Specifically, the four Gungriffon games that have graced multiple consoles over the years. These games pre-date From Software’s perennial Armored Core series but due to a number of factors, both cultural and financial, the games have never quite garnered the appreciation they so sorely deserved.

This is not to say that the Gungriffon games haven’t been critically lauded over the years but they haven’t reached the broader appeal that something like Heavy Gear did for instance, despite both series sharing similar base rulesets for the mecha. Amusingly, the design of mecha themselves has often been mistakenly attributed to be Western in origin, despite the obvious linkages to Ryosuke Takahashi’s VOTOMS series, something that again Heavy Gear shares. As such, we’ll delve into the series as a whole and examine what has made these games remain such a cult hit.

Gungriffon (Saturn)

In March of 1996, a new kind of mecha game was released to the world. Set in the first person, the player worked within the cockpit of an Armored Walking Gun System (or AWGS) mecha as they traversed massive battle fields also teeming with similar enemy units. As Saturn games went Gungriffon was graphically particularly advanced for the time and, despite a moderate learning curve with the controls, quite tactile too. Heavily inspired by the functional parameters seen in VOTOMS, the AWGS mecha in Gungriffon utilised rollers in their feet but unlike the AT’s in VOTOMS could also fly for a short period as well.

Unlike Virtual On, which was then 6 months away from a console release, Gungriffon was a very straightforward and direct mecha game. Where the player basically just had to point and shoot for the most part. However, unlike a standard approach to an FPS, the mecha retained their mass and subsequent momentum. Managing the additional roller and flight elements also added an extra layer of depth as well.

On paper, this sounds like an instant gaming hit and it had also gotten the drop on the first Armored Core by a good 18 months. In addition, it received a swift release across the world. So what went wrong?

The main issue with the original Gungriffon’s lack of sales was mostly down to the console it was released on. Despite all of its graphical veneer and functional prowess, the Saturn’s lack of popularity left the first Gungriffon almost dead on arrival. It garnered a selection of very positive reviews though and the Western press, for once, actually appreciated what the game was trying to achieve. However, the more mainstream gamers failed to take stock of the game’s existence. This was especially true outside of Japan.

Gungriffon II (Saturn)

Released two years later, Gungriffon II had a long list of improvements in the form of additional control features as well as 4 player multiplayer (if you linked your Saturn’s together). From the optional usage of Virtual On’s twinsticks to the ability for two players to control one AWGS. GameArts added a fair amount to the already existing game. Unfortunately, the game hadn’t moved on graphically at all and some even thought the game had regressed visually. This significantly harmed the game in terms of sales in Japan, though it still retained a favourable critical response in light of its functional improvements.

Ultimately though, the game remained as taut as its previous offering but unlike the previous game this iteration wasn’t published by GameArts. Instead ESP stepped in and covered off the financial backing. This might explain why it was rushed to release, as ESP probably wanted to make good on their investment before the Dreamcast was released later in the year. This would have explained the obvious lack of visual polish prior to release. This wouldn’t be the first time that a separate publisher sullied the Gungriffon series either.

Gungriffon Blaze (PlayStation 2)

After the lacklustre sales of the Saturn games, GameArts obviously decided to put Gungriffon on a console that had a greater number of units in the marketplace. Gungriffon Blaze was the game that followed this thinking and was launched on the PlayStation 2 very near to the console’s release. Admittedly, they took a gamble but the reasoning that the PlayStation 2 would follow on from the success of the original PlayStation was suitably sound at the time. They’d also put more development time into this sequel and the subsequent polish was self evident.

Consequently, Blaze did very well and not only garnered further critical acclaim but also reached gamers the prior two Saturn efforts had wholly failed to. Unfortunately, Armored Core 2 was released literally a week before Blaze in Japan so this was the first and only time the two series battled it out on the same platform. Despite it’s quality Blaze was pretty much eclipsed by Armored Core 2 on launch, which is obviously unfortunate but Armored Core had greater momentum as it had secured a bigger and more loyal fanbase in the years earlier.

That said, Blaze is possibly the finest iteration in the Gungriffon series. As its speed and responsive controls made it a truly visceral arcade experience, though some argue this was down to Capcom’s input as they published the game in Japan. It’s also one of the most accessible iterations as the controls, compared to the Saturn games at least, used dual analogue inputs. This was something that Armored Core, the Gungriffon series’ main rival, wouldn’t match for another four years until Armored Core Nexus was released.

It’s hard to fault Blaze on functional level, though there were a few annoying control issues these were mostly irrelevant after a very brief learning curve. A learning curve considerably less foreboding when compared to Armored Core 2. Yet in spite of all these obviously accessible features, Blaze still couldn’t quite make a dent in its competition.

Gungriffon Allied Strike (Xbox)

On paper, Allied Strike offered considerably more than Blaze could have ever hoped to. Online multiplayer was one major element but the player could finally utilise both a first and third person camera now too. However, Allied Strike was a completely travesty for the series.

Functionally whilst quite precise, the overall game ran very slowly. This is not to say its framerate was in any way lacking but that the AWGS’s themselves moved at a slower pace. In addition the flight controls from Blaze were quite noticeably directionally limited, as was the rolling functionality. So you were locked in more in terms of your basic movement. A lot of this may have stemmed from the new online multiplayer focus, so as to keep multiplayer matches more tactical and balanced, but the singleplayer game suffered quite noticeably as a consequence.

The most bizarre fault of Allied Strike though was how badly it looked. Considering that this was released four years after Blaze and on more potent hardware, you would expect a bit of a visual facelift. At the very least a much greater level area and draw distance, things that would actually functionally matter.

Unbelievably, Allied Strike looked worse than Blaze did for the most part and had a far shorter draw distance to boot. Again, fingers have been pointed at Tecmo as they acted as the Japanese publisher for the game and that they actively encouraged feature creep to keep the game competitive with successful Western FPS games at the time. Though in typical fashion they probably still expected GameArts to hit their release date, so again the developer focused on making the game work at the expense of the visual polish.

Allied Strike was critically panned on release, mostly down to how painfully dated it was and that the immediacy seen in Blaze was long gone. In some ways, Allied Strike tried to emulate a simulation type of approach, which didn’t really fit the series’ lineage.

It’s a sad footnote for a series that has, despite its best intentions and innate quality, been undermined by factors like the host hardware and shortsighted publishers. That said, there’s still an opportunity here for GameArts to make something more considered for this generation of consoles, as Blaze is evidence enough that the Gungriffon series can deliver. Whether they’ll seize that remains to be seen though.

Not long after this interview was conducted, Junji contacted me to let me know that he was publishing a book of his work and that could he use the interview I did. Naturally, I was happy to oblige. So the following interview is the English translation of the one you read in his book, Izmojuki Industrial Divinities.

Enjoy!

Where were you born, and what was it like growing up? What things interested you as a child and why?

I am from a town called Akishima in Tokyo. Although it is in Tokyo, Akishima was a suburban bed-town, quite a bit away from the central Tokyo. Being so far away from the centre, it was a quiet area benefited from abundant greenery and water. The environment Akishima offered was totally different from the commonly held image of Tokyo, a busy concrete jungle. Having said that, I had many opportunities to see real fighters and transport vehicles as there was the US Yokota Air Base in the neighbouring area.

When I was a child I liked anime programmes and programmes with heroes in it on TV. I also liked watching Sci-Fi films from Hollywood. I was keen on drawing/painting, so I took a painting/drawing class that was run in the neighborhood after school.

Your mecha design is very realistic in tone. Considering the very fantastical nature of much of Japanese mecha design, how and why did you come about to adopt such a style?

I think it is right in saying that the nature of Japanese mecha design is to embody what is fantastic. Mecha in anime, games, Sci-fi films in the West tend strongly towards being tools or devices “decorate” screens. On the other hand, I think mecha in Japanese anime or manga are closer to monsters or spectres, tangible but paranormal existences, in myths. Their roles are to entice people to enter into the world the stories present. In other words, they attract the third party to the world of the stories. For instance, in the Greek myth, there is an imaginary beast called Chimera. This monster has the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake, and it breathes fire. A theory says that Chimera embodies the fear for the nature, symbolizing a mountainous area where pythons, goats and a pride of lions lived at the bottom, the hillside, and the erupting mountain peak respectively. In the case of Chimera, already known pieces of information are assembled to embody the paranormal power that is felt by humanity, and this method often characterizes the myths found around the world. In Buddhism, various icons of Buddha are assembled from signs and symbols. Combining known pieces of information into a design using a stimulating or shocking manner is also a way to hand down the design to future generations. The elements for an assembly change from one era to the other, reflecting the value widely held at a time. In the case of Chimera, the elements were lions, goats and snakes; these are now the arms and constructive machinery. In this sense, what I do at Izmojuki as well as what people do to design mecha for Japanese anime or manga are doing essentially the same as the way the image of Chimera came about.

Whereas the heroes often found in the Christian world tend to be super human characters based on Jesus Christ, Japanese heroes, familiar amongst the wide age groups, tend to make them paranormally strong by relying on mecha they control. If not, robots themselves possess souls, and are regarded as something like gods. I suspect that the Japanese history has some impact on this. What I mean by history is Japan’s loss of the national religion and the subsequent change in value after the Second World War, and re-establishment of the country based on technology. However, this field has also been developed by strong support from toy companies who obviously have merchandising for boys in mind. The companies inevitably take children’s need for approval and men’s defense mechanism identification into consideration to appeal to them to encourage the consumption of toys (therefore not all can be attributed to Japanese history). As a result of toy companies’ need to appeal to boys and men, the design development seems to focus too much on appearance that leads to eccentric design. Speaking of eccentric design, this is called “keren“, the word often used in the mecha design process. The word, “keren”, was originally used in traditional Japanese art, such as kabuki or ningyojoruri, and it refers to stagecraft or directorial technique of the traditional theatre entertainment. Perhaps the national taste has some influence on the look of the design.

Having done the above research, I decided that I aim to design, based on a fundamental rule. This is to say that I assemble the characteristics of constructive machinery and industrial machinery that I am familiar with into a symbolic form to create imaginative mecha beasts that could almost exist. The realistic impression from my design shows that the assembly is done effectively, in addition to limiting “keren” as much as possible.

What other mecha designers do you respect and why?

I have been greatly influenced by Ron Cobb, Joe Johnston and Syd Mead. As I adore Hollywood Sci-Fi movies in the 80’s, such as Star Wars, perhaps it is the reason why I admire these guys. In the Japanese anime, I like the works of a director Hayao Miyazaki and Kunio Okawara. As for Mr Okawara, I like his works from the 70’s rather than the ones he has done recently. I like the monster-like designs of mobile suits for the enemies in the original Gundam series but what I think brilliant is the designs of the mecha including the enemy mecha around the time of “Time Bokan” series. I find the simplicity of the lines that even a child could manage from his vague recollection particularly attractive, and I have always tried to aim for it myself. In the field of manga, I love Masamune Shirow. Although Ghost in the Shell is better known, I personally like Orion very much.

What other mecha designs do you respect and why?

I am interested in the styles of Dunbine, Galient or Escaflowne that are all intentionally designed to look like fantasy (fantastic). This is because I can simply enjoy designing without worrying about restrictions based on realistic mechanical engineering viewpoint (having said that, the whole thing is unreal anyway).

What is your favorite mecha anime and why?

I still like AKIRA. Kaneda’s motorbike and SOL were sensational. I guess my work is influenced by this. I have not been watching anime recently so there is any particular one that I like. In fact, I am more interested in live-action films. I like gadgets in films that are fundamentally a part of a stage-set, and as such they do not claim any presence for themselves, and yet they are impressive. Good examples of these would be the devices that are used to capture the ghosts in the film “Ghost Busters,” as well as the Delorean in “Back to the Future,” and the Power Loader from “Aliens”.

What was it like working on For The Barrel? Did you feel any pressure from Kunio Okawara’s work on the original Gundam?

When the plan was brought to me, I was very very interested in it. In fact, the work process itself was very exciting, too. As I have heard that the original design of Gundam was the created after many trials and tribulations of not only Kunio Okawara, but also of Yoshiyuki Tomino and staff who were involved in Gundam at the time, the pressure was enormous. As such I started to present ideas more than 6 months prior to the commencement of the series, but the series began before the idea was totally consolidated in the end. It was after a few instalments that the design everything fell into its own place.

In what way, if any, did the original Gundam influence you in your designs for For The Barrel? Where there any other influences?

The origin of the plan was to create Gundam based on the novel without having any knowledge of original animated Gundam. Therefore I ignored original design as if it had not existed in the first place. This may be similar to the way Tim Burton produced the remake version of the Planet of the Apes. The only thing I took into consideration was the detailed technological bits that were accumulated over 20 years of Gundam culture (including building plastic models of Gundams) in realizing a robot that is 20 metres tall.

The “machining skins” and other ships in For The Barrel again look very realistic, how did you approach the design of these?

Unlike existing Gundam, there was no need to consider merchandising aspects with For The Barrel. The aim was to purely draw scenes that were in the novel more effectively and dramatically without being restricted by signifiers that were particular to Gundam. For instance, the robot equivalent to Zaku is described to be a single eyed giant in the novel. So I began to create it based on that information alone. I then came up with the logic that a gigantic humanoid arm should potentially give the sense of fear to the enemy, I decided to base this one eyed giant on the form of a Cyclops in Greek Myth. The shape of feet like artiodactyls was adopted from Cyclops in a film called The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. This is a homage to Ray Harryhausen. In order to express wiliness of the Zeon Army, I designed lines based on hammerhead shark. Inorganic eyes are also taken from the image of sharks. The robot of the federal army that is equivalent to Gundam, on the other hand, was designed as the fighters in the space with the addition of parts that are like arms and legs. The ideas for parts came about so that the robot may change directions by action-reaction forces based on mass transfer not by rockets. “The accidental humanoid” was the image I was trying to achieve. In addition, I made the color of the body of this robot white as it is nicknamed “white devil” by the Zeon in the novel. In the case of classic Gundam (and the Gundam series that is still continuing), mecha were designed with the elements from the simple moral of the robot anime heavily bearing merchandising into consideration. However, in For the Barrel, I designed the federation army robot to make it obvious that it is indeed a weapon as threatening as the Zaku. In addition, I restricted it to be a part of stage-set to make real protagonists stand out more. This was very experimental.

