Let me begin with an apology. I lied. I picked a JRPG after all. At least it’s a western one…
Anachronox (wikipedia article) is a JRPG produced by Tom Hall and Ion Storm, at a time when JRPGs were exclusively produced in, well, Japan. Released in 2001, it was the second western take on a game using JRPG game structure. (The first? Septerra Core!)
Anachronox replaced the typical angsty teenaged protagonist with a down-on-his-luck gumshoe; invisible monster encounters with visible foes you can avoid; stilted English translations with actual English paragraphs; overly-dramatic drama with comedic moments. It does keep the universe-saving plot, the pre-defined party members, and the un-open world. This RPG is clearly not an Ultima, but it is also clearly not another Final Fantasy.
I picked this game for the club because I believe this game deserve more exposure, but more because I had an incredibly fond memory of this game but no specific details. Was it the interplay between the characters? Was it the turned-based gameplay? The magic system? The minigames? THE MAIN STORY?!? Let’s all find out! (There is one thing I remembered: one of your party member is a planet. An actual shunken-down planet.)
I loved this game, still have the disks. But I always played it as an adventure game, amped the combat difficulty all the way down so it was basically a bump in the road to the next thing I wanted to do. Haven’t played in forever, I’ll check if I can get those disks to work.
That reminds me, I should really carve out some time to watch the machinima “movie” version. Yeah, I know, I could really just play the game, but I have to whittle down my backlog a bit more before Anachronox makes it to the front of the queue.
Now that I think about it, I don’t usually replay RPGs, or even non-arcade games. Ultima 4 (Atari 800xl, Atari ST), Persona 3 (PS2, Vita), maybe Dungeon Master (Atari ST).
I should have started my “replay pile” back 10 years ago during the great PC game drought. Wait, didn’t I have a PS2 at the time?
Anyways, I just bought the GOG version and installed it last night. I have this unusual self control, in that I immediately opened the manual to read it. GOG’s manual is a scan, and I can see it’s a CD-case insert booklet. The manual writer managed to squeeze in a lot of the usual PC RPG information, and even colored it with some personality.
The widescreen patch is easy to install. Open the zip, find the folder with the resolution you want, and copy 2 files into your game directory. Run the game, and change display to use HIGH resolution 1280x960. The patch will switch to the actual widescreen res instead. Glorious 1366x768! (sigh) Yeah, I’m playing this on a laptop. I tried using the touchpad but it is very difficult to pan the camera with it, so let me dust off my “gamer mouse”.
My wife and I played this together when it came out. IIRC, it starts pretty slowly, but then gets really good. If anyone is playing for the first time, don’t give up at the beginning.
I played in back in the early 2000s. I played it to the point where I left the Senate or the Congress planet, or whatever that was. Then I lost my save game.
Gosh, I need to play this game again. I down it again on GoG already.
Curse your lousy timing though. First Freespace 2, and now this. Not enough time. Sigh.
The graphics are really terrible by today’s standards. I keep chanting “better than N64” when I first ran it on Monday night. However, it is clear that a lot of work went into the textures making up the characters, to counter the low poly count. They must have worked really hard on the faces, because they use facial expressions as part of their dialog.
3D engines doesn’t age well, but even worse, nostalgia often makes me remember them better than they were. That Skywind mod, where the Morrowind graphics are vastly improved? When I saw the videos and screenshots I couldn’t help but think, “Didn’t it always look like that?”
Same thing with Skyrim. I haven’t played it for over two years but then I started it up yesterday because I’m thinking about playing the Dragonborn DLC. I walked around in Whiterun, looking at some stuff. “Wasn’t it more detailed than this?”
I played this for a while last year, but gave up early on. The combat was too tedious, though the writing and setting was fun. This would be a good choice for an HD remake, but I realize it will never happen.
I played for an hour just now, and because I was messing around with the settings and reading the in-game encyclopaedia, I only finished the tutorial on fighting. The widescreen fix can really mess up the fonts. I reverted back the original exe+dll and used the GCT tool and set the game to 1024x768 full screen. I can live with black bars on the side.
Hurray for subtitles on everything, except for the opening cutscene (long! unskippable! at least the speech bubbles can appear instantly on a mouse click).
There are a few tips from steam post; one of them is that there is supposed to be a fast forward key “” to speed up combat animations, maybe? I tried this key in the tutorial fights, but it didn’t work. The other one is to enable Save Anywhere.
The conversations with the NPCs are styled like Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, mildly. Let’s see if this gets better later.
So I’m about 6 hours in and feeling pretty stuck looking for a second ticket to Sunder. I took a quick peek at a FAQ and saw I missed pretty much every subquest in the first area so I hopped a shuttle back to try and get some of them.
I enjoy the world and the writing and the goofy tone of the game. The combat, less so. The fast forward button helps with that but I didn’t see a way to remap it in the menus. It works outside of combat so it could cut short some of the running around bits if you could find a way to mouse, wasd and still press ‘’.
I remember liking this, I remember a specific unique party member, and very little else about it. Oh, and I remember clicking through like 500 lines of repeating dialog with an NPC as part of a joke about NPCs repeating the same thing.
I’m 2 hours in. (Note to self: wife on business trip != lots of free time.) I just got my first party member, and I still don’t have magic yet…uh, wait, I haven’t looked at what Gramps can do.
I’m getting used to the controls and the graphics, so navigating the game world is a lot easier now. This is unlike my try at replaying System Shock 1 a few years ago, where the muscle memory of using the numeric keypad is just flatout gone.
Is it me, or does the battle flow slower than Final Fantasy 7? This is one thing that really varies between JRPGs. I remember the SNES days being relatively fast, then FF7 being slow to really slow (summons), then Shin Megami Tensei 3 being insanely speedy. Then there were all the xbox 360 JRPGs which went back to being slow. I wonder why did Ion Storm choose to make the battle animation go so slowly. I’d almost consider this to be a lack of polish.
(\ key doesn’t work for me. My keyboard has two such keys, and I remapped one of them to be a return key. Maybe that broke Anachronox.)
The style of camera pans and stuff are really nostalgic 90s 3D video game stuff. I guess it’s considered amateurish now, but I wonder how hard is it to program more dynamic and “natural” camera work?
