kitsune9
Adventurer
My group and I are fans of anime and, of course, role-playing games. We've got BESM, but when we saw the art for Anima, and saw that it was a new RPG coming "soon," then we started salivating about it. So we waited. And waited. And waited some more.
Anima and BESM are truly different beasts. BESM more rules-light.
Anima has odd mechanics to it that kind of puts people off. For example, the Rule of 10 and 1 which if your roll a 1 (i.e. a good result), you increase your success by 3 and if you roll a 10 (i.e. a bad result), you increase your failure by 3.
I had trouble with MA Multiples in character creation (still don't understand the concept).
The other thing is the Combat Table which can have a range of -301 to over 400 (in increments of 10) through which three steps are performed--1) calculate all your bonuses to the attack and throw 1d100, 2) calculate all the defender's bonuses to attack and throw 1d100, and 3) compare the difference on the table to determine how effective the attack is. This can range to no effect to up to 400% (in increments of 10%).
There should have been a simply computation instead of adding up three digit numbers and subtracting three digit numbers and then factoring in how successful one is on their action.
The book is amazingly beautiful, but the game system needs an app/combo dice roller in order to resolve actions fairly quickly.
The pros of the game is that there's a lot of rules to crunch so if you like your games crunch-heavy, there's a lot of cool things the game attempts to do, but if I was to play this, I'd heavily house rule on scaling down a lot of the math and use simpler mechanics for resolution.