This article is a draft. It is not finished yet and might never be.
Created on 08/20/2025
Today I will be writing about a video game that is barely known to the general public. So little-known that it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page (except in Italian), and has no speedruns neither on speedrun.com nor Youtube.
Here are a few indices about the game before I give you its name.
The demo was the reason I had decided to try this game when I first discovered Wii shop channel, and is probably how most Wii players discovered this game as well.
This game is Anima: Ark of Sinners, though I will abbreviate it as AoS for the rest of the article.
It’s just a way to list defaults of this game. Sometimes I’ll compare this game to other one which to my mind give good design lessons. Even though those games are not indie, this doesn’t prevent indie games to inherit those elements.
I know it’s important for games to display who created them and who published them. But please make the presentations skippable, like in Skylanders or Kirby. If it was just when launching the game it would be okay, but it happens every time you wanna go back to the menu.
The game is played with the Wii controller held horizontally. After the unskippable presentations, you’ll be greeted by the game title and this message.
Press
(1)
Well at least you know you have to play horizontally because of this, unlike Klonoa, which doesn’t show you how to hold the remote and what button to press. In general, this is the reason why you see in most games a message like “Press X button to start”.
The thing is, most Wii games with horizontal controller use (2) as the main button. But not here. And I think this is the only game that doesn’t do so. It’s intuitive, especially when you’re going to the pause menu and you learn that pressing (2) takes you back.
How to fix: invert the roles of the buttons (1) and (2).
Just after moving, this is the first action you’ll most likely execute, and you will quickly learn that in this game, jumps are weird. Like no other games program jumps like this.
When playing for the first time a platformer game, I was wondering how jumps worked. I knew you had to press one button, but I didn’t know how to correctly move while jumping. So I faced two possibilities:
After a few jumps, you quickly understand that the first second case makes you move further, but not that much compared to the first one. This is normally shared with other platformers.
Why do I explain that? Because AoS makes these jump mechanics very weird, in a way that shouldn’t be implemented in a platformer.
The jump-then-move control makes me uneasy. Because when moving just after jumping, you advance just a little bit then you fall back. And that just a little bit distance will always be the same, no matter how long you hold the jump button.
Coyote time is that small duration during which you leave the ground (falling) yet you can still jump. Given the level design for platformer parts in this game, this feature is barely necessary.
However, one feature that isn’t present, yet would have made this game less frustrating, would be the capacity to hang on the edge when you’re about to fall.
You could then choose to fall (by pressing down) or go back to the platform (by pressing up or the direction towards the platform).
There are four levels of difficulty, but it seems to depend to versions. From what I’ve seen in Youtube videos, the difficulties are normal, hard, extreme, zen. The version I’m using being 1.0, don’t have those, instead it has easy, normal, hard and extreme modes. Note that the last difficulty is locked, meaning you have to finish the game a first time to play it on the hardest difficulty.
So what are differences for difficulties? Not that much. The most notable one being that in easy mode you can hit multiple enemies at the same time. In harder modes enemies inflicts you more damage and might be less dumb.
When you get touched by an enemy or a trap, you get a huge recoil, which is very annoying, especially when you were near the edge of a platform (or the void). Again, being able to hang on the edge would have made this game much less frustrating.
Checkpoints are symbolized by green crystals, and you have to hit them to save your game (this is more intuitive than Klonoa’s clock bubbles (archive)). Saves don’t show you how much time you played though, only the last date and hour you saved.
But since most of the time you’re moving, when you want to hit a checkpoint the moving attack is triggered, so you can’t hit the checkpoint in that way.
What to add: quickly save the game. Do not ask on which file I want to save the game. Seems obvious to me. And restore fully the player’s health, just like in Metroid Other M, otherwise saving doesn’t help much and is just a pretext for the player to quit this fucking game and never play it again.
There are only 3 musics:
A guitar loop. It fits with the game atmosphere. You can hear in the menu, cutscenes and in some places in the game.
A more orchestral one, with an opera voice and some violins. It gives dynamicness to the game, which might give a weird vibe compared to the empty rooms and when you’re not reacting.
The boss theme. Agains it’s violins, but lower and quicker, which adapts to the stressful combats you might have.
Silence. Sometimes the music stops, and you never know if it’s a bug or not. The only time I know it’s not a bug (or a bug that appears systematically), is inside the castle, where you have to fight moving blue fireballs. Given the emptiness of some rooms, silence gives a more oppressive atmosphere.
How to fix: the music should adapt to what the protagonist does. For example, when Celia is not moving, the music might be calmer, and when there are multiple enemies (or just when a fight begins), more stressful.
Sometimes the game crashes with a freeze and an long unbearable noise. This is not the only Wii game where this happens though, come to my mind Kirby’s Return to Dream Land (which also causes a piece of music to start looping), Skylanders Trap Team (while fighting Dreamcatcher, a boss) and Monster Hunter Tri (when assigning them a wrong iOS number). I’ve seen people having crashes with Mario Kart Wii, but I never got that problem.
A bad game but I see the vision, just like Generation Retro, and with all the tips I gave I would love to see a remake. With all those corrections it might be much more fun (or I may develop it, who knows).
If you’re looking for a hard platformer/beat them up, but with clear mechanics, distinct enemies, and a fair enough difficulty so that every time you’re yelling is because of you and not the game design, try They Bleed Pixels (itch.io). The story is also about a girl who has to deal with supernatural events and creatures.
I discovered this game while I was searching “2d game that cose 5 bucks or less”.
These are links that either helped while writing this article or that I found useful enough to list them so that their trace doesn’t get deleted.