Anyway, great job in pointing out the highlights of the series from the fan’s point of view and attention to detail. It is good to see such a great gaming franchise get the respect it deserves.

The first game was definitely a standout for the Saturn; it blew away other mecha games on the PS1 at that time. The second was even better–even though it was never released in the US and you had to struggle through the Japanese to play it.

Thanks very much for this…could you do a write up on another forgotten mech game BULK SLASH soon?

As for ESP, publisher relationships vary between developers. Normally, ESP are indeed just a publishing shell but in the case of Game Arts – post Grandia – there were vested interests that did exact a form of editorial control. It’s one of the main reasons, Game Arts never worked with ESP again and sought out a new publisher for Blaze.

The older reviews are indeed from other places I used to write, the list of places is fairly long though. I just thought it worthwhile re-printing them for a site such as this.

Mecha Damashii is a very interesting blog. Some of the earliest reviews you posted sound as if they had been written a long time ago, like at the time of release. Did you compile some earlier writings as well? If so, where did you write before (besides on the front page of ic)?

Gungriffon I&II are two of my best memories from the SegaSaturn. I never got two play the PS2 and Xbox games. However, two details in your article strike me as odd.

You imply that ESP was eager to release Gungriffon II early and this might have impacted the quality of the game. But the way ESP deals worked, I am a bit confused why they would do that. ESP was only a publishing shell financed by CSK for these small studios and had almost no major editorial input on any of the games, as far as I have heard from developers who worked with them.

The other point which is surprising me is the sales of Gungriffon Blaze. You wrote that “Blaze did very well”. If I understand correctly, you mean the game finally reached a (much?) larger audience than what the series had known on the SegaSaturn.

But that seems odd to me as overall sales for video games in Japan were weaker in 2000 than in 1996. Early PS2 software sales were notoriously low.

From Geimin’s data (Famitsu numbers), the first Gungriffon was almost certainly a much bigger success in Japan than Gungriffon Blaze. It reached over 170,000 copies before the Satakore version.

Gungriffon Blaze sold around 60,000 copies. There was a The Best re-edition in 2002 as part of a series of re-releases from early PS2 titles. It never tracked anywhere and given the late year of release, the sales were probably limited.

For the sake of comparison and since you mentioned it in the article, Armored Core 2 sold slightly over 200,000 sales in the same year. To give a context of the software sales at the time, such sales were enough to make it one of the biggest near-release successes of the PS2.

In Japan at least, I doubt that Gungriffon Blaze sold even half as many copies as Gungriffon did. Which means that to achieve bigger sales worldwide (if this is what you implied instead), Gungriffon Blaze would have needed terrific sales from the North-American market. Yet I do not remember Working Designs ever mentioning the game as one of their major successes (they usually mention the PS1 releases or Dragon Force when pressed on the topic); Vic Ireland is fairly easy to get in contact with and open about the topic, should you feel the need to verify how well the game did in the US.

It does not mean Game Arts benefited more from Gungriffon than Gungriffon blaze, as the publishing deals signed with Capcom and Working Designs might have worked in their favour. But regarding sales themselves, I am very doubtful.

Good luck with the site and thanks for the numerous video uploads.

Of course, I was playing Virtual-on uncontrollably day and night, I only pop Gun Griffon in every once a while.

I remember reading a Gungriffon Blaze preview in a magazine about 9 years ago, but I didn’t get a PS2 back then and never played that game.

However, I just ordered a copy to rectify my mistake. This really looks like something I should enjoy a lot — the jumping alone looks fantastic! : )