Anachronox has some pretty good story and writing, with gameplay from a third person perspective and combat akin to old school turn based Japanese RPGs along with equipment, item and leveling mechanics. I'll admit, I was pretty engrossed with the story and the writing at first when I purchased this back in 2013 and was really charmed by the fact that it plays on my love for old-school JRPGs. However, that novelty wore off, as I continued to play. Here are the issues I have with this game: - Slow combat: In classic JRPGs, such as Final Fantasy, the party and enemy hit each other relatively quickly and responsively. Anachronox, on the other hand, each characters' animation, including the enemies, are so drawn out, you actually wait for them to finish. - The MISS mechanic: But you know, what's even more infuriating? Your characters MISSING their attacks. After waiting for your characters to finish their move only to have it miss was one of the things that turned me off real quickly and made me quit. I revisited the game from time to time, but this MISS mechanic always got on my nerves. When I did finally decided come back to finish this game (for my completionist sake), I thought this mechanic would improve as you level up or got better equipment. But you know what, it doesn't. Despite being higher level and having Excellent weapons for all your characters, this mechanic NEVER goes away! Thankfully, reading through some of the Community forums, I learned you could speed up the game including combat by pressing and holding the "" key on your keyboard. This feature is the ONLY reason I was able to complete the game. But a game should never need an outside feature to improve QOL. - Yoyo Questing: My last and final gripe is how some of the quests you constantly need to go back and forth between places to get your items or rewards, not a big deal generally, but this often involves going through combat areas to reach your NPCs (see above..). Would I play this again? No
