Mark C. MacKinnon

A nice flexible system designed to handle the gamut of characters that turn up in anime. BESM is not as detailed as GURPS or the Hero System, which means substituting more GM calls for bookkeeping, but that's a worthwhile price to pay.

The book has both simple and detailed rules, and offers guidelines on which rules to ditch to keep things simple and speed up play.

There's a good section on anime and its tropes, and a sample world designed to implement most of them, but one could easily use this for any setting covered by the gamut of anime power levels; there's nothing intrinsically anime about it.… (mer)

The "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" (BESM) title of this book derives from the convention in Japanese animation (anime) to have characters with these features (big eyes being a motif for expressive emotion).

But while technically intended to emulate anime, this book represents a great attempt to make a d20 based roleplaying game that can handle any setting or genre.

Through careful wording and clever adherence to the licensing agreement the authors of this book have come about the closest you can to having "point buy" character creation system and still officially call a game "d20".

One minor gripe is that it's not possible to duplicate the existing d20 players handbook character classes with the point-buy options in this book. But I don't consider that an enormous failing, just a quirk of the system.

As a side note: Some of the artwork is a bit poor, but I also found a fair amount inspirational and evocative of various genres. You could do worse.

- Peter K.… (mer)