It’s fair to say that creature-collecting games will probably always be popular. There’s just something about catching adorable critters and then training them until they’re unholy abominations that makes us all feel good. It’s also true that if you’re a Digimon fan, then your options for similar games are a lot less numerous than Pokemon-style games. Thankfully, one of the options you do have is Anode Heart, and it’s exceptional.
Anode Heart takes place in a world where the physical and digital realms have started to fuse, and it turns out that that is, in fact, very bad. One of the side effects of this is that Tama, the creatures that roam this world, have started to glitch and become increasingly violent. You take control of a robot called Seek, which’s lost all its memories, and your job is to try and prevent the great calamity looming on the horizon as a result of these intertwined worlds.
As you would hope – with a setting so cool – the story is very character-driven, with NPC’s giving you seemingly pointless quests that’ll either teach you about a key system, be an opportunity to recruit them for your village or uncover some important information about the main plot. Of course, the main draw, however, is the Tama themselves, and hoo boy are there some cool systems here.
Your Tama can evolve as they get stronger, but you’ll occasionally need to reset them back to level one to help them become stronger in the long run, as doing so enables both higher stats and a higher level cap. Along with the attacks they learn as they level up, they can also learn attacks from enemies, meaning you can teach a fire-type a water-type move, allowing you to build a wholly unique swiss-army tool Tama.
It’s an exceptionally cool battle system where speed is essential because Anode Heart doesn’t adopt the typical approach to turn-based combat. Instead, each move your Tama can make costs a certain amount of energy, and Tama with higher speed stats get more energy to spend in battle – so make sure you pay attention to your Tama’s speed as well as their power.
Anode Heart is a really enjoyable indie creature-collecting game, so if you are a fan of the genre – but have yet to check this one out – you should absolutely play it and relish in its unique take on the genre.
