Masters Of Anima

HAND IN HAND THROUGH THE SPARK LIFE

- Dom Peppiatt

Pikmin doesn’t get enough love. The under-represented Nintendo brand hasn’t really got any kindred spirits on Xbox, and that’s always been a damn shame—there’s a lot to be said of the family-friendly take on the strategy genre, and where other Nintendo properties get own-brand variations in some way or another, Pikmin never really did.

Masters Of Anima is here to change that. Brought to life by what seems to be an exclusively British voice cast, and fusing the likes of Pikmin with a fantasy-inspired hack-and-slash focus, Masters Of Anima is a title quite unlike anything we’ve ever played before… for better and for worse.

The game starts with your central character, Otto, on the cusp of completing a trial that would see him become one of the titular Masters of Anima: a Shaper that has power over a mysterious energy that can bring stone to life in the form of Guardians. As it happens, Otto is married to the head of the order of Shapers—Ana. The dynamic between these two is quite nice: She’s an honest-to-god genius, and he’s a nice-but-dim try hard, and their interactions are pretty sweet.