As for the battle ships, the setting was the first era when the war in the space was made. Therefore, I designed them thinking that they were converted forcefully from spaceship that had been originally built for transportation and carrying goods, as I recall.

How did you get involved with Capcom’s Tekki and Tekki Taisen games?

It started off with my receiving an e-mail from Hifumi Kouno who looked at Izmojuki’s website. I did not quite know what Tekki would be like at the planning stage. I had nothing to do with Tekki Taisen though. The new VTs were designed by Capcom staff based on my design.

How did you approach the design of the Vertical Tanks (VT), was it a difficult process?

It was Mr Kawano’s idea to call tanks as Vertical Tanks, and the word already existed when the plan was brought to me. Therefore the motif I used was what VTs literally mean, tanks that can stand upright. I remember starting off with Decider that is in a way a main protagonist machine. To use lines which spread out from the centre of the chest is one of the most common designs found among the main mecha, and Decider is designed based on that. I also adopted a design from Japanese Samurai armor. When Decider transforms the attached arms on its arms to store them, they look like samurai with his sward around the waist. As it happens when I was working on VTs, I was working on For The Barrel as well. So I used the same approach to VTs in that unless it had special meaning, heroic decorations or colorings were eliminated.

What I found difficult was to come up with the way for VTs to stand up again when they fall. It would be solved if VTs had arms but that would make them look increasingly like humans and therefore unrealistic. In the end I made a compromise with the function of getting them up as it was a game after all. The 20 meter tall arms with turbine engines that stand and walk would not be able to fight once they fall, to begin with. It was such a dilemma, having to decide what should be the emphasis of VTs; the dramatic nature of the game, reality as a machine, or visually attractive design.

Considering the uniquely large controller Tekki needed, was this taken into account in your design of the VTs and did you have any say in the design of the controller itself?

I knew that there was going to be a controller right from the start, at the planning stage. I thought, then, that the controller was going to be the main feature and that the simulation element was going to be involved in the game, making it important design VTs as a vehicle rather than a hero robot with which a player needs to identify with. Although I was not involved in designing the controller, I was informed of rough ideas for buttons and levers the controller would have. So I reflected them on the design of the controller.

What is your favourite mecha game and why?

I love the Metroid series. I am not good at games in which one gets onto a robot and takes control of it, such as Gungriffon or Armored Core. To tell you the truth, I have not played Tekki much.

Your sister site, The Eight Bit Fighters, displays old ships from classic shoot-em-ups rendered in CG. What motivated you to start a project such as this? Do you have any intention to continue it? Would you ever undertake a Sixteen Bit Fighters project for example?

Usually I am making my living out of drawing illustrations for brochures or anything on paper, visual material production, and website designs. When one designs mechanical characters for games or anime on a freelance basis, without belonging to a large anime production companies etc., like myself, in Japan, the reward one gets is extremely small. It is impossible to make a living out of mecha-designing alone, to be honest. Despite all this, dreaming that one day I may be able to take part in a big project in anime, game or film, I launched the Eightbit Fighters to continue to improve my mecha-design techniques, using what little free time I have left doing my other jobs. For me, 8 bit game offers setting, the world, and 8×8 pixels, the bare basis. In a sense, this is like an exercise book to improve my imagination and design skills. If I make it 16 bits, then, the exercise inevitably becomes easier, making it less challenging for me. So there is no plan to undertake 16bit fighters as a project. The reality is that recently I have been so busy with my work (other than mecha designing) I am unable to even update The Eightbit Fighters.

What is your favorite shoot-em-up and why?

All the games I took up for The Eightbit Fighters are the games that I was familiar with as a child. Xevious in particular is my favourite in terms of its depth and graphic sound. I like all the shooting games from the NES Famicom era such as Gradius, TwinBee or Star Soldier.

Apart from illustration and graphic design what other interests occupy your time?

I like music and theatre. Recently I enjoy watching silly (light-hearted) plays by some group of avant-garde actors in a small live house. Actually I take part in a certain theatrical group as a backstage staff. My main task is to deal with visual materials and costumes that are used in a play. As I do this as a hobby, I take these tasks on in a relaxed manner to enjoy myself. Designing costumes can offer a lot to learn to design characters, however. It feels very good to feel live reaction of the audience in the theatre while I watch the production I am involved with, unlike illustration assignments or design assignments.

You have a large selection of clients, from MTV and NHK to Capcom and Bandai, how does your workload differ from your previous work on anime/manga and games, as well as from client to client?

Actually I have not had much experience with anime or manga. The majority of works I do is the outsourced design (web-site, brochure or advertisement), and illustration which cannot be further away from mecha design, such as illustration for association of the dentists, for instance. As for mecha design my experience is limited to For the Barrel, Tekki and MTV characters. I am interested in anime and manga as a field, but the workload involved in those would be enormous. In addition, in Japan, the lower you go down the hierarchy where you do real hands-on jobs at the forefront of production, you would not be treated well either. The pay is generally low especially when I am a new comer who does not belong to any specialist organization; I am compelled to over work to achieve quality that is well above the reward I receive. As a result it can be very difficult to keep motivated. As it happens, I have been submitting, reworking and resubmitting design ideas for robots for a planned robot amine programme for the last 3 months. However, the reword it will bring will amount to less than a month’s rent in total. In this sense, I am working hard doing other jobs so that I may keep myself in this anime project.

From an artistic viewpoint what do you try to express when you create these images?

It seems that mecha that appear in anime or manga are restricted within these two medium. I would dare to take them out of that framework and pursue mechanical expression in various situations.

What do you think of Western graphic design in comparison to Japanese? Do you think Western design lacks originality?

I think the western graphic designs are always very advanced. I strongly feel that the Japanese graphic designs lack originality, not the western ones.

What advice would you give to aspiring mecha and graphic designers and why?

I approach mecha design by assembling what is around me in a symbolic form. Therefore the important thing is to always investigate things around you that can be materials. I think it is important to see and experience things that are in real life, not in the existing amine or manga. In addition, it is vital to establish your own style firmly; your own style that are not an imitation of other people’s style. You also need a strong will as if you were to make a revolution with your own style. Personally I do not believe that there is such profession as a mecha designer in Japan, though it looks as if it does. If there is someone who is making a living solely out of designing mecha, then it only includes a very small number of people that are regarded as real experts in the field.

Yet, for all this commonality the vast majority of the games that attempt to re-produce those afternoons of toy robot battling end up being disjointed and functionally quite fractured.

I’ve already covered something similar about the various Macross games, as that franchise has a very close mechanical linkage to Transformers, but the issue here isn’t a technical and logistical one but a cultural one in regards to the ability of learning from what has gone before.

Before I even get started, it’s worth clarifying one very important point; Transformers as we know it in the West started as a follow-on toyline from the Takara Microman range in Japan. It was originally known as Diaclone and featured the benign Cybertron robots and their evil Waruder counterparts. The main mecha designers on this were Shoji Kawamori and Kazutaka Miyatake, both of which would go onto work on Macross and steer the real robot transformation for the next quarter of a century.

Understanding that Transformers began in Japan helmed by two renowned mecha designers is crucial in untangling the subsequent awkward game mechanics used in the last decade of tie-ins. As the mecha genre of gaming has very much evolved in-line with the mythos that inspires it, whereas Transformers has existed in an almost singular manner in the West.

However this singular approach is an artificially created one borne of far less noble motivations than simple incompetence. It’s a forced form of cultural ignorance stemming from an excess of pride – as the means and information to make these games better exists abroad, yet this resource has been wilfully ignored.

The following four games have been chosen to highlight this situation, as they are all third person shooters of a sort all of which trying to execute the same premise (though with wildly varying implementation, despite the forcibly standardised genre framework).

The final two entries are obviously multi-platform tie-ins but I’ve covered the Xbox 360 releases in case anyone is wondering.

Transformers Tataki (2003)

This game was the first in the line of mecha third-person shooter games, unlike the other games, this featured the Generation One mecha and narrative. Interestingly, the developer behind this, winky soft, had quite a long history of working with mecha based franchises. They’d helmed a lot of the more challenging Super Robot Wars games for the Saturn and PlayStation (notably that of F and F Final) as well as the excellent Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie on the Super Famicom. In short, they were no stranger to the culturally bespoke rule sets the genre requires, especially in regards to transformation and how that effectively changes the game you’re playing on the fly.

So whilst winky soft had the experience with the genre, they unfortunately didn’t have the technical budget to deliver a shiny third person action game on the PlayStation 2. What transpired was a technically average game plagued with a fair few issues regarding the spatial effectiveness of melee combat.

That said, the transformation abilities were used extensively and sympathetically with the license, as transformation used energy and had to be deployed tactically. In addition, after extended play it was very obvious that a lot of the more restrictive elements of the game added an intended element of strategy (this was especially true of the wingmen placement).

Generally, this game doesn’t review well but a lot of that is based around lack of the graphical veneer in the eyes of the Western press rather than the functional elements. This game was also never released outside of Japan, despite the extensive use of English voice overs.

Unfortunately, the remaining tie-ins get functionally worse after this.

Transformers (2004)

This followed Tataki about a year later and featured mecha from the Armada series, it was developed by Melbourne House (who are now known as Krome Studios) and featured an extensive amount of publicity in the West due to its impressive game engine.

This is where a different set of issues start to surface with the games, as the focus now is more about trying to make a pedestrian third person shooter rather than a mecha game that features transforming robots.

Specifically, this game almost actively hindered the player in regards to using the transformation abilities of the mecha and instead forced the player to rely on run-and-gun shooter mechanics. There were also some very awkward platform sections later on in the game which also felt very out of place.

The game engine was very impressive but it suffered from serious framerate issues that made a lot of the more frenetic encounters actually quite nauseating. It also didn’t help that the extensive use of motion blur made tracking enemies even harder. So even as a pedestrian third person shooter, it really didn’t work very well.

Ultimately, the game itself was functionally pretty poor as consequence of all this. However, the graphically impressive game engine garnered a favourable following in the press and it reviewed better as a result.

Transformers: The Game (2007)

This was the first of the recent movie tie-ins and developed by Traveller’s Tales, the studio behind the various Lego games. The design mandate was still an obviously standardised one; in that it forced the mecha into a third-person shooter framework. However, the mistakes that Melbourne House had made weren’t really acknowledged or learnt from and instead of following on from that, Traveller’s Tales went down an even more open world route.

Now, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do and actually affords greater usage of the transformation abilities of the mecha themselves, which they thankfully did, but Traveller’s Tales decided to make a raft of all new mistakes regarding how the core combat played out.

In short, the camera was the biggest problem as it swayed with the mecha as it walked. This was something used quite subtly in games like Gears of War, which is most probably where the influence stemmed. Unfortunately, when you scale up the protagonists you’re effectively putting a lot of leverage on the camera, so it will sway more and make most players feel quite queasy.

Initially, this wasn’t an issue as the earlier mecha weren’t that big. So whilst it was annoying it was hardly game breaking. However, when bigger mecha became more prevalent, such as Optimus Prime and Megatron, the camera swayed massively and coupled with the fact that by that point most of the enemies were half your size you ended up looking at the ground whilst the camera was swaying uncontrollably. Cue retching and a re-acquaintance with the contents of your stomach.

There were also some other very odd elements as well, such as the inability to transform into vehicle form mid-air as an Autobot and a lag animation delay when you started to climb up a building. The latter was very obvious during the Shockwave boss fight, where you had to effectively do a form of robot parkour to get to each area that the boss had relocated to.

Overall, this game was equally as awkward as the prior Melbourne House effort but this manifested itself in different areas of implementation. It was again as though any prior knowledge of games involving Transformers and mecha in general were wilfully ignored.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

The latest iteration to grace the series and, yes, a whole new raft of functional issues have plagued this game. It’s clear though that Activision have more of a direct input across these film tie-ins, as there is an element of broad functional continuity between the titles but like with many publishers, they don’t understand how to implement functionality in a cogent way as they’re on the outside looking in often without a technical grasp of what their design requests will ultimately manifest themselves as.

Fundamentally, this game and the prior Traveller’s Tales effort are quite similar – they afford similar abilities such as the robot parkour, comparable level layouts and emphasis on third person shooter functionality. Thankfully, the camera nonsense is absent but it’s been thoroughly replaced by another set of bizarrely awful problems.

To transform into vehicle mode you now have to pull and hold the right trigger. This means your hand can often end up in a form of painful hand cramps over prolonged sessions. To make matters more unfortunate, to control the throttle you have to use the same trigger. So you’re often in the situation of trying to reduce speed only to transform back into robot mode. This is exacerbated by the fact there is no sufficient in game messaging to telegraph how close you are to transformation.

This alone is pretty damning but on top of this some bright spark thought it worth coupling the face buttons with transformation, such as advanced jumps, so you’re literally wrangling basic manoeuvres from what can only be described as a Rubix cube inspired interface (don’t even get me started on the hover controls). What transpires is a game that should be fairly straightforward in terms of the rule set, after all it’s pretty much a copy-and-paste third person shooter but ends up being incredibly counter intuitive in terms of its controls. More so than complex games such as Armored Core, as at least the controls are consistent and logical in relation to the game’s varied rule sets.

