Before I started something else longer once more, I decided to play through this odd little fighting game I came across. I actually originally bought this to stream on Twitch at some point, but after realizing that it both has no story and that I'm fuck-awful at it, that seemed like a less ideal use for it XD. I ended up just playing through it myself a few times on the easiest difficulty to unlock the characters and see what the final boss was like to play as. I played it on real hardware and I spent about 3.5 hours with it in total~.
This game really has no story to speak of. There's the slightest pretense of this alien invader thing that's drawing all of these universes or somewhat together, but to the best I can tell it's entirely in the manual. All you'll find in the actual game is a mysterious cutscene at the start informing you this boss exists, and another at the end informing you that there are still many more than the one you beat. It's not a complaint, given this is just a fighting game from 1998, but I still would've liked little story modes for the characters, even if that wasn't the most common thing in the world for a fighting game at the time. The gameplay is where more or less all the content here is, and it's a Virtual On-style 3D mech fighting game~. Two third-person perspective robots enter, one will leave! Now I've never actually played Virtual On, so I can only kinda guess at how this controls compared to that, but given that this was designed for a normal PS1 controller (no analog controls here, despite the year it was released) and not the twin-stick setup that Virtual On has, I assume they're at least a little different. The game's controls are the bit I had the hardest time getting used to. You have a square button, a ranged attack button, a melee attack button, and a boost button to boost in whatever way you're holding the D-pad at the moment you boost. Holding R2 or L2 to spin the camera while you boost will keep the camera not spinning, but locked on your target, and you'll need this because you really never wanna not be boosting (because standing still means death). You really need that lack of control during boosting, because, not unlike Smash Bros., what direction you're holding on the D-pad indicates which variant of your melee and ranged attacks you'll actually do, so to do the side-hold ranged attack but not actually move to the side, you'll wanna be boosting. The block feature can be used as a dash cancel, and you can also press R1 to jump, but I never really got the hang of that. With the jumping in particular, having to use R2 and L2 to be my constant lock on buttons meant that my fingers were rarely free to think about hitting R1 or L1 (L1 very confusingly being a duck button, though I have no idea why you'd want to ever use that). Circle strafing around people and avoiding bashing into the walls of the stage as best I could was my best strategy, but even then I ran into trouble just with how the game is balanced. Some characters (particularly the final boss, unsurprisingly) are just outright better than others, and the game's balance is not that great. Being able to fire projectiles with less cooldown (like the final boss can really disgustingly well) is your winning strategy, as melee was always far too fiddly to be worth it (though the payoff is certainly pretty impressive). I imagine someone better at fighting games than me could delve deep enough into these systems to get a much better idea on exactly how useless or not melee is compared to ranged attacks, but for me, I thought the mechanics as a whole were OK. Controlling it is awkward enough that I think most people save for those already interested in the Super Robot Wars-esque crossover nature of the game will probably be turned off at them and just play Virtual On instead <w>. The aesthetics of the game are quite good for a 1998 PS1 game. Loading times aren't too long, and the 3D models are generally pretty good likenesses of their original mechs, though there is some very noticeable clipping with models and flickering of polygons present. The music is also pretty darn good in how they recreate the original themes of the shows, though there are some confusing music choices. The absolute banger of a main theme of Metal Armor Dragonar isn't used, and I actually have no idea what song they're using for that. The SRX team, Banpresto's original characters introduced in Shin SRW a couple years earlier, have their second ever appearance here as well, but very confusingly their main theme isn't used for them at all. The music used for them is some super forgettable entirely original thing, and it's absolutely baffling to me why they didn't just use the main SRX theme for this game, a theme Banpresto definitely have and have the rights to, for any of their own original characters. At the very least, I certainly appreciated the choice to have all 4 unlockable characters be original ones and not the licensed ones, so anyone buying this game based on a guy they saw on the cover would be able to pick up and play him immediately~. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I'd like to give this a higher recommendation, but I'm not really confident in my ability to judge fighting games enough to judge it mechanically, and the aesthetics and story aren't enough to hold things up otherwise. I think this is a perfectly fine game and a good time if you want super robot-y goodness but in a Virtual On-shaped package, and you really barely need any Japanese ability at all to be able to enjoy it as well. Pack that in with how the 4 unlockable characters (giving you a roster of 11) are unlocked with passwords, not gameplay, and you have something that's super easy to just hop into and mess around with if you want some crossover fighting game fun, even if it's not the easiest thing to control~.
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The last SRW game I was able to get to this year, and one I originally never intended to actually get to! A is the 2nd game in the series developed by AI, the same guys who made the N64 SRW I played much earlier in the year and really didn't care for. I also disliked their mid-2000's GameCube game so much that I barely made it a stage into that one, so I'd quite comfortably written off their entire line of games as just so inferior to the Banpresto and WinkySoft ones that I've played that I'd never play them. My friend recently tried out the PSP remake of A, however, and found it so tough and miserable that I just had to give the GBA original a look and see how it compared to the PSP version and just the games in general. I played the game in Japanese and it took me nearly a month to beat, as is usual for these games, so I reckon it took me about 70 or 80 hours or so (as this is yet another game to add to the pile of ones that don't count playtime at all XP).
