My Review on Reddit with Images

KEY NOTES:
-Chinese developed game with JRPG style turn-based combat and mechanics
-No random encounters
-Limited English/Chinese/Japanese voiceover options
-About 35 hours to complete the game along with every sidequest

INTRODUCTION

Mato Anomalies was developed by Chinese developer, Arrowiz. From what I've seen, they haven't been around for that long and has only developed a handful of games. One notably is the Visual Novel, Hermitage: Strange Case Files. Mato Anomalies is Arrowiz's first attempt at a RPG and it was surprisingly a solid attempt much to my delight.

STORY

Mato Anomalies takes place in a futuristic city called Mato. The story follows Doe, a young detective recently hired to look into a special commodity when he gets mysteriously transported to a strange world full of hostile monsters. He gets saved by a monk named Gram who calls them the Bane Tide. These creatures prey on human emotions and amplifies them from the other world. This is the beginning of Doe getting involved in various cases where the Bane Tide influences the people and society of the city.

As a whole, I found Mato's story to be quite interesting. Much of it explores the society, people, various factions, government, locations and a number of important historical events. There is a strong emphasis on the worldbuilding which serves as a highlight to the game. The early chapters feels episodic in nature, but they all focused on the worldbuilding while the recurring plot of the Bane Tide's effects on the city connected the chapters together along with Doe's continuing quest to search for the special commodity. While interesting as a whole, the execution on the story could've been better.

Many of the dialogue and cutscenes didn't really draw me in at times especially in the beginning of the game. Right at the start, you're bombarded with many terminology, factions and names of people that made it difficult to process and digest. After getting farther into the game and already used to the terminology and people, there were times I still felt like I was reading a dense textbook. The information in the text may be interesting, but the words were dry and weren't exactly exciting to read.

Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the story after the first hour and the quality remained consistent until the climax and final chapters of the game where I felt it focused too heavily on the sci-fi nature of the story. The mostly small scale story had risen to a new level at that point. This story segment still had its interesting side to it, but the complex nature of it made it even more difficult to follow than normal so that I was somewhat disappointed by the end. There were strong sci-fi elements throughout the game, but the story really doubled down on it towards the end.

Overall, I thought the story remained a strong suit and I appreciated the heavy sci-fi nature of the story even though I felt it went too far by the end.

CHARACTERS

The main characters have a lot of variety to them. A young thief, a mentally scarred veteran, an acclaimed singer, a gangster and a young man from the bottom class of society. Despite their different backgrounds, they have great group chemistry and many of them don't hold back on the quips and digs against each other. The dialogue and interactions are humorous at times.

All of them have decent depth to their characters and receive a fair amount of character development and growth. Each of them has a chapter devoted to them which gives sufficient time to flesh out and explore their characters.

Unlike many other JRPGs, I appreciated the generally older cast here even if a few of them seemed on the young side including the main character, Doe. They are all at least of drinkable age.

The supporting recurring characters are written surprisingly well too. They don't get as much screentime as the main characters as expected, but I found their characterization to be solid given their role. On the other hand, many of the villains in the game are very one-note and don't leave that strong of an impact.

Overall, many of the characters were solid and did well to further establish and build on the worldbuilding.

MUSIC

The music for me is one of the game's weak points. It felt like I was hearing the same 5 tracks throughout the game. Instead of intense melodies often heard in other JRPGS, Mato's soundtrack is mostly atmospheric. I don't necessarily dislike the songs in the game, but they don't leave much of an impression on me and often fade into the background. Even the music in battle does little to excite me.

GRAPHICS AND ART DESIGN

The graphics and art design is a mixed bag for me. On one hand, I love the character art in the loading menu and on the game's cover. I liked how these artwork brought out the Noir flair from the game. The character portraits in the visual novel cutscenes were good too and had sufficient details. Some of the background images seen in the visual novel cutscenes resemble oil paintings which provided a nice touch to the overall art style.

Now on the other hand, textures on the environment and buildings lack a lot of details if you look closely. Many of the locations are somewhat dark and there's nothing that distinguishes it from daytime to nighttime. I understand the emphasis on darker lightning because of the city's gritty nature overall, but I would like to see more variety in general. Fortunately, the cel-shaded style masks a lot of the issues.

Enemy designs aren't particularly good though. I'm not even sure on what to make of them. They all looked strange and not in a cool or interesting way.

When it comes to cutscenes though, there are three different types across the game. The most common throughout are the Visual Novel style with the character portraits that's commonly seen in many low budget JRPGs. These cutscenes lack any voice acting.

The less occurring style are the comic cutscenes. You see various comic panels on the screen with very limited character movement in them. You get to see some of the action here and there is voice acting for these.

Last are the full motion cutscenes. These tend to look the best and you can easily see the action here. There's also voice acting too. Overall, it's the best type of cutscene in the game, but there are only a few of those.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay loop is simple. You spend a lot of time in the city hub and run back and forth across the different districts to advance the story. There are a lot of locations in the city, but only a few are actually explorable. I wished it was more interconnected areas instead.

The explorable districts aren't that big so there isn't much in the way to explore or look for things. There's some nice little details here and there and some of the places are interesting, but the intrigue wears out quickly afterwards so that it feels like a hassle to go back and forth between the areas.

DUNGEONS

When you're not going through the city hub, you're going through the dungeons called "Lairs". There are many story related ones along with the random ones which are randomly generated each time. The random ones are a good place to grind and farm for better equipment although they aren't needed for the most part on a Normal difficulty playthrough. EXP scales to the enemies levels.

