Masters of Anima

I can't fathom how I've queued up so many RTS games for myself, considering how I tend to dislike them. Feels like every 5th game is an RTS, in disguise or otherwise. Today's personal disappointment is Masters of Anima. Despite not giving it too long of a shot after I figured out it's an RTS, and not something magnificent enough to pique my interest, I can still give a more or less objective description of what it is, and what it maybe does well. The usual treatment then.

Masters of Anima tries to be many things. It's mostly an RTS, I would say, but it mixes in a good amount of ARPG, Story, and Puzzles. (And on a side note, ARPGs aside, I'm rather opposed to all of these in games. Woe is me.)
The meat of the game is summoning different units, sending them to attack different things, or do other things, such as interacting with the environment to shape it. A seasoned RTS player would be alienated and disgusted by the inefficiency of the control scheme of this game, but I don't find it so bad for the more casual type of game it is. The content of the game is nicely shaped to provide incentive to split your troops and have them perform different tasks, much like teaching you the basics of playing an RTS, especially from the viewpoint of a PC-centric player. For what it does, it seems well made at least, so I can't objectively criticize it there.
The ARPG elements come through a personal character you control via the usual WASD movement system, upgrades you can get yourself over the course of the game, and map exploration. Speaking of maps, they are rather large, but overall the game is still level-based.
The story is the usual boring unoriginal tra... I mean, not to my liking. I've a high standard for storytelling in games, and very few games (with actual gameplay) indeed have had stories I would consider passable, let alone good. So make of my opinion what you will. It's got full voice acting though.
And finally, the puzzles are the kind of casual stuff I've come to expect from "puzzle games" these days. They're a time wasting annoyance at worst, but if you consider enemy attack patterns and how to counter them a puzzle, then maybe there are redeeming puzzle aspects to this game after all.

So overall, Masters of Anima does two things wrong. More importantly, it's of a type of game I don't like. More seriously, it tries to be multiple games, the inefficiency of which I've explained many times. It's not a good RTS, it's not a good ARPG, it doesn't have a good story, and it doesn't have good puzzles. As a hybrid, I even dare say it does well, but I also dare say that most people don't care about hybrids. They want a solid experience in their selected genre, not a mediocre one in multiple ones. So that's an objective reason to not recommend it, but do keep in mind that I mainly just don't like these genres.