It’s worth clarifying one matter though, a few people have cited Piranha Games’ involvement with this tie-in and that they’re upcoming MechWarrior game will be similarly awkward. Examining the credits shows that they’re involvement was purely aesthetic, not functional. So I’m at least cautiously hopeful that Piranha will do MechWarrior and Battletech proud, so long as they watch some Dougram first.

None shall stand…

Ultimately, all of these games are poor entries into the varied pantheon of mecha gaming. However, winky soft’s initial entry is the one I have more sympathy for as they clearly had a much smaller budget than all the other games and that reduced their technical scope considerably. That said, if the subsequent developers had taken their head out of the robotic rectum they might have been able to learn from winky soft’s unfortunate mistakes and build something better next time around. Instead, arrogance limited their scope and they ended up making all new disparate mistakes. Couple this with the fact that the third person shooter genre is so hugely oversubscribed the inability to at least get those core mechanics right is nigh on criminal.

Whilst a lot of credence is given to the technical achievements of Western development, all of which are hard earned and entirely justified I should add, when it comes to functional achievement we still need a swift anecdote from arrogant complacency and cultural myopia.

Considering the uncharacteristically discouraging tone of this entry to the column, I feel compelled to temper that by finishing off with some constructive comments on how properties like Transformers should be approached from a functional point of view in future.

• Robots aren’t people – Games like Assassin’s Creed and Gears of War may initially appear a good fit for re-appropriation when it comes to a mecha game, but they’re functionally very disparate approaches. The obvious and main problem is that the scale of mecha is several orders larger than that of a human, so the rule sets that define Marcus Fenix and Altaïr won’t fit to a considerably larger mecha. The mechanics aren’t scalable from one size to another. You’ll end up with controls that a noticeable input lag and all sorts of awkward camera problems, that’s just for starters. Even human sized power armour doesn’t fit, as the functional parameters are exaggerated within human scale – so you end up at the opposite end of the spectrum; like trying to control a rocket powered kite. Instead of just looking at sales data in regards to an aesthetic genre match (such as a third person shooter), someone somewhere needs to make an informed decision on whether that will actually work with large fictional robots (though in most cases, they won’t).
• Make your mind up – Either make a standard third person shooter or a mecha game, don’t try a bizarre halfway house of both.
• Real world physics shouldn’t be applied to imaginary objects – Mecha aren’t real and break many laws of physics, even the designs that try to be plausible. Using middleware like Havok and PhysX may seem like an obvious route to take, as it often works well with games focused around human protagonists, but with mecha it just doesn’t (look at what happened to Gundam Target in Sight if you don’t believe me, as that extensively used PhysX). Now there is an argument for successful implementation of real world physics middleware but it needs to be discerning and sympathetic with the fictional rule sets already well established. In short, until you know a lot more about the mecha mythos in general – leave real world physics well alone.
• What it says on the tin – If the game’s title has “Transformers” written all over it, you might want to consider basing the game around a transformation mechanic and making it accessible to most gamers. Just an idea mind.

I am, of course, referring to Bakuretsu Muteki Bangai-O. A series of games featuring the titular mecha, Bangai-O, as it sprays a colourful 2D world with a vast array of homing missiles and lasers. The initial functional impetus for the game was outed as being that of the Sharp X1 title Hover Attack but in a more recent interview, this was merely a partial catalyst as it became clearer that the main influences took on a far greater role.

Specifically, three anime series were cited in the interview; Macross, Layzner and Ideon. For those that have been reading the column regularly, I’ve already covered the effect of each of these series (here and here). Now it’s time to see how these influences actually manifest themselves in a gaming series such as Bangai-O.

Before I get started, lets have a quick look at Assault Suit Leynos 2 on the Sega Saturn. This game was released at the beginning of 1997 and was a direct sequel to the original Leynos on the Megadrive. The reason I want to show this first is because this highlights the problem that faced 2D mecha games as their functionality became more potent. Basically, the more agile and well equipped a mecha becomes the more viewing space the player needs to use it effectively. Leynos 2 partially solved this problem by having the camera zoom in and out.

The reasoning being that you needed to see your cool assault suit, as that was the main focus of the game. Right?

Well, no. Mecha, apart from its size and aesthetic, are not solely defined by aesthetic parameters. Just showing these aspects to a player is rather pointless in fact, as they have no functional merit. The real purpose of a mecha, in a game at least, is based around what it can do. Two years later Treasure came along and proved this rather magnificently.

Bakuretsu Muteki Bangai-O (Nintendo 64)

Treasure solved the problem of their mecha’s potency by making the actual sprite tiny. As a consequence they were able to “fit” the mecha functionality into the player’s view. This is where Hover Attack comes in, as games like Leynos were too hung up on showing off how cool the mecha was but Hover Attack wasn’t showing a mecha at all so the game didn’t suffer from a limited viewpoint. Hover Attack was also only a partial base as Bangai-O was offering something far greater in scope.

This is where we get onto the three anime series I mentioned earlier. Let’s start with Ideon first, as this is the most ambitious influence of the three. Ideon is a super robot that can cut planets in half, fire black holes and re-boot the universe. If mecha were an interstellar empire, Ideon would be its terrifying emperor.

However, Ideon also possessed an array of other weapons tucked away within it. These were installed by the humans that originally found the alien artifact. One of the more visually memorable attacks was when the Ideon fired off a volley of omnidirectional guns. Now, try and imagine that occurring in a game where you just see the mecha up close. Doesn’t work, does it?

You need to see where the shots are going, so you can ascertain whether you’ve taken out your targets. Bangai-O approached Ideon almost reverently in fact, to the point that it put its array of attacks in the player’s view, leaving the mecha itself as a relative dot on the aesthetic horizon.

The remaining super robot abilities, unsurprisingly, didn’t make it into the game. As re-booting the universe is a problematic endeavour at the best of times.

Bakuretsu Muteki Bangai-O (Dreamcast)

Barely six months later, a Dreamcast version of Bangai-O was released in Japan. Despite initial appearances, this was not a direct port but instead a fundamental reworking of the original N64 game. It also received a global release and became the “face” of the series for many Western gamers (as the N64 version never made it out of Japan).

It also evolved the anime influences further. So it’s time we moved onto Macross’ involvement. This was a series that featured balletic dogfights with transforming mecha but with the added adage of wonderfully excessive missile volleys.

Ideon offered the catch all omnidirectional attack of doom, whereas Macross afforded a level of pretentious precision. Specifically, the fact that the missiles snaked their way through the air to find their targets was something that Bangai-O nabbed from Macross.

The Itano Circus was part and parcel of Riki’s basic homing missile firing gun, as enemies swayed and jinked you had a mini-anime almost choreographed by Ichiro Itano occurring in pixellated 2D.

Macross also had an influence in the way the mecha Bangai-O moved, whilst precise there was an element of momentum. This made matters more tactical as you didn’t want to be wrong footed at the end of a maneuver. You were also always fighting the subtle effect of gravity, which fed into the momentum even more. Thing is, this wasn’t realistic physics at work. Not even close in fact, it was skewed anime physics. The kind that allows constant thrust in space to equal constant speed (though it does look cool in all fairness). This tactical wrong-footing was and still is part of the Macross dogfight. Seeing variable fighters fire off dummy missile volleys so as to position an enemy for a well placed bout of vulcan gunfire fits perfectly into the Bangai-O mould.

Bangai-O Tamashii (Nintendo DS)

Bangai-O Tamashii was released earlier this year to much acclaim. It’s quite a substantial change to the original Bangai-O formula more down to its increased functional platter. However, the original anime triumvirate are still very much present and fueling the core that makes this shooter tick.

I’ve saved Layzner until last as it’s more relevant in the newer DS iteration than it was in the original. Layzner is one of the most realistic mecha that falls under the category real robot. However, it’s also one of the most potent. This contradiction is at the very centre of Bangai-O’s gameplay.

Specifically, the Layzner is a mecha that has to work within in a very rigid ruleset, it also expects an inhuman level of precision from the pilot (something it’s onboard AI helps to partially assuage) and it’s also terrifyingly fragile once pitted against other SPT’s.

Throughout the Bangai-O series, the player is expected to work within a very focused rule set, be precise in their control and teeter on the razor’s edge of near death around every turn. In Tamashii this is even more true.

There are a few other visual aspects of Layzner that are very much at work as well. The V-MAX halo is now present whenever Bangai-O dashes and generally the movement is more exacting now.

Generally, Layzner makes itself felt in the taut nature of the levels themselves. As the expectation is on the player to perform within a suitably cunning set of parameters, which is probably why the level design is far more engaging than most other shooter-em-ups.

When mecha collide…

It’s always interesting to see people jump on gaming references as the sole functional influence, when there are other far more relevant cultural aspects afoot. Bangai-O, as a series, is resolutely in the mecha gaming genre. Each of the series listed above have had an obvious tactile outcome. Without them Bangai-O,as we know it, simply wouldn’t even exist.

If anything, Treasure are pulling on more anime series with the latest iteration with beam sabres, super napalm and baseball bats. Those abilities alone call on a good quarter of a century of mecha anime after all, in addition to the series mentioned obviously.

With this gaming genre specifically it’s worth realising that it doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum, with only gaming influences taking an effect. Mecha gaming has been borne out of Japan’s half century fascination with its varied pantheon of manga and anime robots. Treasure, it seems, know how to build upon and innovate from that. Maybe more people should learn from their example?

The thing with the Virtual On series though is that they’ve always been focused around human multiplayer. In that regard they are practically peerless. As to their singleplayer “experience”; it’s almost been an oversight.

Even Hajime Katoki’s mecha design was forcibly restrained for the various Virtuaroids, as the 1995 original had very stringent polygon counts which set the aesthetic. The first two Virtual On games in fact are almost exercises in functional minimalism.

Yet Virtual On, as a series, has had a remarkable amount of design-based progeny over the years but in the case of Oratorio Tangram such “offspring” would only be a few years away.

Cue Hideo Kojima…

Zone of the Enders (2001)

Zone of the Enders, or just plain ZOE, was a game set in the far off future in an O’Neill-esque colony in orbit around Jupiter. A force of mecha, known as orbital frames, infiltrate the colony in the hope of capturing a new experimental prototype orbital frame called Jehuty. As if the parallels with the original Gundam narrative aren’t striking enough: the game’s protagonist, a young boy by the name of Leo Steinbeck, stumbles upon Jehuty and is conveniently blown into its cockpit resulting in much mechanical ass kicking of the enemy forces.

Functionally, the control of Jehuty was uncannily akin to piloting a Virtuaroid. In that, Jehuty had two main modes of combat; dash based long ranged attacks and circular strafing melee attacks. However, unlike a Virtuaroid, Jehuty had no means to cross the distance between ranged and melee combat effectively.

In Virtual On combat was linked by fixed length dashes, which interconnected until the player reached a close enough range to swipe them with a melee attack. ZOE had an analogue dash function, which meant there was no functional linkage between ranged and melee combat. This was compounded in the original ZOE due to the slow speed at which Jehuty moved and initiated its attacks.

The only real functional progression ZOE had over Virtual On was the means in which Jehuty could circle strafe its melee attacks in a spherical fashion. Admittedly the bulk of ZOE’s combat was similarly planar to Virtual On but the melee attacks could operate properly in three dimensions: as you circled underneath or above an enemy orbital frame to slice them from behind. Unfortunately the speed at which Jehuty moved made this rather mundane. Doubly so when the enemy units could manoeuvre at a greater speed in some instances, ultimately rendering the melee combat almost random in terms of its effectiveness.

Irritatingly, the initial narrative in the first ZOE game was actually quite sketchy and the game ended in a manner almost cursory. I say irritating, as the over arching conflict and back-story are genuinely fascinating and, in my opinion, rather well wrought. Thankfully, the second game does help to cover the meat of the narrative in a more thorough fashion, though more of this later.

The focus of ZOE though was predominantly that of the singleplayer progression, so direct comparisons with Virtual On are only really valid in terms of the game’s core mechanics and not the over arching narrative (as Virtual On technically doesn’t have a gaming narrative, though there is an awful lot of print based literature for Virtual On but it wouldn’t be fair to include that here). ZOE was trying, albeit in a very clumsy way, to re-create an anime narrative that gamers could partake in and that is laudable.

In addition, Yoji Shinkawa’s mechanical design was and remains incredibly progressive. Arguably, Shinkawa’s artistic proficiency helped give a much-needed lift to the mediocre and dated gaming functionality.

ZOE was also memorably bundled with a Metal Gear Solid 2 demo, to the point that almost everyone bought the game for the demo rather than the mecha game with its name on the box. It was a shrewd move, as the sales would have been a useful bargaining tactic to make more games and allow Kojima et al to creatively “branch out” into other genres.

Anubis (2003)

Two years after the first ZOE, Anubis was released. This was quite a substantial improvement over the original game; both in terms of combat speed and functional variety, but it still suffered from the same issue between the two modes of combat.

Jehuty also had a greater array of weapons at its disposal now and a far more effective grab move, as you could utilise elements of the environment and even enemy units as impromptu melee weapons. Yet, the two elements of combat were still very much separated from one another. Even later in the game when Jehuty is upgraded to the point it can use a function called “Zero Shift”, that crossed the gap between the two elements of combat by teleporting the player to melee range almost instantaneously, felt very clumsy as it required no tactics to use effectively.