The dungeons themselves aren't particularly interesting design-wise. The structure for all of them are nearly the same with small paths connecting the platforms. There are a few optional branching paths to acquire treasure chests and there are some minor puzzles needed to advance sometimes. All of them are on the simple side.

Enemies appear onscreen so there's no random encounters. Surprisingly though, they don't move either and instead are rooted in their spot. Due to the small paths however, you can't avoid them most of the time.

Overall, the dungeon design looks boring, but they are at least easy to advance through. The backgrounds do change across the chapters as well which does mask some of the sameness of the dungeons.

COMBAT

The combat is another highlight of the game. There's a turn order on the screen (although it was smaller than I'd liked). Menus consists of skills and items. What really makes it unique though is that every character has a shared HP pool. It felt strange at first, but it didn't bother me after a while. The shared HP pool meant that all of the character's max HP are combined into one bar. Any damage that any character takes will deduct from that bar. This provides an interesting layer of strategy for having certain skills for certain characters that increases their defense and deduct damage if they were the one to take the hit.

The second unique mechanic is that every skill is on a turn cooldown (which carries over after battle). The cooldown amount varies from skill to skill, but every character's basic default one doesn't have a cooldown. This prevents you from spamming the same skill back to back. At least none of the skills make use of any MP bar.

Each character has their own super move which is usable after building up the super gauge that increases from taking and dealing damage. Like the HP bar, this gauge is also shared between the party. These super skills range from offensive types to support types.

Regular enemies are somewhat easy most of the time, but there are a few elite and mutated enemies that provide a decent challenge. Bosses in general are interesting fights and provide even greater challenges. It is worth mentioning that the final boss in the game is very difficult compared to everything else in the game.

SKILL TREE

Every character has two skill trees (Yin and Yang) that you can spend their SP on (one is gained each time from increasing a level). Each character tree focuses on a different part of their kit including one of their weapons (each character has two weapon types). This is where customization for character builds come in. Conveniently, you can reset the SP at a small money cost.

I enjoyed the skill trees here since they had interesting things to unlock. Some are just straight up stat boosts, but the others consists of learning new skills, cooldown reductions for specific skills, new effects to skills and new passive effects.

It is worth mentioning that every character shares a level as well so the amount of SP for every character is always the same. It also makes it easier to switch in and out other characters for different team dynamics without having to train them each time. It's just a shame that the SP acquired in limited and you stop gaining them after a certain level. This means that you can't learn every skill on the tree unfortunately.

Every playable character is very unique gameplay-wise and bring different things to the table. Tanking, counterattacks, buffs, debuffs, status effects, there's a lot of variety to the type of skills you can use and are effective. You even have a character that can grant another character an additional turn and there's one character who can give herself additional actions if she skips her turn. There's a lot of fun to be had with experimenting with different characters which also makes battles more exciting. Up to four can be included in battle.

GEARS

The Gear system allows further customization. Gears are obtained from enemy drops, chests or purchased from shops. They only provide further stat boosts by themselves, but if you link the gears of the same types, you unlock further useful effects.

MIND HACK

Of the playable party characters, Doe is not one of them despite being the main character in the game. While the group makes progress in the Lairs, Doe is usually out back in Mato monitoring the situation in the Lairs. With that said, he is able to engage in his own sort of battles called Mind Hack.

Every now and then during the main story and during sidequests, there are certain individuals that remain uncooperative so Doe is able to hack into their mind to get the information they need. This is done through a card battle game. You eventually get up to 6 different decks all provided by the party members, but you can't customize them in any way. You're stuck with the cards in the deck you choose. With that said, each deck has different types of cards, effects and strategy to them. I only used the default deck and the advanced version of it the whole game so I can't say much about the other decks, but the card battles have surprising strategic depth to them. The cards in the default Fate deck works by chaining cards in certain orders for additional effects and damage.

The main goal is to reduce the Host's health to 0 by dealing damage from offensive cards. In the meantime, you have to deal with the Host's demons that have their own health pool and provide various effects. Some require defeating first before actively engaging with the host due to their effects. It is important to note that demons will always respawn after a set amount of turns.

These battles were surprisingly fun, but aren't very common in the game.

SIDEQUESTS

There are a number of sidequests available each chapter. Nearly all of them further improves on the worldbuilding and have a decent amount of story to them. The process generally involves talking to a bunch of different people across the city and ultimately ending in a side Lair to beat the boss there. It feels repetitive at times and the rewards are not usually good, but the story and additional worldbuilding from them are well worth doing.

BONDING

Every playable character has bonding type events. These events provide further character development and fleshes out their background. The only gameplay benefit you get from doing them are unlocking the advance Mind Hack decks, but either way, these events are great to experience.

FINAL REMARKS

I didn't have strong expectations for the game to begin with and the start was a bit of a drag, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how much I enjoyed the game afterwards. The sci-fi story, solid worldbuilding, well written characters and fun combat system made it a good experience. Despite the 35 hours it took for me to beat the game, it felt a lot longer.

A lot of the art design, bland dungeons, and locations took away from the experience. Not to mention the sudden shift in story near the end of the game. There isn't a lot in the way of replay value since there isn't a New Game Plus option, but there are additional difficult post game dungeons after clearing the game.

With all of that said, this isn't a typical JRPG game even when ignoring that it had Chinese developers. The story and execution feels very dense and not that easily digested. There isn't much in anime tropes and instead feels like a western game at times with the more mature storytelling and execution. It has a different appeal altogether.