SPY x ANYA: Operation Memories Review – A Lot of Everything, Little of Substance

What are your favorite tie-in games? Is it perhaps SpongeBob SquarePants Battle for Bikini Bottom with its multitude of references to the show, detailed character models, and decent platforming? Or perhaps it’s Dragon Ball FighterZ with its heavy emphasis on team-based combo mechanics and flashy abilities rivaled only by the show itself? Or perhaps your favorite is today’s subject: Spy X Anya: Operation Memories, for Switch, PlayStation, and PC platforms. Today’s review will be on the Steam version of the game, provided with DLC by Bandai Namco on launch day. I would say that I’m a relatively light fan of the show, only having watched about one season of it with some friends.

Overall, I love the cute antics that Anya gets the family into as well as the political drama that can show up with the parents. That is all to say: I’m not sure I’m the demographic for this game. I certainly enjoy the show and the various gags produced because of it, but one thing I am not a fan of is life sim games similar to Animal Crossing. It’s fair to say a large number of people reading this played some amount of Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the lockdown. Building your town how you like it, talking to NPC villagers, doing little tasks for rewards to build up your town and make it something truly your own. That’s the demographic and vibe this game goes for. I even put 150 hours into New Horizons because what else were we going to do? It’s fair to say that going into this, I was not expecting anything high octane. After seeing it announced in a Nintendo Direct, it was clear this would primarily be a game targeting the Switch’s casual audience and that’s most prevalent in the gameplay. Worth noting to the uninitiated:  the show’s primary genre is comedy. There are a few moments of things like blood, but for the most part the show and the game are pretty safe. There’s no blood like the show occasionally had and the dialogue is as barebones as can be.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself—let’s talk about the gameplay. What are we doing in Spy X Anya? I wish the answer was simple, but this game has a lot going on. I’m going to explain one cycle of gameplay and you tell me if that’s something you will want to do for over 100 hours. (That’s rhetorical, please do not tell me.) Also don’t worry about the story, in the 20 hours I played hardly any of it was spent on delivering some kind of narrative. You get a basic premise for why you’re doing the tasks that you are and not much else.

Upon selecting a new game I was immediately greeted with a tutorial on basic camera control in video games. The first screen of the game after the title screen is something Super Mario 64 taught you through an optional signpost 30 years ago. Let that speak for what the demographic of this game is. You are going to be taking pictures of Anya and the family in various happenings. It might be playing with a bubble blower at the park, seeing fish at the aquarium, dressing up and putting on a mini fashion show for Yor, and more. It’s very cute and the writing, while basic, can be pretty fun. You even get occasional interstitials after beating a few “story missions” where you might get a funny gag with drawn art. But these are just the outings, what about the rest of the game? In between these outings that you plan out are events where you, take more pictures of things around the house or the school, and play the same 15 minigames remixed in various ways. Oh, and I hope you like very basic dialogue sequences because that is most of what you’ll be doing in this game.

You might be a bit confused why my review for what is essentially Animal Crossing for Spy X Family fans is already wordy despite being such a basic game. I wish I knew how to better convey just how confused I am about this game. This game has you grinding, a lot. Animal Crossing has a built-in stopping point where you can’t do everything in one day and the only way to do everything in a single day is to change the internal clock to cheat the in-game schedule. Anya does not have anything like that. It’s a calendar system, but you just have a set amount of days between outings and those days are filled with pictures of the apartment, school, and the minigames. There are about 2 to 4 days between each outing so you have to play a lot of these. To give some credit where it’s due, some of these minigames involve you playing as Loid or Yor in sections vaguely reminiscent of what they do in the show. Loid has you patrolling large museum-like structures, hunting down paintings, and avoiding enemy patrols. Yor’s minigames, however, are just We Have Dynasty Warriors At Home. There’s no other way to put it, you are just mashing the attack button for waves of goons. It’s pretty boring, even with the raffle ticket challenges which is an entirely different mechanic used to unlock more costumes. Almost everything in the game is a loop back to the outings and the costumes you wear during said outings.

There’s clearly some kind of attempt here to add a lot of variety to the game, but unfortunately a lot of it becomes repetitive because it has you beat the same minigame multiple times to unlock new versions of that one minigame. So if I want to unlock a larger facility with different level design in the Loid minigame, I need to play the first level three separate times, each of which costs some kind of in-game currency (no microtransactions to be seen) and you only get about 3 or 4 minigame attempts before you have to finish for that day. It all feeds into this loop of take pictures at the outing, plan your next outing, take pictures at the apartment, play mini games to unlock currency for costumes in the store, go to school, take pictures at school, go back home to take more pictures, play more minigames to unlock more costumes, and go on your next outing. Repeat ad nauseam. This is a game meant to be played over the span of dozens of hours. You’ll get some fun dialogue every now and then, the game even made me chuckle on occasion, but what’s here is incredibly basic so trying to cram 20 hours of gameplay into about a week for review just had me getting kind of bored of the game honestly. This is of course coming from someone who understands gaming a lot more than the average parent or guardian might. I’m just kind of curious who this game appeals to, because most games that are anime tie-ins will appeal to gamers in some way. People who are already in the know on those IP. But I don’t see my sisters or anyone paying $50 along with DLC cosmetics for a game that literally doesn’t end.

I don’t think this section may matter to most people, but for those curious about the PC version’s specs I’m currently rocking a 3080 TI with 32 GB of RAM. My system was made for Elden Ring at max settings, not Spy X Anya. The PC version is held together by duct tape and dreams. The Vsync option is hidden among the framerate options so if you set this game to 60fps, there’s just constant screen tearing on the PC. Even after fixing the frame rate issues by switching to Vsync, I eventually switched over to playing exclusively on my Steam Deck and it looks a thousand times better. This is a game made for smaller handheld screens and not 4K TVs. Also, the game uses the rightmost face button to confirm and the bottom face button to cancel, regardless of what controller you’re using. Without in-game button mapping, I needed to either get accustomed to the odd layout or change it through the Steam Input menu. My Xbox controller’s B button being confirm was rather disorienting despite being used to Nintendo controls.

I think it’s fair to say that Spy X Anya is for a very specific crowd of people. If you like Animal Crossing and you love the Forger household along with some of their compatriots, this is probably the game for you. You might play a pretty decent chunk of it like I did, and get your money’s worth. But honestly I can only recommend picking this up on sale. What’s here is perfectly functional yet barebones and I don’t think that’s enough to rate it highly. With over 32-story missions, 49 side missions, and 51 challenge missions, you have a lot of game to enjoy if this sounds appealing to you. Or maybe giving Yor a ponytail for the entire game gives you gender euphoria and that makes Spy X Anya the perfect game.

 

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