Anubis also suffered several silent revisions in Japan improving boss balancing and enemy squad AI until that culminated in a final “Special Edition”, which more elegantly solved the issue between ranged and melee combat by having more intelligent squad based AI. This forced the player to approach groups of enemy orbital frames with greater care and an intensified sense of spatial awareness. Even then this improvement only accentuated the brilliance of Oratorio Tangram, which a few years prior had managed to incorporated all these elements in a seamless whole.

Anubis also finally covered the bleak narrative in far more detail. Gone where the shonky CG rendered cutscenes and instead replacing those with traditional cel-shaded animation, which fitted the whole mecha anime influence more convincingly.

In all fairness, Anubis’ narrative was impressively executed. Not only was it very well written but it produced a functional context where Jehuty and the main protagonist, now by the name of Dingo Egret, really were the nexus that could turn the tide against the terrifyingly potent Bahram forces. Throughout the game there is an oppressive sense of foreboding that frames the action in a way that gaming doesn’t normally experience very often.

The only other mecha gaming series that comes close to this level of narrative is Armored Core but that has never been given an adequate localisation, mainly due to its subtlety most probably. Anubis is far more straight-laced in terms of its plot in comparison, so the subsequent localisation was more manageable.

Again, Shinkawa’s design work was breathtakingly executed. With a whole new graphical engine, using subtle elements of cel shading on some of the explosion effects and just a fantastic use of lighting, the mecha design was simply radiant. Even the brilliant useage of the Vic Viper fighter from Gradius as the basis for a transformable mecha was a stroke of genius. Thankfully, there is an excellent artbook available (as seen to your right) which shows the work that went into these designs and whilst Kojima bizarrely seems to take credit for the games (despite simply copying the core mechanics from Virtual On), it’s Shinkawa that should be given a greater level of creative credence. As he’s managed to encapsulate the real robot design mantra in a way that’s beautifully ethereal. Something almost no-one, bar Mamoru Nagano, has managed to successfully pull off.

Due to the lack of Metal Gear Solid demo bundled with Anubis, its sales were more inline with the game’s target demographic. Even in Japan it was very much a cult hit, doubly so abroad. This was unfortunate as Anubis was definitely a superior game when compared to ZOE but its actual popularity cast a more realistic shadow over the series’ future.

Zone of the Ending?

Despite the excellent Fist of Mars, which is a capable Super Robot Wars clone, the PlayStation 2 ZOE games leave a fair amount to be functionally desired.

Due to the barren landscape of mecha gaming outside of Japan, a large number of people fallaciously assume that games like ZOE and Anubis are without peers. That these games are even a pinnacle for the mecha gaming genre. Unfortunately, they aren’t. Functionally, ZOE still has issues that probably can’t be resolved (even the ACE games suffer from a similar, though less obvious, flaw). Kojima has sidetepped these problems by making greater emphasis on the narrative, to the point that an anime series has spawned from the games.

This is not to say that this isn’t a worthwhile endeavour, as gaming narrative is something that requires further development and it even fits well with the influences from mecha anime in this instance. Yet, you’re still controlling a mechanical avatar throughout the narrative and this is what ultimately constitutes the bulk of the game.

As such, it might be worth considering that the functionality should receive as much attention as the plot. At the very least hire Juro Watari and the remainder of the Virtual On team to do it properly.

Once I’d learnt the basics I decided to create a club in a fairly central London arcade (London being in the UK, in case you’re wondering). It was imaginatively titled the London Virtual On Club, or LonVOC for short.

It then appeared that my practice had been pretty thorough, as my subsequent skills were rather potent against the new club members (all of whom were keen to best me, but in the non-Xbox Live smacktalk sense). We were also later graced with the only arcade cabinet of Virtual On Oratorio Tangram (M.S.B.S. 5.2) in the UK, which was a lot of fun.

Considering the recent announcement of Oratorio Tangram coming to digital download, it seems only fair to cover a series that made me travel halfway across my native country just to plumb credits into an arcade cabinet (a cabinet I later ended up owning, as you probably know already).

Dennou Senki Virtual On (1995)

The original Virtual On had a very difficult birth, more than many probably realise. Up and till this point SEGA had used their Model 2 hardware in quite a rigid fashion in terms of gaming functionality.

The reason for this was that the bulk of the processing power was in the rendering than anything else. So whilst the games had beautifully textured polygons, they couldn’t do much with them. This is why a lot of the earlier Model 2 games felt quite on-rails. So the simplicity behind Sega Rally’s beautiful handling and Virtua Cop’s point and shoot approach where dictated by the hardware, not design.

Cue Juro Watari and the premise of having an arena based fighting game where the player could dash at blinding speed wherever they wanted. Unsurprisingly, the early vestiges of Virtual On where almost canned but Hisao Oguchi (then a producer) joined forces to prove it could be done.

The biggest problem the team faced was that Model 2 hardware had real problems with updating the position of complex animated objects. In Virtua Fighter the movement was relatively slow and the arena quite small, so this limitation wasn’t really an issue. In Virtual On, with complicated robots dashing at high speeds things got very difficult.

The initial hit was the robots themselves, it was clear even in early stages that they needed very low-polygon models for the titular Virtuaroids or VRs. The problem with mecha design at that time is that it didn’t really do simple. They were complex multi-jointed machines with a huge amount of geometrical detail. So Katoki Hajime, renowned for his gritty real robot designs, was called into help. His simple and highly stylised designs helped get the game running, as well as give the title an iconic aesthetic.

The next problem was handling how to update two VRs positions on the fly. This is where things get interesting.

One of the most important aspects of the original Virtual On was down to the fixed length dashes the VRs did. Initiating a dash and then pressing one of the attack triggers would have your VR face your opponent and fire. Making sure you got the right angle on your target was also crucial. In addition, at the end of each dash the VR would freeze in position, leaving the player vulnerable. So what followed was a tactical wrong footing of each player as they tried to catch one another at the end of their dashes. This became known as thrust vectoring amongst the fans.

This core aspect of the game was another happy accident and borne from the limitations of what the Model 2 board could handle. The fixed dashes were admittedly one design solution for the technical limitations (as it only had to have the hardware calculate a start and an end point) but the dash freeze occurred down to the hardware needing time to update the position of the VR.

I asked Watari several years ago, how he best described the mechanics in Virtual On and his answer was that it was akin to Noh theatre being crossed with American Football; fixed rigid motions coupled with complex arena based tactics.

Not a bad analogy really.

There is one other technical aspect I haven’t covered though; the twinsticks.

Why use a tank control setup for high speed vectored dash based combat? You’ll only think that if you look upon Virtual On’s mechanics in a visual sense. Due to limitations of the hardware, the game needed a very precise form of control input for the movement commands. If you’re going to be penalised with immobility at the end of a dash you want to make sure that you wanted to dash in that direction in the first place. The twinsticks were the solution to this potential disastrous lack of precision.

The important part of the twinstick setup was at the base of each stick. However, to limit as much of an input deadzone as possible the stick was lengthened to take advantage of its leverage. So the player only needed to register a small movement with the sticks and the leverage would amplify that to the already sensitive electronics at the base. Basically, a very low-tech solution for a then cutting edge problem.

The only way to make doubly sure that your inputs made it into game as intended was manifested as a literal doubling of input; two sticks. Each stick acted as backup for the other in terms of your direction controls. Admittedly, you could pivot on the spot like a tank by pushing the sticks in opposing vertical directions but that was more of an easter egg rather than anything actually useful.

This is why playing the recent SEGA AGES port on a pad is akin to fondling a restless ferret through a wet towel and why Marz had such problems but more of that later.

Some may think that Virtual On’s twinstick setup came from Cyber Sled and to an extent this is half true, as the controls were a partial inspiration. The big difference is that Cyber Sled was trying to emulate futuristic tank combat (so no fixed dashes basically) rather than anything mecha related.

Virtual On turned out to be a massive success and catapulted both Watari and Oguchi into the internal corporate limelight. The game was also ported over to the Saturn and PC but with mixed results, as mapping the hardware limitations intentionally onto other platforms proved very awkward. To the extent that the Saturn port was mechanically very different, as dash freeze was massively reduced. However, when a line of new arcade boards was announced in the form of Model 3 the Virtual On team were assembled once again.

Dennou Senki Virtual On Oratorio Tangram (1998)

The name Oratorio Tangram, or just Oratan to the fans, was birthed as means to describe what the game was. Oratorio being a holy opera and a tangram being a Chinese puzzle based around arranging shapes, the name essentially signified that the game was meant to be a “grand remix” of sorts. It’s an apt name as the changes to the game were legion.

Now with far more potent hardware, a lot of the limitations that defined the core mechanics of the first game were no longer really present. That said, some were still artificially retained as they still gave meaningful structure to the game. Specifically, the dash freeze was still about but in a vastly reduced capacity. This made the game much more reflex based than the original but the general reduction in dash speed allowed the player to keep up.

The other interesting change from the original was how a lot of the move set had become automated. Close combat in the original game was far more manual in terms of input: circle strafing in close combat was something the player could control with greater precision as to how far they moved. Oratan changed this by replacing the control with a fixed length “quick step”. It made close combat more approachable but at the expense of plateauing the skill of the player.

Other elements also had a functional makeover; dashing received the ability to curved and change mid-course. The latter was referred to affectionately as Watari dashing. The game even afforded aerial based dashing now.

The biggest changes were twofold; V-armor and turbo attacks. V-armor was another layer of defence that deflected shots from a certain range. Compared this to the original were you could almost dash snipe an opponent on the other side of the map. The reason behind this was to keep players from running away from another and it actually worked quite well. Turbo attacks allowed the player to use the dash button in conjunction with a weapon trigger to power up certain attacks, this added another layer to the menu of attacks available to the player and deepened the game further.

Oratan also saw four major revisions, this was down to the further fevered following the first game had generated and the tournament scene was suitably ferocious. Balancing basically became a far greater issue.

The M.S.B.S. 5.2 was the starting version and featured the most problems both technical and functional. This was swiftly followed by 5.4, with faster quick-stepping close combat, more available energy for weapons and a slew of other balancing tweaks across the board. Some maps even received reworking.

5.45 was the Dreamcast port and turned out to be a monumental challenge for the Oratan team. A lot of hardware reliances simply didn’t exist on the Dreamcast and the code base required extensive re-working, doubly so as the game had to run at 60 fps and still retain the visual accuracy from the arcade version.

Amazingly, the Dreamcast port received one of the best conversions the series has ever seen. It was practically faultless. It also featured online versus play over a 56k modem, from someone that played this originally in Japan it puts a lot of contemporary online games to shame.

The port also had a bespoke twinstick peripheral much like its Saturn cousin, which with Oratan’s increased input speed was absolutely essential. This isn’t to say you can’t play the game on the pad but with the sticks you can control far more precisely, allowing you to do things like this.

The final arcade version was 5.66 and released on Naomi hardware to allow for Dreamcast VMU integration and a partial porting of some of the codebase. 5.66 turned out to be a vast change to the previous iterations, with new rendering tech and new VRs (this generated large animation/art tasks for the team not to mention the monolithic task of balancing them properly).

To think that 5.66 is basically the Dreamcast version in the arcade, would be a grievous misunderstanding. The dash speed had been increased and the game was totally balanced around the aforementioned twinsticks. So the precision and speed the player could command was far in advance of what the Dreamcast version offered.

This is why the newly announced console port of 5.66 is terrifying as there’s no news of any kind of twinstick peripheral. A pad couldn’t keep up on the Dreamcast version, which was a custom made port. This is specifically an arcade perfect port but without anything approaching arcade perfect controls.

It’s awful to think that the finest iteration of Oratan is being released to the public but with only half the functionality available to the gaming populace.

After 5.66 graced the Japanese arcades, many of the team left SEGA and took up jobs with Squaresoft (now Square Enix). Watari and Oguchi stayed but much of the expertise was no longer present, which is where the problems started.

Dennou Senki Virtual On Force (2001)

Now with most of the team elsewhere, the sequel to Oratan had a tough life ahead of it. It only got worse as the new team now had to work with the notorious Hikaru board. If this had been a simple update to Virtual On, with two player versus intact, they might have had a chance of making something good. Unfortunately, the high concept from was that of four player. Now ignoring the awful functional ramifications for a moment, the technical nightmare of getting two VRs working in game was difficult enough but four?

The entire development was must have been an uphill struggle, with newer staff members desperately trying to get to grip with the code base, work with awkward hardware and deliver the impossible at the same time. All things considered, they did a pretty impressive job but unfortunately it followed hot on the heals of the near-perfect Oratan.

The big problem with Force was in three major areas; the four player didn’t work with Virtual On’s single lock dash based combat, the game avoided any and all dash freeze to hide the limitations of the lock-on system (allowing you to dodge everything, removing any of the original core tactics that had made the games such a success) and then a hugely unbalanced card system that awarded better players with even better VRs. The sum of all this practically killed Virtual On in the Japanese arcades.

Force, in its defence, did try and utilise the four player setup as best it could though. Specifically, each team of two was split into a leader and a wingman. If the enemy team killed your leader, that resulted in a victory for them. If they killed the wingman, they lost their lock-on briefly as the leader could share some of their health to bring you back to life. This approach fostered a very cogent form of teamwork in the arcades, for the few that stuck with the game.

Yet for all the teamwork, the card system nullified any real kind of fanbase. As newer players were absolutely thrashed by veterans with better VRs. The card system was from Virtua Fighter 4 and whilst that purely offered aesthetic upgrades, for obvious balancing reasons, someone decided to copy Armored Core’s approach to customisation for Force, where upgrades would give functional variance. It was really very unfortunate, as the team focus was undermined by the possibility of having one veteran in a souped up VR trounce two newcomers.

