Review of RandomAnime

And now we come to the real meat of the book – the section in which the game truly struts its stuff as an anime game.

Considering the lack of a true anime “genre,” the game takes the rather ambitious approach of offering over 100 highly specific powers rather than an effects-based system of the Tri-Stat or HERO model.

The end result is an extensive list of abilities that don’t necessarily lend themselves to every character concept or setting. Not to mention creating some circumstances that are flat-out weird.

For example, while making a character of better-than-human strength is easy enough with the Augment Gimmick, the hard attribute cap of 10 remains. Making a character of really superhuman strength – someone on the level of A-ko of Project A-ko or Ryoko of Tenchi Muyo – isn’t really possible. Now, you can use the Robot Fighter Gimmick to create a character who can dish out and take mecha-scale damage… but only if he’s attacking or attacked by a mecha. In other words, a character who maxes out Robot Fighter can punch out a skyscraper-sized mecha and survive that same mecha stepping on him just as well as he could survive being trod upon by a human, yet he’d break his fist punching an actual skyscraper and would be crushed if one fell on him.

Then there’s the Barrier Gimmick, which allows a character to erect a force field completely invulnerable to everything except energy-based Gimmick attacks, maintain it indefinitely, and attack through it unless the player – for whatever reason – describes the Barrier in such a way as to make that impossible. Energy Gimmicks striking the Barrier call for a contested Resolve roll between the attacker and defender to see if the Barrier holds, regardless of the force of the attacking power. Sufficiently massive mundane attacks – like, say, a nuclear strike – may, at the GM’s discretion, require an uncontested Resolve roll on the part of the character to maintain the Barrier. So, let’s say a character defended by a Barrier takes a hit from the Death Star. If the Death Star’s main gun gets statted up as a Widget with an energy-based Gimmick – some variation on Blast, presumably – then the attack becomes a Resolve-vs.-Resolve contest, never mind the fact that the cannon packs enough force to destroy a planet. And if the main gun isn’t treated as a Gimmick, but rather as “just” a really big “mundane” blaster, then it’s a simple question of the PC’s Resolve to determine if he’s left floating unharmed in space while the planet gets blown out from under him. In short, this Gimmick’s a deal-breaker for any game in which the opposition lacks an offensive energy-based Gimmick.

Also, many of the Gimmicks require some feel for how the game plays before their value (or lack thereof) becomes apparent – Gimmicks like Reroll, that (unsurprisingly) lets the player re-roll a poor dice roll, and Slots, that lets the player add all three dice together when they come up three of a kind. (This will make more sense once I get to the game mechanics below. I promise.)

And in an even broader sense, many of the Gimmick names, while occasionally colorful, don’t lend themselves to obvious descriptions. Quick, which of the following sound better, and what do they do: Naturally Lucky, Incredibly Luck, or Fortune Smiles? How about Seeming, Masquerade, or Mimic? Crab’s Might or Tortoise’s Scale? The book really needs a Gimmick list that includes a brief summary of all abilities to avoid this sort of ambiguity.

Playtest: Character creation took much longer than it should have due to page flipping required to figure out which Gimmick does what.

On the other hand, I like the fact that players can apply the Typed Attack Gimmick to any energy-based Gimmick for free, which not only gives the Gimmick in question specific perks and weaknesses – e.g., a fire-based Gimmick can burn things but may be vulnerable to water – but also lets the character perform inconsequential but cool little cantrips related to the power, such as lighting a cigarette with a flame from the character’s fingertip.

Another Gimmick, Flurry Attacks, lets characters do an end-run around the combat system’s lack of an impact of success levels on damage (see below). The only drawback there is that while it could be interpreted as a single deft, swashbuckling attack, it’s really intended to be the barrage of frenzied attacks that the name suggests. As such, it can’t be used for called shots, a staple of the swashbuckler.

Perhaps the most glaring omission is any sort of magic system, with “magicians” forced to purchase Gimmicks just like anyone else and define them as “spells.” A house rule for Sorcery on the company’s web page does address this problem, however.

Flaws aside, the scope of the selection did impress me, and it grows even more impressive when combined with the Gimmick lists in Collectémon and Minionomicon, not to mention the Gimmicks on the company web site. Moreover, what the Gimmick list lacks in flexibility, it makes up for in anime flavor. In addition to relatively “generic” powers like energy blasts, super-speed, and stretching, characters may be able to “anime leap,” run with ease along any surface, summon blazing swords, and even pull “Shojo Mallets” out of the nowhere known as “hammerspace” to harmlessly clobber errant boyfriends.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Nuclear Punch: the power to strike the ground and cause a nuclear explosion that destroys everything in its path… including the explosion’s creator. Every time I read it, I’m reminded of Daffy Duck’s ghostly response to Bugs Bunny’s call for an encore of the former’s show-stopping self-explosion: “I know, I know… but I can only do it once.”