Anime Studio Story

excellent petit jeu, fidèle à la réputation du studio le jeu est une pépite de gameplay qui ne se termine JAMAIS !

This game has an interesting concept, but the execution falls flat. The game quickly becomes repetitive, with the same mechanics over and over. It feels more like a grind than an engaging experience. If you're a fan of Kairosoft, you might find some enjoyment in the customization, but overall, it lacks the charm and depth of their better titles.

Anime Studio Story is very similar to Game Dev Story (which inspired Game Dev Tycoon), but it has its own unique twist: making anime. You start with a small studio, invest in upgrading your staff, develop characters, and train your team to unlock new genres and sub-genres. While the core loop looks almost identical to Game Dev Story on the surface, a couple of issues stand out. The main problem lies in the character systems. The game rewards you for using the same characters across multiple shows, allowing you to level them up over time. However, character creation is restricted to the Designer role, an occupation with notoriously low stat caps compared to a Director or an Executive Director. This creates a frustrating bottleneck in a core progression system. The game expects you to cycle through jobs to level up stats and unlock new roles, but this restriction directly inhibits that loop. To get around it, I had to temporarily reclass a high-stat employee into a Designer to create a character, then immediately reclass them back, costing a significant amount of money both ways. On top of that, spamming a single high-stat character is heavily rewarded, which completely disincentivizes creating new ones. In reality, many iconic anime feature a protagonist for just one series. Forcing players to reuse the same character over and over isn't fun, nor does it feel true to the medium. The achievement design is equally questionable. To unlock the final achievement, you must: a) Build a Kairobot Statue b) Unlock the Kairo TV Station (requires maxing out relations with all other stations and reaching Year 28) c) Level up the Apartments theme to Level 5 d) Reach over 15 million max viewers The game never states these requirements or even hints at them, which feels like poor design. Ultimately, Anime Studio Story is worthy of a casual playthrough, but it isn't worth full price. Given its flaws, it is much better grabbed on a 50% off or deeper sale. The core loop can be fun, but Game Dev Story is simply the better, more enjoyable game overall. I got this for about 80% off, making it great value.