Summary
Final Fantasy fans will love this game...great RPG
The Good
Final Fantasy fans will be right at home when playing Anachronox. The game has an interesting, involving storyline, great character development and is overall a lot of fun to play. You team up with seven quirky characters each with their own past (A couple of them are old friends of the main character Sly Boots, and you'll learn his past as you play the game as well), you get to know the characters well and there's great character development despite the shortness of the game.
The game's humor is great and pretty refreshing to see in an RPG. You'll find yourself feeding a puss stained sock to a guy in exchange for information, teaming up with a retired superhero, getting bossed around by your mouse pointer (Who is actually a character in the game) and doing many other strange but amusing things.
There are only a few worlds to explore but they jam-packed with mini-games and sub-quests which keep the game interesting.
I've read many complaints about the graphics and I must admit they were a tad dated, but the cartoonyness and vibrant colors really added to the atmosphere and humor of the game. I really liked them.
The Bad
The music in this game was a little too cheesy for me. On some worlds it was too techno-ish and and others it was slow and boring. The battle music was the worst, slow and just plain annoying.
The game world was originally supposed to be much bigger, but was slashed down to rush the game out into stores after an already long production delay. That's too bad. The game is quite good, but with a few more worlds thrown in and a longer playing time, it could have been even better. In fact the short length of the game was a bit of a letdown. Anachronox isn't supposed to be one of those long open ended RPGs that has over 100 hours of gameplay but I would have liked to see at least 40 or 50.
If you plan on playing the game, expect to experience a few bugs along the way. This was a major problem when Anachronox was released, there's a patch out now, but there is still some minor problems. The game wasn't designed to run on any OS newer than windows 98, so XP users may experience even more problems.
The Bottom Line
As you can see from other reviews, Anachronox has quite a fan following. For good reason to, it's a lot of fun. While I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, it's a great game for any RPG fan who's looking for something a little different but that's still a lot of fun.