Even with Force’s dwindling numbers, there were a total of two revisions for the game. That said, things were only about to get much worse for the series.

Dennou Senki Virtual On Marz (2003)

After Force tanked in the arcades, much of the new team were suitably jaded by the whole experience. So when a PlayStation 2 port was announced, many again left and others managed to work on something else. So without the core knowledge of how the arcade version worked, a new console specific team had to be assembled.

Again, the higher ups had their input stating that the reason for Force’s demise was that it lacked a compelling single-player experience (overlooking the fact that it was an arcade versus series of games). The new console team took this onboard and re-worked the Force codebase into something that would feature a greater emphasis on a single-player campaign.

Now before I go off on one here, there is one element I haven’t covered yet about these games: between the releases of each game Watari had penned a serialised novel filling the narrative gaps. These were One Man Rescue and Fragmentary Passage. They explained a lot of the background for both Oratan and Force respectively yet there were still large mysteries unresolved. Marz was Watari’s attempt to answer a lot of the narrative inconsistencies to the Japanese fan base.

Unfortunately, for everyone else, not only did we get a comedically awful localisation but the historical context didn’t exist outside of Japan (as neither of the sidestories were published abroad).

That aside, Marz wasn’t shaping up to be that good. Many of the game’s environments were long and winding, yet the original Force lock-on system was sadly still present. This meant you’d be locking on to an enemy kilometres away in another canyon whilst you were trying to negotiate your way through a veritable maze.

The whole game was infuriatingly like this and what with Force’s ported sluggish mechanics the final game wasn’t exactly great. The real nail in the coffin was down to the fact that Marz was the first console game not to receive a twinstick peripheral. Considering that Force relied so heavily on quick jump cancels, having to attempt that on a pad with woolly dual analogue controls made the game a lot harder than it needed to be.

The only way to for me to play Marz properly was to complete the game on Ultimate difficulty, which unlocked the Shirokis Temjin (the VR at the beginning of this article in case you’re wondering). A wonderfully quick VR that basically made the game play like Oratan again. It also helped having a custom built pair of twinsticks.

The final level was noteworthy though as it reversed gravity, which was functionally quite interesting. If only the rest of the game had experimented with different mechanics and reduced the size of the environments, Marz may have been a bit more worthwhile.

Virtual Off?

So what happens to the series now? After the one two punch of Force and Marz, the series is still on its knees. Having Temjin et al appear in Super Robot Wars (both in Alpha 3 and now K) only confirms the fact that the series is in dire straights with its fanbase, as the cameos are a feeble attempt to generate interest again.

A digital download version of Oratan 5.66 may appear on the surface to be a beneficial thing but the lack of twinsticks only shows that this is an exercise in kudos generation rather than anything worthwhile for the series. Not to mention that playing 5.66 on pad will be pretty heartbreaking, as you just won’t be able to control the game properly.

Of all the mecha games I love, Virtual On is and always will be my favourite. Instead of approaching mecha as something literal, the team approached how the combat would work instead; basically what the mecha do rather than what they are. That insight is probably the most inspiring aspect of the original games. I just hope one day that insight will re-surface.

In 1953 a budding manga artist, by the name of Mitsuteru Yokoyama, penned a series that would be responsible for laying the foundations of a pop-cultural phenomenon that has now lasted over half a century. The series involved a young boy remote controlling a giant robot by the name of Tetsujin 28-go (translated as Iron Man 28 and released abroad as Gigantor). This focus of the boy controlling a huge mecha from ground level was clearly an inspirational one in the case of Sandlot’s genesis.

For almost all but one of Sandlot’s games they have a very similar gameplay implementation in regards to the player viewpoint, that of a boy on the ground looking up at an immense mechanical behemoth (or at the very least a discernable sense of scale to the gaming proceedings).

It’s also interesting to note that this mechanical inspiration has consequently spawned a more successful series of games.

More after the jump…

Remote Control Dandy (PlayStation)

Technically this was made pre-Sandlot, in 1999, for the now defunct Human. The game was based around the player controlling a large mecha limb by limb from a fixed viewpoint on the ground. As a consequence, the player toggled between their human player and the mecha (allowing the former to get a better viewpoint on the resultant robotic carnage).

It’s worth explaining here what controlling a mecha limb by limb actually entails. The shoulder buttons represent the left and right leg respectively. In that pressing L1 and R1 sequentially makes the mecha walk by moving it’s left leg forward followed by its right leg. Conversely L2 and R2 make your mecha walk backwards. In the case of Dandy, arms are controlled via the face buttons Circle and Square respectively. Taking out a target requires the player to basically punch the crap out of it.

Due to the limitations of the original PlayStation pad, the game only let you control one thing at a time. In that, you had to toggle control between the mecha and the human viewpoint. This meant the human protagonist’s job was to get the best vantage point on the situation so that the mecha could tackle their target with greater clarity and ease. Understandably, the learning curve for the controls was pretty steep but surprisingly tactile nonetheless.

Dandy was the first game ever to try something like this in terms of mecha gaming and it worked really well. This was never released outside of Japan though and is only really recommended to the hardier brand of importers, well those that don’t mind PlayStation era graphics at least.

Tekkouki Mikazuki: Trial Edition (PlayStation 2)

To tie in with a 6 part live action mini series based around the majestic Mikazuki, this game was released with the first pressing of the original soundtrack and is quite hard to get now (to put it mildly).

The show told the story of Kazeo, a young boy whose life was saved by the appearance of a giant robot called Mikazuki during a monster attack. When it was discovered that Kazeo had the unique ability to pilot the robot in battle, he became a member of the AIT team. AIT was dedicated to protecting the Earth from Idea-Monsters (Idom). These creatures were the manifestations of people’s thoughts, and often appeared in unthreatening (even humorous) forms before transforming into vicious monsters.

This was very similar to Remote Control Dandy in terms of its gameplay approach but more simplified in terms of limb control and attacks. Though, more importantly, this was the tech that Sandlot prototyped for use on their other PlayStation 2 games.

Gigantic Drive (PlayStation 2)

The first official Sandlot game and the one that got released abroad as Robotic Alchemic Drive. To all intents and purposes, this was Remote Control Dandy deluxe. The game focused on controlling each limb of your mecha from a fixed viewpoint, much like Dandy. The tech that had been prototyped on Mikazuki was taken further with Gigantic Drive. In addition to your bog standard skyscraper sized mecha, two of three available robots actually transformed too (one into huge tank and the other a futuristic war plane).

The biggest change over Dandy and Mikazuki was that the arms for each of the mecha were controlled via the left and right anologue sticks respectively. This resulted in the game really feeling like a mechanical puppet show; not to mention mastering punches, jabs and uppercuts was a more demanding affair than simply pressing a single button (a la Dandy).

Gigantic Drive also introduced the ability to have the human characters attack one another, rather than just getting stepped on by their mechanical avatars. This produced some interesting instances where finding the other player in multiplayer meant securing an easier win (after all if you took them out with a well placed grenade they wouldn’t be able to control their mecha).

I, personally, have many fond memories associated with this game. When I was living in Japan, local kids used to come over and play games. Gigantic Drive consequently got lots of versus playtime and several vocal victory dances (by the kids, not me).

The Chikyuu Boueigun (PlayStation 2)

For those not familiar with Japanese publishers D3, they’re one of the main forces in budget gaming in Japan. Releasing games for around 2,000 yen a pop they offer affordable gaming to the casual masses.

D3 approached Sandlot off the back of Gigantic Drive to make a game with the same engine. What D3 got was a game where the player controlled a tiny human protagonist taking on vertically endowed aliens. In English, you tore giant alien ants a new one with rocket launchers in a massive destructible environment.

Admittedly, this wasn’t a mecha game per se (though it did feature a mecha Godzilla clone and huge alien tripods) but The Chikyuu Boueigun wouldn’t have been created without Sandlot’s previous mecha gaming outings. In many ways, their fascination with the scale of mecha and the mythos surrounding them crystallised a new and vastly satisfying third person action game.

In addition to the gun toting action, the player could also mount a nippy (but vulnerable) air bike, a tank and a helicopter (though the latter was notoriously tricky to handle). If that weren’t enough, each of the game’s single player missions could be played in two player co-operative multiplayer. For the price, the game was an unbelievable gem and it sold well as a consequence.

The Chikyuu Boueigun was released abroad as Monster Attack and garnered quite a following, to the point that several sequels have been spawned (though more of that later).

Tetsujin 28-go (PlayStation 2)

Following on from the success of The Chikyuu Boueigun, Bandai approached Sandlot with a chance to create a game to tie-in into the new Tetsujin 28-go re-make.

In many ways, having Sandlot make a game that started the mecha genre in Japan and more pertinently Sandlot’s focus on scale centric gameplay was almost prophetic.

The game was great though; similar to Gigantic Drive in approach but with a simplified set of controls for the arms (you only used the Dual Shock 2’s face buttons rather than the anologue sticks, which was more akin to Dandy than Gigantic Drive) but this produced a more focused and rhythmic pace to the combat. Something the smaller scale mecha were more suited towards.

The game also made more of an effort to model flight for each of the mecha. In addition, it was possible to have the mecha pick up their human controllers and negate the need to find the best viewpoint for the action. Tetsujin 28-go also offered some pretty raucous four player versus action.

Unfortunately, this never made it outside of Japan (despite the re-animated TV series making it abroad). Though the more poignant aspect of this game’s release was that Mitsuteru Yokoyama died earlier in the year, never getting to see his formative work in gameplay form.

The Chikyuu Boueigun 2 (PlayStation 2)

Despite the success of Tetsujin 28-go, Sandlot once again returned to the world of giant alien ants and huge alien motherships. In many ways the sequel was literally twice the size of the first game.

You now had two playable characters; the default vehicularly capable man and a new aerially competent woman. The game also sported nearly triple the number of missions from the previous game. Considering that this was a budget title, the amount of top notch gaming available puts many full-blown productions to shame (plus it started out in London, with giant aliens crawling all over the Houses of Parliament, which clearly makes it amazing).

Again, whilst technically not a mecha game (though it did feature more mechanical alien vessels this time around) the game clearly came from a honed understanding of how scale in mecha gaming is so important in relation to how the action is portrayed (as in suitably epic).

Some of the missions in the game were immense in scope and whilst the framerate often went on the fritz, the sheer immense undertaking was mightily impressive fun.

This also received a limited Western release, under the moniker of the Global Defence Force, and garnered an even greater following than the previous game.

Chousoujou Mecha MG (Nintendo DS)

Up and till this game, Sandlot had focused on producing epic scale in gaming form. Considering the technical limitations of the Nintendo DS in this department, Sandlot turned their attention towards the platform’s unique touchscreen control setup.

In many ways, Mecha MG is a brave title. Instead of having the player on ground level looking up at a huge robot as well as having to reposition themselves for the best vantage point, they are instead placed directly behind their mecha but afforded a more complex control system on the touchscreen. To make matters more varied, each of the 100 mecha in the game sport totally different controls and gameplay attributes.

Unlike their previous games, where controlling a weighty mecha is meant to feel cumbersome, the controls in Mecha MG leave a little to be desired. In that, having multiple points of control clustered in close proximity with one another can often produce undesirable consequences (as in accidentally transforming your mecha into a roadster rather than swinging its arms). Admittedly, as with all games, this is part of the learning curve but in the case of the Remote Control Dandy lineage the deliberate movements made the game more tactical and afforded greater clarity to the controls, Mecha MG’s controls are subsequently more immediate and a little messy in contrast (to begin with at least).

This is not to say that Mecha MG isn’t a huge amount of fun and unlocking various new mecha and getting to play around with them is a huge draw (after all you want to know what crazy whacked out control system the game will throw at you next).

At present, this has only been given a Japanese release though with the Nintendo DS’ global success and the public’s desire for quirky titles, Mecha MG may get a Western release sometime soon.

Remote Control Dandy SF (PlayStation 2)

Meant as a sequel to the original Remote Control Dandy on the PlayStation, SF took the premise further by possibly having the most complex control system ever attempted on the Dual Shock 2.

Much like the original game, the player controls a large mecha limb by limb from ground level. The main difference over the games before it is that SF allows the player to control both the mecha and human commander simultaneously.

In that, you can move your viewpoint at the same time as moving each limb of your mecha. It takes a little getting used to but once mastered in makes the previous games feel quite constricted.

The reason I haven’t included this in the timeline above, is that technically it may not be a Sandlot game. True, it bears the same name as proto-Sandlot’s flagship game as well as many of the hallmarks of Sandlot’s scale based control. Yet, the game’s credits lack a mention of the company and more tellingly Sandlot’s online portfolio does not list SF at all.

Whether or not Sandlot worked on SF, it’s an excellent game that evolves Sandlot’s various opuses to the point it felt as though it should have always been thus. Plus, the name alone denotes a heritage that needs to be acknowledged.

Again, SF lacked a Western release. This obviously being a shame because the mecha design by Kow Yokoyama and the retro-stylings of the game’s visuals are pretty damn impressive, not to mention the fluidity of the gameplay.

…time to put that robot to bed

What with another Chikyuu Boueigun game around the corner (now on the Xbox 360 no less) and a Chikyuu Boeigun strategy game already out, Sandlot clearly have grown out of their mechanical pastures for the time being. Mecha MG showed that the company could tackle different design approaches with their vibrant mecha based enthusiasm, so with any luck we may see a similar effort on the Wii (with whacked out controls to match).

Whilst you often hear then term “sandbox” in regards to gaming, Sandlot’s approach is arguably the Japanese equivalent. Huge destructible environments for the player to roam within (either with a mecha by their side or just with a trusty rocket launcher).

