Anaksha Female Assassin

From the ashes will arise a pure and virtuous angel, wearing a crown of fire upon her head and carrying a bright white star in her right hand. She will speak with a voice of thunder, and will be feared by both men and demons alike.

—Unknown Indian Philosopher and Astrologer, 400 AD

What separates a vigilante from a criminal? I've asked myself this question many times. Yet I don't know the answer. I only know what I stand for...and what I believe in.

—Anaksha

A Flash game series created by Arif Majothi, Anaksha focuses on a vigilante assassin who takes down the scum of the society of Santa Lina, one of the most corrupt cities in the US.

In the first major game, Anaksha: Female Assassin, Anaksha starts by targeting domestic abusers, but slowly widens her net, and in doing so makes the city safer. When the man whose act of evil first encouraged her to start her crusade resurfaces, Anaksha becomes determined to take him down.

The first game is followed by three Mini-Adventures, which are more graphical adventure games than assassin games like the first game. They work on a standard Chain of Deals setup and explore Anaksha's character a bit more. In the first Mini-Adventure, A Sea of Fire, Anaksha is charged with finding and killing the dangerous owner of a club while helping various people out along the way. The second Mini-Adventure, A New Threat, focuses on Anaksha's quest to get to the bottom of the trade of a new drug that is sweeping through the Hell's Cats district of Santa Lina like wildfire. In addition, there's another short Mini-Adventure, Quick Stop, that acts as an interquel between A Sea of Fire and A New Threat, where Anaksha has to make a pit stop and get on the phone with her contact, which proves a bit tougher than it sounds.

The just-released official second installment, Anaksha: Dark Angel, has Anaksha, known to the media as the "Virgo Killer," in perhaps her most epic adventure yet as she is framed for the murder of an innocent teenager and must find a way to clear her name in addition to finding a kidnapped orphan and putting a stop to a deadly drug epidemic sweeping Santa Lina.

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Tropes used in Anaksha Female Assassin include:

• All There in the Manual: There are large game manuals with descriptions of characters and places on Anaksha's official site. Also, Anaksha has a Twitter account.
• Anti-Hero: Anaksha is a vigilante assassin who targets the corrupt and Pays Evil Unto Evil, making her a straight up Type IV on the Sliding Scale of Anti-Heroes.
• Author Avatar: In "A New Threat" there is a British Indian hanging out in a nightclub. He is a programmer who wants to create his own game website. His name is Arif.
• Blondes Are Evil: Rose.
• Badass Boast/Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Anaksha's awesome speech after coming out of her Ten-Minute Retirement:

This is my promise to all you sick bastards who have turned this city into a hellhole! All you parasites who've abused the system for your own gain; abused people for your own pleasure -- retribution has arrived! Go ahead. Run and hide, bury your cowardly heads in the ground; I swear I'll hunt you down and show you the mercy you deserve -- none! The angel of death is here...and your punishment is due!

• Bad Cop, Incompetent Cop: Most of the cops of Santa Lina are either incompetent at their job (such as Sam Mitchell, who Anaksha nicknames "Chief Wiggum") or utterly corrupt bastards (such as the four Dirty Cops that Anaksha takes down before the final mission).
• Based on a True Story: Arif has stated that some of the plot elements in "Female Assassin" were inspired by true stories - in particular, the story of a girl sold in a marriage is something that happened to one of his friends. Ouch...
• Big Bad: Vincent St. Claire. His drug dealing was foreshadowed as far back as mission 4, and it's his actions that start Anaksha on her quest.
• Black and Grey Morality: The police are useless, and the only one who has the power to challenge the monsters is a vigilante assassin with mental issues.
• Boom! Headshot!: Anaksha's preferred method of offing her targets. Since most people in Santa Lina wear body armor because of the rampant gun crime, this is justified.
• Can't Kill You - Still Need You: In the beginning of "Dark Angel", Anaksha has to keep the drug-dealer alive to torture him for information.
• Chain of Deals: The general format of the Mini-Adventures. Anaksha even lampshades it at the beginning of A New Threat:

Anaksha: *sigh* Here we go again on another treasure hunt! Find this, give it to him, find that, give it to her. Story of my freakin' life!

