Anima: Beyond Fantasy - anyone played it?

[Townopolis]

What's it like? I saw it in Borders today, but knowing nothing of it deterred me from buying it, you know, not having scads of money to gamble on unknown RPG systems and all.

What I saw of the inside suggested it's horribly complicated with numbers that should generally be divided by 10 before use, it also looked like the rules made a lot of fine distinctions between things such as a glaive and a naginata, or between two similar martial arts.

So, it looks horribly complicated, but has anyone actually played it?

[Starsinger]

It's so funny you of all people would ask. I've picked up a copy of it, due to recommendation by SweetRein. And since I'm bullying my RL group into playing I should be able to tell ya how it goes in a week or so...

[NPCMook]

I don't quite understand fumbles, still reading through Character Creation. Overall, looks kind of interesting

[Drascin]

Well, I have it (bought it in an anime con), I've read a lot of it, I even bought a fluff sourcebook of it. It's a good read, very interesting. And it's well-presented.

Then I tried a couple sessions of it. And yes, at least for me, it's way too complicated. The character creation is both by class/level and points, which kinda undermines the point of each, there are tables for lots of stuff, each armor has different "AC" against each kind of attack... generally, it's very interested in the kind of details I'm used to gloss over.

Maybe for people used to more complex games like Rolemaster it's not that bad, but at least for me, used mainly to D&D and Tri-Stat, it just gets into unneccessarily complex territory at times.

Also, maybe I just understood the rules wrong, but at least in our sessions, balance seemed to be rather wonky.