The interesting thing about Sandlot is that their unique approach to mecha gaming has had knock-on effects to the design of other genres, most notably that of action games, and there was me thinking that mecha could only destroy things.

It was possibly the most accomplished implementation of mecha themed space combat yet achieved.

The player had control over the titular mecha, the Omega Boost, and were able to acquire targets in spherical 3D at incredible speed. Considering the aesthetic influences from anime such as Macross, it was unsurprising that Shoji Kawamori helmed the mecha design with his regular finesse.

Many assumed that the game was an offshoot from Team Andromeda’s seminal Panzer Dragoon series, as the beautifully insane homing lasers were in similar effect. It became an almost apocryphal tale, that was supposedly wholly without credence.

Well, Yuji Yasuhara would probably disagree…

From dragons to mecha…

The first Panzer Dragoon was an iconic on-rails shoot-em-up, which had the player mount a dragon that could fire homing beams from its mouth. The aim of the game was to sweep your cursor over as much of the screen as possible, snagging as many enemies as possible. It sounds simple enough but in actuality, it was quite a challenge. Games like Rez owe a lot to the original Panzer Dragoon, as they distill this focused approach even further.

The second game in the series is more interesting though. Sure, the first Panzer Dragoon got the ball rolling but Zwei, its sequel, is actually more influential and also a far more accomplished game.

It’s difficult to encapsulate the sheer focused pacing seen in Zwei, to this day it probably remains the most important of all the Panzer Dragoon games (even more so than Azel, or Saga as it’s known in the West, and definitely leagues ahead of Orta). Zwei also had a rather notable programmer on its team; Yuji Yasuhara.

Admittedly, he wasn’t an official member of the posse known as Team Andromeda but he did help code the game. It wasn’t long after Zwei was released that Yasuhara jumped ship to more fiscally stable waters in the shape of Polyphony Digital.

It wasn’t long after that when Omega Boost would have started. Obviously, Yasuhara made enough of an impression to get the green light on a Panzer Dragoon-esque shoot-em-up with him at the design and coding helm.

That would have been quite a feat to land something like that back in 1999, doubly so considering that it was at a Japanese developer which eschews the nexus of ego that you normally see in the West.

In any case, the effects of Panzer Dragoon Zwei had a tangible creative outcome. Chanelled through one man to make something that, to this day, isn’t truly appreciated for its unfettered brilliance.

The Mechanical Circus

Why all the fuss then? What makes Omega Boost so different from the slew of mecha mediocrity out there?

Well, let me explain how mecha combat has been portrayed for the last 25 years. Specifically, since 1982 Macross beamed across Japanese televisions showing beautifully balletic aerial dogfights with planes that could transform into mecha. The series then evolved very quickly into space based battles were acquiring targets without the paltry limitations of gravity came into full effect. Couple all this with swarms of missiles chasing their targets with an iconic demented glee and you have a very potent aesthetic mix.

So potent in fact, that no-one had been able to accurately reproduce that in game form. When I say no-one, I really mean it as well. Bandai tried to many Macross games over the years and they all tanked horribly, not only fiscally but also functionally. The first real attempt at 3D space combat was with Macross Digital Mission VF-X, though the less we talk about that the better.

Even Virtual On turned a blind eye to the likes of Macross and had its combat occur in a suitably planar fashion. No-one wanted to the poison chalice that was the holy grail of mecha gaming; a full blown spaced based mecha battle. No-one, except Yuji Yasuhara it seems.

Omega Boost approached the premise in a simple but uncompromising way; have the player acquire targets spherically at their own discretion and give them a simple lock-on that can be re-acquired instantly. With the latter, the game offered almost no HUD based elements to indicate what had been targeted but instead focused the camera on that point, or the nearest target that was within that area when the lock-on button was pressed. Releasing the button would then allow the player to fly freely and manually track targets if they so wanted.

One of the few HUD elements was a very conservative yellow targeting cursor that showed which way Omega Boost was effectively pointing, meaning that to fire its vulcan cannon you had to place the reticule on the target. If the player held down the firing button though, then the functionality changed and as you sweeped the reticule over an enemy it produced multiple lock-ons. Releasing the button would result in the familiar swarm of homing lasers.

Whilst these lasers were the crux of the Panzer Dragoon lineage, their true origin was squarely a result of Ichiro Itano’s work on Macross (something that has already been covered at great length in this column). So having Kawamori on the mecha design helm only cemented Omega Boost’s functional roots even further.

However, Omega Boost had one more anime reference up its sleeve. It wouldn’t be a high speed mecha game without at least one nod to Layzner. Something this game had quite blatantly in fact, as after the first few levels the player unlocked an attack called the Viper Boost. This had the Omega Boost glow blue and enter into a spherical energy shield as it homed in on targets and blithely rammed them. The sixth level, where the player faces a fleet of battleships in orbit around a planet, is an ideal example of this attack. For those familiar with Layzner, and it’s similarly potent V-MAX attack, then the Viper Boost’s resemblance is uncanny. Even more so when you realise that the Beta Boost, your mechanical nemesis, has a similar attack but instead glowed yellow. Again, mirroring the V-MAX attack of the Zakarl from Layzner.

To make matters even more implicit, the mecha would always been boosting in whatever direction it was facing. This could be turned off admittedly but it gave a momentum to the gameplay and help with the player’s evasion of enemy weapons fire.

What threw some people, and by some people I mean provincial American journalists, was that the enemies came in waves of attack. This simple and obvious design choice had the game lumped in as an “old school shoot-em-up” like R-Type and Gradius. Despite the mind boggling idiocy in regards to such a major simplification and almost forced ignorance to the remainder of the game, the game did utilise waves of attack but the implementation up to that point was wholly different from the shooters of old. Omega Boost removed the functional allegory of Gradius and re-created, almost perfectly, a fully formed spaced based battle that allowed the player to go almost wherever they wanted.

However, this is where Panzer Dragoon Zwei’s heritage comes into play. Whilst the game did allow tracking of targets all around the player you were funneled through environments. Not in an overt on-rails manner but enough to notice a sense of progression that felt similar. Though the stages where you zoomed through a tunnel were obviously more straightforward in that regard.

Expensive Production Values

Despite the functional finesse of Omega Boost, the real eye opener back in 1999 was it’s FMV and aural production values. As the FMV’s throughout the game feature live actors blended with CG, all directed by Kawamori. Even the pilot of the Omega Boost, played with a fervent apathy by the brilliantly named Greg Funk, had his space suit designed by Kawamori.

Even the music to accompany the opening eye candy was specifically catered for each region of release. With Japan having Feeder’s “Shade” from it’s Swim EP (no doubt due to Taka Hirose’s gaming passion), the UK having Cast’s “Dreamer” from their last album and the US receiving Loudmouth’s “Fly”. Naturally, the Japanese release used Shade more in time with visuals but that’s hardly a surprise considering the game was released there first.

The original game soundtrack is another matter entirely though, as it’s incredibly rare these days. Though this is more to do with Omega Boost’s rather lackluster sales in Japan and the soundtrack consequently had a very limited run.

The cover art as well, which many mistook to be a Kawamori work, was done none other by Yoshiyuki Takani. A veteran painter who worked throughout the anime industry and making a name for himself by doing the cover art for mecha model kit boxes, which is a wonderful parallel considering the game’s subject matter.

A forgotten renaissance…

Despite Omega Boost hitting all the right beats from start to finish, it was ultimately several steps too far for the gaming populace to keep up with. It sold initially quite well in Japan but reports of motion sickness were quite common and the game was tarnished as a consequence. Whereas abroad it was more of a sleeper hit and had a few toys released along with it (don’t bother trying to buy them though, as they were pretty awful).

It also confused people that a renowned car game developer managed to put out a very polished space based shoot-em-up, as many of the press didn’t really approve of the creative tangent. Polyphony Digital responded almost silently and now the game is no longer listed on their official site.

It’s an incalculable shame that Yasuhara’s vision wasn’t appreciated for its sheer all encompassing brilliance. It pushed the genre of mecha gaming into areas that it should have always resided within and made that leap to almost giving the player the chance to sit inside the cockpit of a mecha blasting through a frenetic battle in outer space. Looking back on the decade since is almost heartbreaking, as mecha games have taken several steps back functionally.

Of all the mecha games that deserved numerous sequels and its team to be universally praised, it would be Omega Boost. Unfortunately, Yasuhara and his talented ilk now have the unenviable task of buffing the pedestrian irrelevance that is a Toyota Yaris to a cold, dead and uninspired shine.

Admittedly, From Software’s Armored Core games have often received rather disappointing localisations and non-existent marketing but some balk at the series’ ongoing complexity, both in terms of the controls and intricate customisation.

The truth is that these games have a very traditional learning curve in effect and not just as a series but for each and every game. In the current climate of zero effort rewards maximum enjoyment, Armored Core is decidedly antagonistic in its approach on making the player learn the game. In many ways, the Armored Core series is the spiritual successor to games like Assault Suits Valken.

Anyway, here’s more history on the older Armored Core games than you shake a reinforced ceramic composite stick at (oh, and each of the gameplay screenshots double as links to in-game footage in case you’re wondering).

More after the jump…

Armored Core (PlayStation)

The Earth is but a radioactive and blasted landscape, devoid of life since the Great Destruction fifty years ago. What is now left of humanity lives under the surface, in huge cities run by corrupt corporations. As such, there is the need for a discerning type of mercenary; one who can undertake missions of a particularly ruthless nature. These mercenaries are known as Ravens and their ride of choice is the Armored Core (also called an AC), a huge customisable mechanical avatar that’s sole purpose is to lay waste to whatever is stupid enough to stand in its way.

Armored Core was a game like no other at the time; it was a fast and responsive third-person shoot-em-up where the player piloted a massively customisable mecha. Each of the parts that made up these mechanical behemoths cost money, as did their maintenance and the re-supplying of ammunition, so the mercenary aspect of the game (as in getting paid) gave purpose to the gameplay. After all, nothing forces you more to be accurate and frugal with your machine gun shots when you know every single bullet is costing you money.

It was also a big game, with over forty missions and branching storylines. All of which where told in the somewhat voyeuristic fashion of e-mail from your disreputable employers. The game had a unique, eerie and dystopian feel. It also had one of the most memorable gaming villains, that of the decidedly uber AC Nineball and its enigmatic pilot, Hustler One.

The controls were also particularly comprehensive, with almost every button on the pad used in gameplay. Due to the limitations of the original PlayStation pad, no analogue sticks were able to assuage the difficulty of tracking a target a la an FPS. Instead, the shoulder buttons acted as the means to look up and down. This was one of the main faults the game had but was easily avoided with judicious usage of the re-mapping of buttons via the options. That being said, yours truly had no problem with the shoulder buttons for vertical tracking but it did take a while to get used to (though the point here is that you are supposed to be controlling a complex mechanical war machine).

Armored Core’s mecha design was also very interesting in that the player could create their own mecha. As such, a special type of mecha designer was needed. Originally, Armored Core lacked any famous mecha design assistance but Shoji Kawamori, creator of Macross and mecha designer extraordinaire, heard of the project and offered his services.

Talking of Kawamori’s creative input, building an AC was no slapdash affair, creating an unbeatable AC was a work of heightened craftmanship. The main three areas of design focus were as follows; keeping the energy consumption on the generator as low as possible (whilst utilising a fast AC frame and powerful weapons), having the weight of your AC within the limits of your AC frame and making sure that your armour points are matched by defence points (in that having loads of AP means nothing if the armour’s defence is weak).

This was given a Western release and was one of the series most successful iterations; it also garnered a sizeable multiplayer community with various tournaments held both in Japan and abroad.

Armored Core Project Phantasma (PlayStation)

Set not long after the events in the original, the Wednesday Organisation are in the process of building a new type of AC killing weapon, called Phantasma. However, it seems that wider ramifications are still afoot. The few missions Project Phantasma offered were quite a bit more challenging this time around but this was mostly due to the fact that parts and money from the previous game could be utilised, so the difficulty had to be raised as a consequence.

The main addition in Project Phantasma was that of an arena mode. Replacing the redundant “Ranking” league table from the original game, the player now had to earn their No. 1 Raven status by physically downing their mercenary compatriots. Unlike the missions, AC damage and ammo didn’t need to be paid for and you basically earned pure cash for each victory.

One of the more interesting aspects about Project Phantasma was the use of famous seiyuu Sho Hayami as the voice of the game’s twisted villain, Stinger. Interesting in that Hayami also voiced the similarly skilled mecha pilot Max Jenius from Macross, another Kawamori related work. Project Phantasma also started the ball rolling with the wonderful aspect of unbalanced parts, mostly due to the inclusion of new and vastly overpowered weapons. Some liked this state of affairs, many didn’t.

Armored Core Master of Arena (PlayStation)

The final entry into the PlayStation Armored Core series and the game’s title really wasn’t kidding; Master of Arena was almost entirely based around AC arena encounters. As such there were two discs for the game, the first being set around a very small mission mode and an easy arena and the second being host to a massive selection of over 150 AC opponents.

The missions were again harder and more involved than Project Phantasma and they were interlinked with many of the arena encounters, in that you had to defeat a set number of arena AC’s before more missions would be become available. The narrative was also based around the re-appearance of Nineball and the fact that there were still unseen forces pulling the strings of our future society.

The amazing aspect to Master of Arena wasn’t so much the massive and involving arenas but actually a customisable AI setup called “Ranker Mk”. This allowed the player to create their own ultimate AC opponent, making this iteration of the series nigh on definitive due to the almost infinite gameplay longevity on offer. This is regarded by many as the pinnacle of the original PlayStation incarnations and perhaps even the best Armored Core game of all time. It is unfortunate to say that this type of gaming quality wouldn’t be seen in the Armored Core series for the next few years.

