Videos: Another Century’s Episode R Promo Video Update
Posted on : 19-07-2010 | By : Cacophanus | In : Videos
Hardware: PlayStation 3
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After much anticipation, the new and updated promo video for Another Century’s Episode R was shown in Akihabara today. This is the longer promo that stores use to promote game and as such is over twelve minutes long and features predominantly gameplay footage – something that hadn’t been seen until now. There are a fair few interesting developments but the first major one is the open inclusion of the Original Generation of Super Robot Wars mecha, such as the Cybuster, Alteisen Riese and ART-1. Admittedly these aren’t the first OG mecha to be featured, as the Gespenst Mark II appeared in the original ACE back in 2005, but these new OG mecha are featuring full characterisation for their pilots and haven’t appeared in an ACE game before.
Moving on from that, there are a fair few important functional clarifications to be made. Notably that the “chase mode” is actually an on-rails shooter section and that the boost gauge is ominously absent throughout much of the footage – to the extent that much of the encounters seem to be heavily scripted from a camera and lock-on perspective. This is something that does concern us, as the original ACE games afforded a large amount of freedom in terms of movement and removing that would be a functional regression really. This could be easily explained due to the selection of the footage in the video however, as it mostly shows the more flamboyant aspects of the mecha rather than full-on moment to moment gameplay. It also seems that each series also has its corresponding base ship too now, from the Argama to even the Macross Quarter. In any case, the new promo shows the game to be incredibly impressive and we’ll be eagerly picking this game up on its August 19th release. Don’t forget that you can also pre-order the game here.
Still no Hi Nu…
The ginormous bosses look exciting and the on-foot fullmetal panic gameplay looks interesting. Everything else. . . not so much.
Alteisen = fangasm
There’s some really great gameplay features in there, the FMP bits look awesome and Gundam Crossbone grabbing an enemy and using it as a shield was really impressive
Not very impresive graphics… BUT WHATEVER!!!
GAMEPLAY IS WHAT REALLY MATTERS!!!
Now seriously, this game’s gameplay is really good.
Does anyone know if there will be a NTCS port? Or at least subtitles?
I’ve never had a chance to play these games but from the videos I’ve seen, they either need more enemies or to make them more aggressive. After the fan pleasing factor, they don’t actually look that fun to play.
On the whole the videos of the earlier ACE ganmes can be pretty misleading, as many people – myself included – use fully upgraded mecha. When you start the game and have to work your way up the upgrade ladder, it’s much more challenging. Not sure on the number of enemies observation though, as many missions have fleets of ships with various mecha escorts. That’s pretty epic really.
By more enemies I mean more like around you at any given time. At most I see maybe three to four around you and they get dispatched with relative ease. If their going to go down that easy I at least like to have that Dynasty Warrior catharsis of wiping out multitudes of them. A good example would be the better moments of ZOE 2 where there are sometimes five enemies after you and each one is a decent challenge.
Well, that’s the point I was making; playing ZOE with Naked Jehuty is a walkover (on any difficulty). None of the grunt enemies are a challenge with that setup. Likewise with ACE, with a fully upgraded mecha you’ll obliterate everything. As for the number of enemies, it depends on the mission in the ACE games – such as this one for instance. Again, the Enhanced Layzner is powered up but the level is littered with enemies. Don’t forget ZOE also only operates with clusters of enemies at one one time, even the “huge” battle towards the end of the second game only spawns enemies in closely knit groups.
Well, on the whole though, the first three games had missions that consisted of open fields with waves of easily dispatched enemies. I think the series has some pretty weak level design in general. You’re likely to be holding the attack button as the game locks on from enemy to enemy automatically. On the rare chance that there is an objective that involves something other than “take out all enemies” it’s usually pretty poorly executed. ACE2 had some missions with interesting objectives that helped to break things up. ACE 3 on the other hand totally screwed the pooch with nearly identical mission after mission.
It looks like R may take the series in a better direction though. Some of those city levels looked really fun to run around in. There does still seem to be a lot of the aforementioned automatic arcadey auto-lockon spamfest gameplay. This is why space themed missions in robot games tend to be not very much fun to play in general. There just isn’t a sense of proper orientation with which to plan attacks or avoid obstacles.
[...] canale You tube permettendo a chiunque di poterne ammirare pienamente la bellezza. Mechadamashi ha riportato i due video realizzando un interessante commento dove viene esaltata la presenza di elementi [...]
I don’t agree with that at all, as ZOE has the same problem of dispatching enemies by just holding down attack whilst working through identikit rooms. ACE by contrast is far more involved, especially in the first game with its varied mission objectives. Whilst the games did get progressively more action orientated towards ACE3 they were still more of a challenge than either of the ZOE games.
Separately, a lot of people like to compare ZOE and ACE but the actual influence for ACE is the same as ZOE’s, in the form of the original Virtual On, hence their similarity. The difference is that ACE managed to incorporate a more thorough dashing/boost system than ZOE on account of the team openly understanding Virtual On’s mechanics a lot more.
In ACE:R it looks like this has been radically changed again, so for that reason alone ACE:R could be functionally a lot more interesting.
Personally, when I thought “wow ,isn’t there anything else to do but blow stuff up?” I quickly realized there’s not much else giant robots (or small ones in FMPs case) are good at.If the presentation and gameplay mechanics are good enough they can over shadow the lack of variety since it’s just so damn fun to play.