• Chekhov's Gun: The lighter Slug sells to Jack is a literal example of this trope.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Quite a few of Anaksha's targets engage in this.
• Cold Sniper: The main character.
• Crapsack World: Santa Lina starts out as this, but after Anaksha takes down the serial killer in Mission 9, and Vincent St. Claire in the final level, things finally start to get better.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Sarah, the teenage wife of one of your targets, dies perhaps the most horrible death of any of the victims of Anaksha's targets.
• Cult: The Children of the Pyramid Cube, whose leaders want to organize a mass suicide of their members, including children and babies. Their lunacy is largely inspired by Time Cube.
  • In the Mini-Adventure "A New Threat," you meet a lunatic who is apparently a member of the cult in question, who goes on about "truth mucus" and how circles are the devil.
• Dark Action Girl: Anaksha may well be the poster girl. Rose also qualifies.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Anaksha is haunted by her failure to save her friend from Vincent St. Claire. When Anaksha defeats St. Claire in the final level, she finally moves on.
• Dirty Cop: Anaksha kills four of them who have been destroying evidence for St. Claire, as well as gang-raping a 13-year-old girl in their patrol vehicle and getting her sent to prison on a false drug possession charge.
• Domestic Abuser: Anaksha's early targets are these, often brutalizing and/or out-and-out murdering their significant others.
• Driven to Suicide: The victim of the first three child-rapists Anaksha is charged with taking down.
• Dumb Blonde: Both played straight and inverted with Dee. She is a computer genius, but it takes her a while to finally pass the driving test.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Anaksha, and the whole city, earn this after Anaksha takes down St. Claire (who happens to be one of the most powerful crime bosses in the whole city.)
• Film Noir
• Frame-Up: Anaksha is targeted with one of these in Dark Angel.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: In Anaksha's case, stuffed monkeys, as revealed in the Mini-Adventures.
• Gorn: Many of Anaksha's killings, especially later on, fall under this. And that's not even speaking of what the Serial Killer she takes down likes to do to his victims.
• Hypocrite: In "Female Assassin", Anaksha takes down a man who is known for his preachings of good behaviour and sexual abstinence, but who also blows his cash on teenage hookers and drinks in his spare time, then comes home to beat seven shades of hell out of his family. Then in "Dark Angel" you have "a firebrand preacher" - a highly religious man who loves to engage in petty theft, arson and having sex with his 11-year-old granddaughter.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The Serial Killer that Anaksha takes down.
• Ironic Death: The Hispanic gangster begs Anaksha not to shoot him. So she throws him out of the window, not even bothering to open it.
• Kick the Dog: Every one of your targets has done something heinous or horrific to wind up on Anaksha's hit list.
  • In "Quick Stop," Tracy rats out Melissa, her co-worker, to their boss, about letting Anaksha use their store's bathroom which is reserved for employees only -- technically "following the rules," but most likely done out of spite and still a Jerkass thing to do under the circumstances, particularly since Melissa has two pre-school age kids to support and the boss puts her into the bind of having to write an apology letter to keep her job, which could get her fired anyway with no grounds for a lawsuit.
• Karmic Death: What happens to the man who intended to kill Jack.
• Kill It with Fire: Eamon and Cal do this to both Sarah and her cat. Alive.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Vincent, your final target, wears headgear that renders him immune to your Boom! Headshot!. You need to Shoot the Rope above a set of heavy steel girders to crush him and take him out once and for all.
• Meaningful Name: Anaksha's company is named 'Zaranna." This is a combination of "Zara" (Anaksha's friend whose death sent her on the vigilante's road) and "Anna" (short for "Anaksha").
• Mentor: Anaksha has one in Edward, her adoptive grandfather, whom she calls "BabaJi," and who taught her how to use the sniper rifle.
• Mission Control: Anaksha gains one of these in D, a computer expert and granddaughter of a guy who Edward fought alongside during the war.
• Off with His Head: Several of Anaksha's later missions require her to decapitate a target with her sniper rifle.
• Panty Thief: Anaksha gets to take one (of a genuinely dangerous kind) down.
• Pay Evil Unto Evil: As a vigilante assassin, this kind of thing is par for the course for Anaksha.
• Potty Emergency: Anaksha is in the middle of one at the start of Quick Stop.
• Pretty Little Headshots: AVERTED. When Anaksha snipes somebody off, it is not pretty. Especially when she gets her hands on Edward's new "Hellhound" ammo, which can make people's heads a splode.
• Rape as Drama: Quite a few of Anaksha's targets have raped people, with the worst of them (such as her first three-man hit and the four Dirty Cops that cover for St. Claire) doing it to children.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: And child rape even more so.
• Religion of Evil: "Children of Pyramid Cube" look like this. Also, in "Dark Angel" four of Anaksha's targets are the followers of the cult which requires drinking animal and human blood.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Anaksha first targets abusive husbands, child rapists and other assorted scumbags, but after St. Claire resurfaces, she spends the entire 3rd act disrupting his operations before finally taking him down in the final mission.
• Serial Killer: One of the targets, Edward Riley, is a cannibalistic serial killer. He's murdered, skinned and eaten at least forty people, all of them hookers. He is the first target who you get to give a true Your Head Asplode treatment to, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving piece of work.
• A Simple Plan: All Anaksha wants to do in Quick Stop is go to the bathroom and call D. While getting the former is relatively simple, getting the latter proves to be the harder task, particularly since her cellphone is dead and the pay phone has been vandalized.
• Shout-Out: The entire Pyramid Cube cult is a shout-out to Time Cube, what with the talk about "educated stupid" and such.
• Slashed Throat: How several of Anaksha's targets have murdered people.
• Sobriquet: Anaksha is known as the "Virgo Killer" after someone snapped a picture of her shoulder tattoo of the Zodiac symbol Virgo during the game. Interestingly, everyone seems to believe the Virgo Killer to be a man, and Anaksha does nothing to disprove such speculations.
• Straight Edge: Anaksha doesn't smoke, doesn't drink and doesn't do drugs. She's also not too fond of porn in general, and the only ink on her is the Virgo symbol on her left shoulder.
• Ten-Minute Retirement: Anaksha nearly suffers a breakdown after she thought she killed an innocent man. Edward helps set her straight on what he really was, however.
• Vigilante Woman: Anaksha.
• Villainous Breakdown: The reason Vincent St. Claire tries to obliterate his school is because Anaksha has seriously damaged his operations, and made it harder for him to conceal them. The bogus email he sent to the police and the media in the name of the Virgo Killer flat out shows that Anaksha "made his blood boil."
• Weapon of Choice: Most of Anaksha's killings are done with a sniper rifle, but during the Mini-Adventures, she also uses a .45 Automatic.
• Wretched Hive: The city of Santa Lina, especially the Hell's Cats district.
• Your Head Asplode: After the first five missions, Anaksha gets her hands on some new bullets from Edward that can do this to her targets. Certain missions require you to asplode a target's head in a certain way. For example: one mission dealing with a crazy cult requires you to destroy the leader's brain so that the cult has nothing to preserve.