Armored Core 2 (PlayStation 2)

Set a hundred years after the events of Master of Arena, the world of Armored Core is a very different place. The central hub for Raven’s, called the Raven’s Nest, was disbanded and the Raven’s themselves were outlawed. Humanity began anew but it wasn’t until humanity colonised Mars that the Raven’s and their ACs were needed once again. Set on Mars, Armored Core 2 dealt solely with the same petty corporate squabbling of the previous games but also with a new and enigmatic alien menace. One that hinted towards the true origins of the technology behind the creation of ACs and the reasons behind the Great Destruction that occurred 150 years ago.

Of all the entries into the Armored Core franchise, Armored Core 2 probably had the strongest narrative. It is unfortunate to say however that it was also the weakest in terms of gameplay. Armored Core 2 was very rushed for release, because it was intended to be a launch title for the then new PlayStation 2. It missed the launch by a few months though but upon its final release it was still in a ropey state. The framerate, draw distance and general game speed were very much lacking. To top it all off the parts list was shockingly unbalanced, which made the once strong and revered versus aspect of the series a veritable laughing stock.

There were improvements made though, such as the addition of your AC overheating as well as a new high-speed “over boost” function (not to mention a few extra hard points for even more ordnance and raw firepower). Yet despite these additions the slow and clumsy controls, the nausea inducing framerate and weapons that lacked any skill in their usage made the game a rather disappointing endeavour. It is also unfortunate to say that for many in the West Armored Core 2 was their first, though misrepresentative, taste in what the series had to offer.

Armored Core 2 Another Age (PlayStation 2)

Following Armored Core 2 by a few years, the action had now returned to Earth. Finally, a habitable and green world but still filled with corrupt corporations and other shadowy forces of power. Despite the previous and somewhat disastrous entry, Another Age did actually rectify quite a few of the problems that made Armored Core 2 so disappointing. The framerate and weapon balancing was noticeably improved, the game engine also received a new lick of paint and many of the new environments were particularly impressive.

That being said, Another Age was still very much a follow-on from Armored Core 2. Whilst there were improvements in the previous iteration’s gameplay pitfalls, they weren’t entirely fixed. Seeing this obvious state of affairs, the developers decided to drastically change the structure of the game. By drastic we mean doubling the mission count, to over 100, and removing the primary source of narrative; the Raven’s e-mail account.

Due to the massive size of the game, the lack of e-mail made the narrative all the more subtle and surprisingly engaging. The missions themselves were also tactically more complex and diverse than previously seen. However, the real point of interest (for many fans at least) was the reappearance of Stinger’s Vixen, Phantasma and Nineball. Another Age was also the prototype for a new mode of versus combat; co-operative missions and online matches (via a peer-to-peer USB modem service, which wasn’t too hot in all honesty). In any case, with Another Age the darkest chapter in Armored Core’s history came to a close. It was time for the halcyon days of the series to shine forth once again.

Armored Core 3 (PlayStation 2)

Armored Core 3 was very much the turning point for the Armored Core series. In many ways, it was what Armored Core 2 should have been; fast and action packed with an entirely new and very impressive game engine. The good old days of Armored Core were back. In terms of narrative though, things are a little woolly. Armored Core 3 was clearly set after the events of Another Age, but dates and locales aren’t specified.

What we do know is that corporations are still the superficial governing force of the human race, with sinister dealings happening behind the scenes and we’ve gone back to living underground. Raven’s are still needed to do the messy and explosive jobs that most people wouldn’t dare to. In terms of gameplay additions and fixes, they were legion. In addition to the “overboost” cores, seen in Armored Core 2, there were now “exceed orbit” cores. These allowed the player to detach a drone or drones from its back and have it track and fire at will upon enemy targets. Weapons could also be dropped mid-mission and wingmen employed for that extra bit of firepower. Not to mention the new aspect of dual wielding guns, to give AC encounters that much needed John Woo edge.

The massive change however was that of increasing the number of versus players from two to four (via iLink). Couple this with the very shiny new game engine and silky smooth framerate, resulted in a very accomplished versus setup that only helped to emphasize the judicious part balancing that had been mostly absent in Armored Core 2 and Another Age. The somewhat shaky USB modem versus was still present but that paled in comparison to the joys of a four way mecha smash-em-up. Armored Core 3 was a great game but it only turned out to be a forecast of greater things yet to come.

Armored Core 3 Silent Line (PlayStation 2)

Upon our return to the surface instead of being all peaceful and civilised, history repeats itself and we bring our petty nonsense with us. It turns out that our underground complex wasn’t the only one of its kind. There are others with darker and more advanced technological monstrosities lurking in the places that had been long forgotten.

Silent Line is probably the finest entry into the Armored Core canon since Master of Arena. Unsurprisingly, the evidence behind this reasoning are due to both games sharing similar attributes. In addition to all the features in Armored Core 3, Silent Line added a whole new cockpit view setup, over 400 parts (double that of the previous offering) and the ability to destroy another player’s weapons mid-sortie. The amazing new feature though was that of how the game’s AI was handled.

For those that haven’t been paying attention, Master of Arena used an AI creation tool called Ranker Mk. This was based around changing preset values rather than teaching your AC in an organic fashion. Silent Line changed this by utilising an organic AI modification setup. In that, you would design an AC and then pilot it yourself in various arena encounters. In doing so, the AI would watch and learn from how you would play.

As such playing your AI avatar was uncanny and it was clear to see that this technology had been implemented throughout the game too, with enemies exhibiting differing and organic combat styles. Again, this kind of game feature coupled with the now immense parts list meant that Silent Line possessed unparalleled gameplay longevity. Many have argued, however, that this immense parts list wasn’t exactly as balanced as it could have been. Even so, Silent Line was a paean of gameplay and in many ways remains definitive Armored Core.

Armored Core Nexus (PlayStation 2)

After Silent Line, the franchise seemed spent. Where else could it go now? Everything that could be done with game had been already and bar some more parts balancing, the series had nothing new to offer.

To make matters more difficult they had to use the same parts list and game engine from Armored Core 3 and Silent Line. After much head scratching, Nexus was born. Nexus was a lateral shift in gameplay from Silent Line; instead of adding just more features, fundamental aspects of the gameplay were re-visited and changed.

They tackled the parts list by allowing the player to fine tune many of their stats but the main and fundamental gameplay change in Nexus was the way that heat affected gameplay. Previously, heat was something parts and impacts from weapons fire generated. It also only affected your armour points (or AP), in that get too hot and your armor melted away. In Nexus however boosters generated heat, this meant that in order to move efficiently you had to keep boosting to a minimum or more likely equip cooler boosters. Couple this with the fact that the radiator now removed energy from your generator during this cooling procedure meant that the player had to keep an eye on their generator bar whilst in the thick of combat.

On the surface, this may sound terrifying but it worked in a very logical fashion. Add the new and intuitive dual analogue control setup into the mix and Nexus is probably the first Armored Core game that mere mortals could comprehend. In terms of plot in Nexus, it was a direct continuation from Silent Line but the interesting thing was that Nexus was a two-disc game. One disc was entitled Evolution and contained all the new missions, essentially being the new game so to speak. The other disc though, called Revolution, was of particular interest.

The Revolution disc revisited missions from the PlayStation games and had a vast library of unlockable content (the massive amount of Kawamori’s artwork being particularly welcome in this respect). Each of the missions also offered the chance to play the opposite objectives, essentially giving the player an opportunity to take on the role of a competing Raven. The main fault of Nexus though was the complete and utter absence of a broadband capable online versus mode. With the inclusive new control setup and logical management of heat, not to mention a very balanced parts list, it was very much a missed opportunity.

Nexus has divided fans though; the older players don’t rate the new heat mechanic, as it was too restrictive, and the lack of online versus frustrated many. Whereas newer players finally felt, they could play the game on their own terms. These points didn’t go unheard however and the subsequent game mostly addressed these polarised issues.

Armored Core Ninebreaker (PlayStation 2)

Armored Core is regarded by many in the West as a difficult and foreboding game. In many ways, it is exactly that. Out of its mecha pop-cultural context, it remains misunderstood and the motivation to pilot such mecha seems non-existent and even irrelevant. Ninebreaker tackled this head-on; the entire game was one massive training simulator, with 150 disparate training programs that would make anyone an AC piloting veteran. It also heralded the re-appearance of an upgraded Nineball.

It’s worth clarifying that Nineball is the embodiment of raw AC power; though not entirely evil his pilot’s motives aren’t always clear. There is a reason for this though; Nineball is an avatar for the overriding shadow organisation that controls the Armored Core world. This is hinted at in more ways than one, Nineball’s final form in the original Armored Core games was called Nineball Seraph. Seraphs are one of the seven choirs of angels; in short, Nineball is there to protect the “god” of the Armored Core world. In Armored Core 2 the term Ninebreaker also came about, awarded to those who had apparently defeated Nineball himself (this being you the player from the previous games). As such this game, the ninth game in the series, was named Ninebreaker; emphasising the need for the legendary level of skill that the game required.

Ninebreaker also toned down the heat mechanic, making it less brutal whilst balancing the parts list even further. It was the ultimate iteration for versus combat but it still lacked such online functionality, though a rather lacklustre web based ranking system was introduced based on points acquired in the various training programs.

In many ways, Ninebreaker is the superior game to Nexus but it requires a greater input from the player. You really are being trained to the fullest of your ability in each program but it still lacks the purpose of narrative driven missions. It also criminally lacked online versus via broadband, though it had a surreal online ranking system, unforgivable considering the training bent of the game. Cue the first portable entry into the Armored Core canon.

Armored Core Formula Front (PlayStation Portable / PlayStation 2)

Formula Front was a first for the series, in more ways than one. The focus of Formula Front was no longer direct player controlled combat. The PlayStation Portable lacked enough buttons for a traditional Armored Core game to function properly; as such player control was removed. Instead, your AC had a customisable AI setup, very much akin to Master of Arena in fact. In short, you wound up your AC toys, put them in an arena and watched as they blew each other up.

The emphasis was one on one on one match-ups where your team rises up the ranks of the Formula Front world. The F-1 allegory is no coincidence either, in the world of Armored Core; Formula Front is entertainment for the masses. This “Formula World” mentality also went online and players could remotely challenge other teams, via Nouten.com (the online service that facilitated Ninebreaker’s lacklustre ranking option).

The second big difference was the fact that Formula Front was the first truly handheld Armored Core. It also was the first game to boast connectability between the PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation2 versions of the game.

Formula Front also had four versions; the original PlayStation Portable launch title, the PlayStation 2 port, the International release (with added player control, though it had a few issues) and the trimmed down Western release of International that lacked a lot of the extra arena opponents. Due to the spectator sport focus of Formula Front, From Software regard it as more of a sidestory than anything part of the main timeline (though it is set during the era of Nexus et al, simply due to the parts available).

Armored Core Last Raven (PlayStation 2)

The corporations that run our society have had enough; they have decided to wipe out this “Raven” menace once and for all. Re-grouping and renaming themselves the “Alliance”, they are set to re-forge human society through a massive war. The Ravens see this coming though and form their own coalition, calling it “Vertex”. The Ravens have no intention of going out without a fight.

As you can see Last Raven is set around an all out war between these two massive forces of power, but in an interesting twist the events of the game only occur within a 24 hour timeframe. If Jack Bauer were a mecha pilot, this would be his game. Making matters more complex still is the addition of cumulative part destruction and damage, in that you can destroy AC limbs outright and they won’t be repaired (forcing you to re-purchase busted parts). There is also a dynamic mission structure and the addition of human ground troops to cause mischief during missions.

Last Raven is an immense undertaking though, not only down to the sheer amount of gaming content but more because it’s really quite difficult. Upon release, most Western players complained that the singleplayer game was in fact too hard (something that was reflected in several reviews, to the point that many just gave up). However, if you brave the truly daunting learning curve in Last Raven then you will be met with a game that is remarkably well crafted. To the point that after besting each enemy Raven in combat gives a real sense of gameplay accomplishment.

Interestingly, Last Raven’s difficulty also stems a lot from the AI’s competence. They are very nimble and react quite organically to player tactics. Something that was culled from Formula Front, or more accurately from the user created AI that was used in the various Formula World tournaments. This being rather shrewd on the part of From Software.

Last Raven was aptly named due to it being the final entry on the PlayStation 2. Like Nexus and Ninebreaker before it, Last Raven still lacked online multiplayer, though many fans managed to circumvent this with the use of Xlink Kai and other tunneling software. Generally though, the response to Last Raven was mostly positive (well, for those who had stuck with the game). It also managed to bring the narrative arc quite nicely to a close, after all you end up as quite literally the last Raven alive.

Armored Core Mobile (Various)

Since the inception of From Capsule, From Software’s dedicated mobile gaming arm, several Armored Core mobile phone games have been released. At present there fourArmored Core mobile games.

The first release was that of Armored Core Mobile Mission, which was a singleplayer effort with a top down view. This was very quickly followed by Armored Core Mobile Online, which was an online multiplayer effort using the same top down view and game engine from Mobile Mission. Armored Core Mobile 2 was the first of the mobile games to utilise the rear view third person camera from the original games. Finally, Armored Core Mobile 3 is the most advanced of all of them and is a sidestory that fills the gap between Nexus and Last Raven.

Unlike the previous entries into the series, I haven’t played these versions quite as much but they are comparable to the original PlayStation games (though they use parts from the PlayStation 2 offerings).

