izigame.me

TL; DR Mato Anomalies is in part a dungeon crawling JRPG, a detective visual novel, and a card game, in other words it is overambitious. I enjoy this game; however, it has issues feeling both unfocused, and unpolished. I did not like the ending.
Note the game has its moments and can be really fun, but it is about an average experience overall. With that said I will probably keep an eye on their future projects.

Story

The detective Doe has a few debts, and he is coerced into investigating a hot new commodity, but he quickly finds himself in over his head, and is nearly killed by a demon before an exorcist rescues him. They start working together, one trying to uncover a conspiracy, the other likes killing demons.
The story is told through three ways, unvoiced dialogue, voiced in-engine comics, and cutscenes. These could work well together unfortunately the transitions between them feels very jarring and immersion breaking.
The writing itself is fine and sometimes pretty great, during most of my playtime I was into it, though it has a few issues, there is a lot of terms, the phrasing can be stiff and awkward, and overall, it can fall into tropes. Some of this might have to do with the localisation, but I know nothing on that topic. It draws some inspiration from cyberpunk, and a few other places and does a good job at creating an atmosphere of downtrodden and exploited people.
It is also very overambitious and tells a story that is larger than what is necessary, they should have kept the phrase “less is more” in mind, because the game feels very long. However, the story and ending they had planned would not work in a series (probably) and is best told at once, but personally I really disliked the last chapter and the epilogue, and frankly could have done without it.

Presentation

Mato Anomalies features an impressive number of enemies, and a lot of them have interesting designs. They also belong to specific dungeons that have their own moods, music, and visuals which gives you some nice variety. However, some chapters feel a bit long, and so it can get repetitive.
The music is good though, it has nice beats, different instruments and is an enjoyable listen, on the other hand we have the character designs that are a bit more varied in quality. Unimportant characters lack eyes, but there is also some trouble with shadows or the lighting which gives models a lack of depth even for anime designs.
Another issue I had was with the city Mato, and its inhabitants. There are very few character models, and you often find herds of the same person walking around which is extremely immersion breaking. The city does not feel lived in outside of conversation, it is quiet, empty, and dead. The few NPCs you can talk with help little, ideally their dialogue would have changed after every chapter so we would have had something, but no, it only changes after a handful of specific events.
One thing that I noticed quickly and noticed often was an issue with animations, they often end several frames too soon which stops any flow dead in its tracks as the characters goes from mid-attack to freezing in place. It looks very jarring, but luckily it is not an issue with every single attack.
This problem is even worse during the comics since the animations finish before the voice lines, and sometimes you skip ahead thinking the panel was done, but no, surprise! There was actually another speech bubble for that panel which had not appeared yet, and which you had no way of knowing would exist. Despite being aware of this and waiting a few extra moments I still accidentally skipped over dialogue. If the dialogue and the animations were in sync this would not have been a problem.

Gameplay

Doe is the first protagonist you encounter, and it is with him that you explore Mato and talk with all the different people and progress the quests. It is also with him where you play a card game.
This game is framed as a way to acquire information people are not willing to share, and despite not liking card games I liked this one. It was pretty fun, and I enjoyed trying different decks to beat different situations. The only thing I disliked was having to die to restart since there is no manual restart, but if you hate card games there is also a skip feature.
Unfortunately, I think the whole minigame is an unnecessary addition that the game would have been better without. I would have preferred if they instead focused more on Doe being a detective by giving us more dialogue options and giving us extra rewards or temporary buffs the more information we acquire. The buffs could be the exact same as the ones from the random lairs, but they would be applicable to the story or side lair in question.
Dungeons
The second protagonist is Gram, an exorcist who can enter lairs to kill the demons within. As you progress through the story, he will be joined by one character per chapter for a total of six party members, but you can only bring four at a time which gives you some options to customise your setup.
Personally, I had some issues choosing who to use since I found that they had fun and distinct playstyles that could complement each other well and in various ways. You are also able to build character in different ways on account of each weapon having their own unique skills and damage types, you could use Garm with a sword and do slash damage, but you could also use a spear and do pierce, it depends on what you need for your party.
One thing that keeps the game enjoyable is that each chapter has its own unique lair design, “mechanics”, and set of enemies. It is always cool to fight new enemies and sometimes it even felt like they went overboard, but I am all for overambition, if done well. However, there is a severe lack of bosses for side quests, fighting the same two bosses in every lair during an entire chapter does start to take its toll, especially since the different mechanics are only really utilized during the main story. It gets a bit samey on that front, and it is not helped by side quests having a formulaic structure.
With that said I enjoyed the actual combat, I found that I liked it more the more I played which was surprising, but I really like the changes they made from a more typical JRPG. Your entire party shares a health pool which means healing is easy, and all abilities are on cool down rather than being MP dependent. This encourages you to use abilities frequently which makes combat encounters faster, while also eliminating some of the tedium. Yet fewer, more interesting encounters would have been nice.
However, there is another problem. Having a shared health pool, and rechargeable abilities makes combat a lot easier and the game does not always account for that. Sure, it is fun to stomp my enemies and it is definitely satisfying, but some more challenge would have been nice. There is also an issue with the side quests, and that is that they are the easiest part of the game, they are often gated by story events that are of higher level and difficulty, so when you actually play a side lair you will face no challenge, and you will barely earn any experience whatsoever. That is kind of annoying.
The larger issue is the length, I thought the gameplay was fun but even I was bored at the end, it is just too much and not enough changes across 40-hours. You only ever unlock three more skills! The rest are unlocked at the start or are dependent on your weapons!
I am ending on a positive note since this is a recommendation. I like the Infinite Domain that they added post-release, it is not perfectly implemented, and the amount of loading is annoying, but it is really entertaining to stack bonuses and make your team ever more powerful as you destroy wave after wave of enemies. It was definitely the most fun I had with the gameplay.