izigame.me

(SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE SCIENCE ADVENTURE SERIES BELOW)
For reference, I played on PS5.
I do not like Anonymous;Code, in fact, I actively dislike it. I hate to say that as such a huge fan of SciADV, but I really, really, do not like Anonymous;Code.
This so called "culmination of the Science Adventure series" was nothing more than a disappointment, and it pains me to know that. It miserably fails to live up to the quality standard of every other mainline SciADV entry. The only other entry in this series that I dislike is Steins;Gate 0, which is not mainline, and I've only seen the anime adaptation. I didn't like the way that it handled the cast of Steins;Gate, but I loved some of its ideas and could see how much potential that story could've had if it was in the hands of more competent writers who understood the material it was a spin off of. However, I refrain from truly disliking it until I've completed the visual novel, in the hopes that it may redeem a story that I otherwise did not enjoy. Anonymous;Code has no excuse. Just like Steins;Gate 0, it is another watered down rehash of the SciADV team's most popular entry, and once again, it misses the mark. If I had to pick between Steins;Gate 0 and Anonymous;Code for which Non-Steins;Gate I thought was better, it would be 0 with no hesitation.
To adhere to the character limit, I'll be skipping over positives. There aren't many to speak of anyway.
Starting off, the sprites here are bad. Seriously bad. They look like baby's first flash animation character design. They have this shitty 2.5D artstyle that seems like it's trying to blend together the 2D sprites of Steins;Gate and the Chaos; games with the 3D models of Robotics;Notes, but doesn't commit to either, and comes out looking terrible. Every body part of the characters is independently animated, making them look like they were pulled out of a gacha game. I legit could not stop thinking about this the entire game. They look terrible. How bad they look is made especially apparent with the CGs and Manga Triggers, which change the artstyle completely and look a thousand times better. The difference is night and day. The best example I can think of is this, SpriteCGIn this case, the sprites look simplistic and bad, and the CG makes those same characters look great. The baked lighting and extra detail of the CG makes the characters look more in line with the sprites in Chaos;Child, and they just look so much better.
Think of this story as a shonen. It follows a teenage hacker named Takaoka Pollon, who meets a strange girl name Aizaki Momo, and they embark on a dangerous journey to save the world!!!! Lose interest yet?
If I wanted a shitty shonen like 95% of anime and manga out there, believe me, SciADV would be the last place I would look. It takes place in a futuristic cyberpunk setting (ooohhhhh) where people have superpowers and super high-tech technology!! This is a far cry from what I've come to expect from the grounded, realistic settings of the Science Adventure series. Remember how Steins;Gate (original) never showed you SERN's dystopia in 2036? Yeah, there was a reason for that.
The characters here are equally as bad. They're less characters and more so caricatures. Pollon is a boring ass protagonist. He's an "anon with a bright future who can't stand idly by when someone's in need!!" What's with the cringy ass writing?!? Pollon has the power to "Save and Load" like in a video game. It's overpowered as fuck. Takumi and Takuru were Gigalomaniacs, Okabe had Reading Steiner, Kaito was mostly ordinary other than Slo-Mo (which he couldn't activate on command) and Yuta could use Mutual Recognition. Pollon's Saving and Loading is basically a constantly available Time-Leap Machine, meaning he essentially has Reading Steiner and can time leap whenever and wherever. His ability is so strong that any and all sense of the danger felt in Steins;Gate is completely absent. There is a hint of convergence later on but it isn't explored in much detail and is ignored in the true ending. Momo, the heroine of this game, is booorrrinnggg. Compared to Rimi, Kurisu, Akiho, Serika, or even Ryoka with her ridiculously huge tits, Momo is just a total nothing character.
The story here is really boring. I was checked out about half way through and just couldn't wait to be done. This is the shortest SciADV entry I've played thus far and it's the only one I couldn't be bothered to 100%. Not to mention it has enough religious undertones to make even Hideo Kojima weep.
Onto my biggest problem with Anonymous;Code, and one that I feel impacts the entire Science Adventure series as a whole, and for the worse. It's revealed that everything takes place in an Earth Simulator. Each world makes up a "world-layer." There are infinite world-layers expanding downward, and there is an upmost world-layer that can be considered the "real world." The real world has an Earth Simulator of the world-layer under, that world-layer has an Earth Simulator of the next world-layer, so on and so forth. Anonymous;Code and Occultic;Nine take place on a world-layer above Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate, Chaos;Child and Robotics;Notes. The existence of Gigalomaniacs, Reading Steiner and monopoles are all results of errors in the simulated world. At the end of Anonymous;Code, the world-layers are reset to a new state reflecting the topmost layer, hence resetting every world-layer, including that of the previous entries. What this essentially means is that the delusional Nishijou Takumi no longer exists, Onoe Serika never gets realbooted and stays an imaginary friend, Okabe Rintarou never invents the PhoneWave (name subject to change), the Robotics Club never builds Super GunBuild-1, and Gamon Yuta never becomes a ghost. Of course, new errors will occur, but the times that were 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016, and 2019 will have already passed in the topmost world-layer, and the events will not transpire as they once did. This plot point singlehandedly makes it so every single Science Adventure entry did not happen.
The simulation being reset also means Aizaki Momo will never have existed, though this is rectified in Anonymous;Code's true ending as her mind is turned into data outside of the simulation so that she can exist in the new world-layers. Okay, that's great, for her. But for me, I don't give a flying fuck about Momo! I'm thinking more about Takumi and Serika, the two characters that I actually like that were made from delusions. They don't fucking exist in the new world-layers, but Momo does? Why does the worst fucking heroine this series has to offer get to live while two good characters don't?!?
You wanna use world-layers? Fine. You wanna say everything has taken place in a simulation? Fine! The BEGINNER's GUIDE TO EARTH SIMULATOR states,
"Chiyomaru Shikura continues to pursue the same theme he started chasing 14 years ago.
That being... Is the scenery your eyes perceive truly real?"
The foreshadowing has been there since Chaos;Head. I'm fine with the simulation. But pulling a JoJo's and resetting the universe, undoing all of the stories that I loved in the process, is just a step too far for me.
To me, it seems like Chiyomaru Shikura and the Science Adventure team failed with Anonymous;Code to realize just how important these stories are to some people. My love for this series started with Steins;Gate, but it's become much more than that over time. I'm more emotionally attached to these stories than I am some of my distant relatives. To see the decade and a half history of this fantastic series trampled by the most underwhelming game in it hurts me in a way that words just can't describe. So for that, I'm afraid that I just cannot recommend Anonymous;Code.