Returning from the Internecine

If the above is anything to go by, Armored Core is a pretty sizeable gaming endeavor. I’ve gladly poured a lot of time into almost all these games, to the point I played the PlayStation original so much I attained 101% completion (which I am pretty sure was the game’s way of saying “enough!”). It also goes without saying that there are some areas I have been unable to cover, though I hope the gameplay videos I’ve linked to should assuage some of that.

It’s worth understanding that Armored Core has survived over a decade across multiple gaming platforms and generations of hardware. It’s really quite remarkable, doubly so for a unique gaming intellectual property that has no ties to massive licensing. In any case, the recent sequels in the form of Armored Core 4 and Armored Core For Answer have continued the saga further and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down any time soon either. So, strap in and join the Ravens mercenary plight – it may often be a tough endeavour but it’s always been a rewarding one.

Of all the mecha franchises out there Macross is one of the most badly represented. This isn’t because developers want to sabotage the series but more down to the fact that each Macross game is actually comprised of three disparate gaming genres all vying for dominance via one control method.

To clarify, Macross is a series based around love triangles, giant aliens, music and, of course, planes that can transform into large robots. Naturally, each game focuses on these variable fighters, which results in a game that has to offer control for each of it’s three modes; fighter, GERWALK and battroid.

To say that that this is a pretty tough undertaking isn’t in any way an understatement. It’s actually, almost utterly impossible.

The annals of Macross gaming are pretty extensive but this column will only be covering the more recent 3D efforts. This is not to say that the older 2D shoot-em-ups aren’t worthy of discussion, as the PC Engine versions were developed by none other than NCS who created the incredibly influential Assault Suits series, but that the problems with the various modes of transformation only reared their head once greater functional (3D) scope became available. As such, I apologise that this is a somewhat of a selective breakdown rather than anything exhaustively thorough.

It also goes without saying that I won’t be covering the numerous Robotech games, not out of blinkered otaku tendencies but because the faults that befall the newer Macross games are equally present in the Robotech editions (in some instances, even more so).

So why is it so bloody hard to get a variable fighter working in-game? Well, it’s down to the aforementioned three modes that they can transform between; fighter, GERWALK and battroid.

Fighter mode is basically a plane so any functional tenets from flight simulators are an easy match. Battroid mode is your nimble Japanese mecha and, as this column has shown, that genre has a lot of reference material already. Switching between these two modes would be do-able and wouldn’t require a complex control scheme, however there is one more mode left.

GERWALK, a wonderful acronym that stands for: Ground Effective Reinforcement of Winged Armament with Locomotive Knee-joint. Basically, it’s a halfway house between fighter and battroid. To explain, the legs come down and the arms pop out but the main body remains that of a plane. Interestingly, the mecha designer responsible for the variable fighter design, that of Shoji Kawamori, actually came up with this mode first. On a skiing trip he noticed how jumpers legs dangled in mid-air and wondered how that would work on a plane. GERWALK, as such, is the crux of the variable fighter’s capabilities as it allows the high speed pursuit of fighter mode but also the VTOL capabilities seen in battroid. This is also where the functional problems start.

With this extra mode sandwiched between fighter and battroid, the controls have to offer a new disparate control scheme. At worst this means that each mode ends up with a massively different set of control inputs, making the learning curve suitably counter-intuitive.

Macross Digital Mission VF-X (PlayStation)

This is where the 3D games start; with UNiT’s abortive VF-X games. The first game was set around the same time frame of Macross 7, so the roster of available variable fighters was pretty extensive. It also featured, for the first time ever in fact, a fully transformable VF-4. Something had never been since it was introduced in fighter mode way back in Macross Flashback 2012. All in all, it was shaping up to be every Macross fan’s dream.

Then it got released.

After multiple agonising delays, VF-X hit the shelves. It had a wondrous opening FMV with Fire Bomber singing Try Again and animation by GONZO. The front end was stylised a la Macross Plus and then the game started. Oh…dear.

The first problem was that because this game was in 3D the developer, UNiT, couldn’t resist showing the animation sequence for each transformation. So you’d have the controls wrenched from you as your variable fighter transformed. Thankfully, you were invulnerable during this phase but comedically this oversight could be used to break the game until it was made farcically easy.

The second problem was a mixture of a badly implemented GERWALK mode and a neutered battroid mode. In the case of the latter, battroid mode was unable to fire missiles, which whilst inaccurate to the anime was also functionally frustrating and limited the usefulness of the mode.

GERWALK was a mess though and sat between the two other modes, meaning that the player had to toggle through each mode rather than select them individually. The reason why it didn’t work was down to the means in which your variable fighter gained and lost height. Thrust for the other modes was almost reversed in GERWALK, in that in order to gain height you had to pull down on the d-pad. On its own, it made sense but between the other two modes it just jarred. Couple that with the surreal choice to have the player strafe in GERWALK when not applying thrust and then allowing them to turn once the boosters were activated, meant you often over shot your target. The camera also had a habit of looking straight down in GERWALK, which was almost inevitable as it was tied to the player gaining altitude.

All in all, the first VF-X game was a pretty rocky start to the 3D generation of Macross games.

Macross VF-X2 (PlayStation)

This was a direct sequel to the original VF-X and whilst UNiT were still onboard it was clear that Bandai was ghosting a lot of the development. Overall, VF-X2 was actually pretty decent. The camera got a re-working allowing the player to track targets despite their actual orientation and a more consistent control configuration.

GERWALK still caused problems however, as it had certain additional functional nuances that jarred with how the other modes worked. Admittedly, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the hellish nonsense seen in VF-X but it was cumbersome enough to avoid using the mode most of the time. Battroid mode also still couldn’t fire missiles, bizarrely.

All that aside, VF-X2 was pretty compelling and visually it was a massive improvement. This was also one of the first Macross games to see a potential Western release but due to the complex rights issues associated with Macross outside of Japan (courtesy of Robotech), it never made the jump. There is a limited edition demo available, featuring a playable VF-5000B, but it goes for crazy money these days (if you can find it).

Separately, VF-X2 actually played an important narrative role in the Macross saga as a whole. Set in 2050, it laid the groundwork for the formation of privately funded military organisations, such as SMS in Macross Frontier occurring 9 years later, due to the inherent corruption of the government military. It also had a similarly fantastic opening FMV.

Macross Plus Game Edition (PlayStation)

By this point Bandai had probably had enough with UNiT. So they looked elsewhere and found Shoeisha. Weirdly, they went with a dedicated Macross Plus tie-in rather than a series catch all. Of all the series Macross Plus was one of the least successful in Japan and considering the difficult rights issues abroad, the game would never have been able to be released anywhere else but Japan. Still, they went ahead with it and the result was moderately impressive.

It’s also worth pointing out here that Shoeisha flat-out cheated in terms of offering the full gamut of variable fighter control. The game was actually split into two parts; aerial missions and ground based missions. In the aerial missions you played with fighter mode and in the ground based missions you played with battroid. So where were the transformation capabilities seen in the VF-X games?

Well, these had been relegated to quick time events. Specifically, when a missile volley was headed your way you would get a prompt to press X this would then kick off a cutscene of your variable fighter transforming into another mode and dispatching the missiles. Technically, GERWALK was present as a mode in this game but not one you could directly control.

It was a shrewd move as it meant the other two modes received a far more cogent functional treatment. It also looked rather lovely and what with Yoko Kanno’s seminal orchestral score playing in the background, it felt more inline with the host work.

Macross M3 (Dreamcast)

After the previous Macross game, you’d think Shoeisha were onto a near winning formula and wouldn’t drastically change their approach. Wrong. Macross M3 was close to a carbon copy of VF-X. In that it allowed the player to transform into any mode during gameplay, rather than separating the modes out in different gaming segments.

It almost worked as well. The transformation was handled on the d-pad and movement on the analogue (something Artdink shrewdly copied on the recent Macross Ace Frontier but more of that later) and a simpler approach to acquiring a missile lock (you just held down A when the enemy was in your targeting reticule and at the appropriate range). However, the camera setup was appalling as it placed the variable fighter squarely in the player’s field of view making it very hard to track targets. GERWALK also received its perennial functionality, with different controls for that mode and an inability to look up. Battroid mode could fire missiles though, so that was at least something.

This also had a wonderful opening FMV and filled in the gap on Max and Myria’s history prior to Macross 7. It also featured a slew of the more esoteric variable fighters that hadn’t been seen in animated form. Anyway, M3 sealed the fate of Shoeisha’s involvement with the Macross franchise and this was, thankfully, the last game they did.

Choujikuu Yosai Macross (PlayStation 2)

This is when things started to change for the better. Bandai approached SEGA AM2 for starters, which can only bode well. This was down to SEGA having access to the tech behind the popular Aerodancing games and Bandai hoped that having that arcade flight simulator would work well with Macross.

It worked very well in fact, SEGA’s Macross game is to date probably the most accomplished of all the dedicated Macross tie-ins. Unlike the games that preceded it, AM2 picked a base mode that the other two hinged off. Due to the usage of the Aerodancing engine the main mode was that of fighter, so the base dog fighting combat worked beautifully.

However, all was not sublimely wonderful. Even with the flight simulator focus, GERWALK did still cause problems. Requiring a mysterious new control configuration for gaining and losing altitude, one that wasn’t used in the other modes to boot. Battroid mode also lost its ability to fire missiles, again. That being said, the game did play well for the most part and some of the final missions were suitably epic.

Bizarrely, a far bigger roster of variable fighters was planned (namely those from Macross Plus and Macross Zero) but these were pulled prior to release. This may be down to the narrative focus being on the original TV series and movie, as such the added continuity was probably deemed too confusing.

Another Century’s Episode 2 and 3 (PlayStation 2)

Now I’ve already covered the first two games in this column but whilst the ACE series isn’t solely dedicated to Macross it did offer some of the best variable fighter controls yet seen. Like the AM2 game that preceded them, both ACE 2 and 3 had a specific mode focus. Instead of being based on a flight simulator engine, ACE was always based around mecha combat. Unsurprisingly, the variable fighters had this imposed on them as well. The result was a far better approach to GERWALK mode and a seamless control configuration for all three modes.

In ACE2 the emphasis was more on the mecha combat and whilst fighter mode didn’t get used it was a tad clunky. This was also true for all the transforming mecha that had a flight mode attached to them. In ACE3 this changed and a new more responsive flight mode was offered. This had a better camera setup as well and generally improved the variable fighter handling, as fighter mode became more viable.

Ultimately, what made the handling work was that GERWALK was treated as a similar mode to the other two. Admittedly, the games were still weighted towards the mecha end of the spectrum but GERWALK was finally viable. It was faster than battroid but slower than the fighter, it sat between the two as a stopgap offering further graded functionality.

Specifically, GERWALK acted as the VTOL jack-of-all-trades it was always intended to be. Battroid mode was meant for the heavy mechanical take downs and the fighter as a way to cross the huge mission areas quickly. GERWALK sat between the two and aided the mid range combat in a beautifully organic fashion, as it had enough potency and speed to keep the enemy at bay without ending up as a massive mechanical target,

On their own, the variable fighters depicted in ACE were a finer and more accurate representation compared to almost all that had preceded it. This was down to From Software’s expertise in the mecha genre more than anything else.

Macross Ace Frontier (PlayStation Portable)

So where does this leave us? It’s clear that approaching Macross with more its mecha in mind is obviously the better route to take but is that all? Well, Artdink have made a name for themselves recently with their Gundam Battle franchise (also covered previously in this column). Their focus and tech is very much suited for handheld mecha games but could they pull it off with a mecha that has two other disparate modes?

In short, yes. They pulled it off quite well in fact, almost too well though more of that later. Remember the usage of the d-pad in Macross M3 to change modes? Artdink used something similar for Ace Frontier by having the analogue nub select each mode specifically (so no cycling through the modes basically). They also retained the camera viewpoint seen in VF-X2 and Macross Plus Game Edition. All that aside, like the ACE games, the game’s focus is very much on the mecha. This means that GERWALK acts as a halfway house between the too modes.

However, Artdink took it upon themselves to create two new problems with GERWALK mode. In the original anime, GERWALK mode can skim across vertical surfaces due to it’s VTOL configuration. Ace Frontier offers this functionality, which probably sounds fantastic but ends up being very not. To clarify, when you’re in an enclosed space and switch to GERWALK you often end up attaching to a vertical wall. This plays merry havoc with the camera and can cause the player to actually get stuck on geometry. Not entirely brilliant that. Secondly, GERWALK mode has a bizarre way of losing altitude The X button normally generates an upward thrust in GERWALK and Battroid modes, but to go downwards you have to double tap the X button and hold. In a frenetic dogfight it’s not uncommon to yo-yo in terms of your altitude when in GERWALK. Not exactly great that.

The above probably sounds more damning that it is but GERWALK is still causing problems but more down to Artdink’s zeal at trying to replicate functionality that nobody in their right minds had tried to do previously.

For a PSP action game though, Ace Frontier puts a lot of games to shame (especially the earlier console iterations listed above).

Dedicated to all pioneers…

I’ve probably been a tad disparaging throughout this edition of the column and whilst these faults are very much present in the games I’ve covered, it is by no means the direct fault of the developers themselves.

They’re doing their best to reproduce something that is purely aesthetic. Ichiro Itano’s mecha choreography has a lot to answer for, both good and bad (again, I’ve covered this before in the column). The issue here is that everyone has forgotten where the variable fighter came from; that of gangly ski jumpers and the thought of “what if a plane had legs?”.

Well, not so much forgotten but conveniently omitted I suppose. After all, how many decent 3D arcade helicopter games can you think of?