies. At least there is an option to level up the enemies if you want to. ·About lack of QoL, polish, annoyances: -This game, with such simple graphics, has lag spikes on Steam Deck. I checked and it's made with Unity so it's clearly not very well optimized. -Unexplained keywords (e.g: what is explosive damage?). -There are places where the tileset is not clear enough (area with difficulty telling walls and floor appart, skipped an entire area because I didn't see side doors and thought it was locked until later). -Can't skip the level up and evolution animations so it gets tiring very fast due to frequency. -The are three different PCs: healing, item storage, and monster storage. VERY rarely you find them at the same place. The game makes you backtrack and waste time for the most basic and common things. -The party is split into active/benched. You can't interact with the benched ones from the info screen directly; it makes you go back and select benched, or move them to the active ones depending on the action you want to do. -Can't check monster stats or interact with their equipment on the storage. You need to move your party to the storage, move the ones you want to check to the party, do whatever you wanted to do and then swap them again. -Can't scroll fight turn history and you have go to a different screen to see more than a small slice of it. -Can only sort items on the bag by type; by alphabetic on the monster storage, and by alphabetic and type (on a different menu) on the item storage. -No filtering or search function of any kind anywhere. -There is a day/night cycle. You can only buy a very limited amount of items per day cycle and certain monsters/NPCs only appear in dawn/dusk but you can only advance time to after dawn or hour by hour by talking to an NPC that's out of the way and disapears halfway through, so you have to wait quite a while if you need dawn time. -After a certain point of the story two new enemies that you can't capture start appearing very commongly. One of them instakills your monster when it dies and you can't escape from the fights until way later in the game. It also takes spawn slots and doesn't dissapear unless you kill it making farming midgame even worse than it is. -Can't rebind keys or buttons by default. -With a controller or the arrow keys/WASD the cursor sometimes doesn't remembers selection, sometimes it does. -With a controller the map cursor moves very slowly segment by segment, but if you use a mouse it only lets you move the cursor to certain predefined segments very quickly. Why can't it be like this with a controller? -With a controller stick the movement is erratic and weird. You bump into walls and get stuck very easily. You also can get stuck with moving enemies in small spaces. -There is an area where the game turns into a 2D platformer. The boss is so badly designed that they added two ways of skipping it. Why not rework it instead? A simple HP or speed reduction would suffice. -The entire last segment of the game is a slog to a new degree: -Long no going back area without healing, monster, or item storage access until the midpoint. -Suddenly the movement is slow, grid and turn based (like Mystery Dungeon games) and you can't run. -Optional boss battle deep in the dungeon that basically requires an specific item to win, but there is no item storage until after it happens so you need to know beforehand. -Next area after the optional boss is a bigger, even more obtuse version of the fast travel maze but with teleports and powerful mini-bosses every few steps. Then a double boss fight, one of them mentioned above. If you die here you need to replay the maze segment again. -If you need something from outside this area in order to win the ridiculous final fight you have to complete the entire final segment again from the beginning :)