Little Anchor – Recommended!

Finally, a sci-fi otome game! Does Little Anchor fulfill the hopes of a solid game that will satisfy a sci-fi fan?  For me at least, it does.

Now, I’m not a huge sci-fi fan, so I was glad to find out that the amount of tech gibberish (that’s my official term for made-up weapons, chemicals, physics laws, and everything else you find in sci-fi) was fairly low, so I could focus on understanding the plot.

There are a few terms that you should get comfortable with, but not too many – and I won’t bother spelling them out, because I don’t remember and it has no bearing on the story.

Elushyon: The ship that the main character is captain of and where most of the story happens.

EUG: The Earth-based government that the main character’s father belonged to, and where all the Elushyon’s crew is from.

ICSEO: The mainly space-based rebel government

SG: Mecha that are used for combat – they look like Gundam units

Basically, the EUG is the existing Earth government. Way back when, the Earth had an energy crisis, and started creating space colonies to find a solution. A new source of energy, Helium 3, was found out in space, and is controlled by the EUG. However, some people on the space colonies felt that the EUG was taking advantage of them, and all they really cared about was Earth. Civil (planetary? galaxial?) unrest increased and became more violent and terrorist-like, and finally coalesced into a rebellion, with ICSEO as the largest group.

The main character’s father was an admiral in the EUG armed forces, and became a hero when he sacrificed himself and his crew in order to save civilians from terrorists. ICSEO is seen as a terrorist organization by the EUG, but as the story starts, they are starting peace negotiations. The Elushyon was built as a neutral ship that was supposed to symbolize this peace, and that’s why the main character was chosen as the captain, though she just graduated as an officer.

On launch day, the Elushyon is attacked in port by ICSEO SGs, and has to fight back to protect the civilians at the launch. This attack cuts short the peace negotiations, and the Elushyon starts taking order from the EUG.

The first half of the game is getting from Ceylon, the launch site, to Helsinki, where EUG’s headquarters are. The rest of the game is in space fighting ICSEO.

The plot is believable without getting too bogged down in details, and each character’s background affected their outlook and behaviour. I actually want to finish everyone’s routes, they’re all interesting, though I’d say Lucio’s is the most ‘normal’ (no twists really). The story is broken into 12 acts, and until Act 6 all routes are the same (though you have to choose different actions to finish people’s routes, you can skip most of the dialogue and the battles).

The battles are also pretty fun, if very simple once you get used to the controls. I’d STRONGLY recommend watching the tutorials, they’re not long and they pretty much tell you how to win. You can skip the battles on the second go-round, but there are some special events that only occur if you fulfill certain requirements during the battles, so it’s worthwhile to try and get those scenes at least once. I used La Primavera as my guide site, it tells you what the requirements are to get the scenes. There’s also a fair amount of battle dialogue that is triggered based on your directions and events (like your ship taking damage), and even CG videos for battle actions like SG launches and attacks that are pretty well done, and (thankfully) you can turn them off once you’ve had enough. I’m impressed with the battles, even though the battle map itself is primitive (looks like an electronic version of Battleship).

Let’s see, what else? The music is forgettable, but I quite like the art – it’s clean and attractive without being too generic (one thing I often don’t like about space settings). And the characters are great, I actually like all of them, even the main character most of the time (though once in a while she acts dumb).

Each character has two endings, so far I’m done Yukino’s, one each of Reishen and Lucio, and the ‘secret’ character. Now I’m working on Joshua, and I can’t decide whether to do Alva or Violet next. The amount of romance and CGs is not huge, but acceptable – I think if I could change anything I’d add a little more romance to the ending parts, but not much.

To sum up, I’d recommend Little Anchor for sci-fi fans definitely , and general otome fans as well.

My next posts will be a bunch about new games and news, I’ve been missing a lot lately!

3 Responses to “Little Anchor – Recommended!”

1. Rita says:

   May 29, 2009 at 1:34 am

   ARGH! Now I REALLY want to play it. >__>
2. lijakaca says:

   May 29, 2009 at 10:25 am

   Hehe, it’s very fun! And I should specify, when I mentioned the music being not great, I’m talking about the background music – the songs are pretty good, I think.

   I finished Joshua last night, once again the ending was a little too abrupt, but it was good Now I think I’ll try Alva, and then Violet!
3. Wingmar says:

   July 17, 2009 at 3:47 pm

   Sounds like an interesting and fun game. I like the battle idea, since it makes a big diffrence in the game pace. The whole story reminds me a bit about Gundam Seed :3