The story of A is a bit of a weird one for a SRW game. While a lot of the SRW games by the year 2001 (as this is a super early GBA game) had multiple protagonists, or at least multiple avatars you could pick from, as well as a super robot or real robot for them, this one gives you multiples of both. You can pick a male or female character, and both of them can pick from two choices of real or super robot. The story is also relatively different for each character (with the unpicked one appearing as an antagonist with a personality quite different from their player character version), and I picked Lamia in a super robot for this one. There are a few new additions to the series in this game as far as represented licenses go, but the most noticeable one by far is Martian Successor Nadesico. This is written by a different guy than the N64 game was, but while this game solves the issue of being quite so humorless and boring with its writing, it sadly does not solve the problem of just how much bloat there is in the text (and the quite significant number of Nadesico characters present really don't help with that). It's not so much that the dialogue is bad or unnatural, so much as there's just too much of it. They could really have used an editor poking them in the shoulder to just get to the point faster, because some of the between-mission VN-style story bits can drag on for absolutely ages (and I'm talking like 15 or 25 minutes of reading in some cases, and that isn't entirely just because I can't read Japanese as fast as I can read English XP). Overall I quite liked the writing as a whole, but that feeling of "god damn, please wrap this up a little faster" definitely dragged everything down in a way I really wasn't too hot with. Mechanically, it's a fair bit of stuff back from the N64 game with some new odd bits thrown in here and there. The overall regular features of a SRW game from this time are still here as usual. FE-type SRPG gameplay with pilots who level up independent from money-upgraded mechs, some pilots can swap mechs, and individually upgradable weapons with cash (as while Banpresto dropped that feature, AI hung onto it for quite some time). All that goodness. There are some things a little odd for this point in the series though. Enemies with just absolutely bullshit levels of abilities like endure or parry, something that Banpresto had chucked in the can several years earlier, are here in spades and suuuuper annoying from the game's midpoint. The lack of the ability to skip attack animations is also very heavily mourned, at least by me Xp. Thankfully, this game is at least without really unfair reinforcements messing things up for you all the time at least. There's also the odd and unique feature of this game using shields not as an chance-activated skill like parry, but as an extra health bar of sorts that depletes before your actual health. Not a bad feature per se, but not exactly a good one either, and I'm glad it's gone after this. Another interesting note is that with the way this game does its random seeds, save-loading for better results is actually impossible, as even on real hardware, loading your quicksave will get you the exact same result if you just do the same thing again. Combo-attacks that can be done when certain units are adjacent are also back from the N64 game, and it's gonna be your main method of dealing out punishment for most of the game, particularly if you're trying to take down bosses who retreat once they get past a certain limit of HP. Overall, the level design is pretty darn good, but there just aren't a lot of them. The story is only 39 missions long, and there are very few route splits, and when there are, they're generally quite short. The total mission count is also quite low as a result of this, but that's pretty easy to overlook for what's effectively a GBA launch title (and just how long the cutscenes are make up for the playtime of that lack of missions pretty well too ;b). Aesthetically, the game looks really nice for a game for being SUCH an early GBA game. Animations aren't exactly as nice as the PS1 games coming out around that time, but it's still close enough to be very impressive for what little memory they're working with. That said, there are a few very odd and conspicuous color choices that are just obviously wrong, and I can only really chalk them up to some color limitation. It's not a big problem, but things like the captain of the Nadesico's hair being light purple instead of the royal blue it is in the show are pretty big things that are very hard to miss, so it felt work mentioning. Music is pretty good too, but it's very GBA. It's a pretty steep downgrade from the CD-based games of the time, but it's also pretty hard to meaningfully complain about that. It *is* just a GBA after all, and they're still pretty darn good versions of these songs for the tools they're working with. The most uncanny part of it all is just how much of this game's sound font sound *so* much like the one that GameFreak would use for the 3rd gen Pokemon games a couple years later, so it's very odd and amusing hearing the Getter Robo theme played with such similar sounding "instruments" at least XD Verdict: Recommended. It's not a masterwork, and doesn't really hold a candle to anything Banpresto was doing at the time, but it's still remarkable a step up enough from the N64 title that it's made me very interested in playing AI's other portable titles. It's a damn impressive little adventure for such an early GBA game, and you'd almost never guess how early it was if there weren't another like five GBA SRW games after it XD. If you can read Japanese and want some good SRW action on the go, this is a choice that's tough but not too tough that you'll probably have a pretty darn good time with ^w^ |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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