The amazing Border Break has finally received it’s Ver 1.5 update today. This features all manner of new maps and mecha, not to mention new character customisation. The game itself is also still doing very well in the Japanese arcades, still no word on a home based console port though.

The upcoming Double Helix developed Front Mission Evolved, has received some new screenshots over at the official Japanese site. These show some interesting functional developments for the series, notably that of the wanzers sporting hover legs. It may appear that with each passing burst of PR from Square Enix that Front Mission is changing more into something like Armored Core. However, for those unaware of Front Mission’s roots; customisation (both visual and functional) played an integral part of the original games. The addition of hover legs is admittedly a nod to the realtime – not turnbased – functionality that debuted in Armored Core 2 but that’s not to say it has been wholly copied either (after all Armored Core owes much of its functional inspiration to the Assault Suits games). The point we are somewhat clumsily making is this though; hover legs were notoriously awkward to use in the older PlayStation 2 era Armored Core games and it will be interesting to see whether the team at Double Helix have learnt from this. As the more recent Armored Core games solved the issue by merging the functionality of ground based legs and hovers, to allow all AC’s to traverse water (something that was normally the exclusive remit of the hover leg types in the PlayStation 2 games). This merging of leg functionality is clearly not present in Front Mission Evolved though – as the screenshots show – so how they’ve solved their handling issues will be interesting to see. In any case, more screenshots from this recent update are linked below.

The upcoming Kihei Senki Legacies has received its first trailer. This series, as we previously mentioned, is fueling the semi-frequent zeitgeist in anime that gamers make great mecha pilots (a posit will heartily concur with!). However, this premise does go beyond the narrative background of the series itself. As the entire show appears to animated in 3D CG, in a manner not too dissimilar to the recent OVA Freedom.

America has finally received a game from the long-running Sakura Wars series. It may have taken a decade or so longer than the fans had anticipated, but I’ve got a copy of the PS2 Premium Edition in my grubby little paws right now, and can confirm that, yes, this this release has actually happened, after years of false hope, wild rumors, and constant delays.

We’ve written about this game before, but for those of you who haven’t been playing along at home during the thirteen-year wait to see one of these games in English, here’s the short version: Sakura Wars is a strategy RPG series that started out on the Saturn and was one of the few landmark titles that Sega was able to develop for their ailing competitor to the original Sony PlayStation, and quickly grew to popularity in Japan because of its (then) unique combination of sexy, steampunk robots and sexy, talkative women, with game mechanics that rewarded the player for their ability to chat up girls with better units to use in the strategy RPG portion of the game. While it did well enough to get live theater performances in Japan, anime hadn’t yet hit any sort of popularity in America and at the time no one was willing to take the chance on what would be an incredibly niche product.

Times have changed, though, and Nippon Ichi’s American branch announced they were bringing over Sakura Wars 5 as Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love on both the PlayStation 2 and the Wii, and unlike all the other false starts over the years, I have physical evidence that the game is out in my native language. After all these years, it’s finally here.. While our younger audience probably fails to appreciate why Sakura Wars’ strategy RPG gameplay paired with visual-novel style focus on relationships was so shocking to gamers on this side of the Pacific back in the nineties, old men like myself (23 years old) remember when both strategy RPGs and dating sims were extremely niche genres, never mind a game containing both. Seeing a game in the series make it to market not only fulfills a personal dream of mine, it also shows how cosmopolitan the video game marketplace has become. So what are you waiting for? Grab either the PlayStation 2 or Wii versions now!

Expect us to review this at some point in the future, although given the site’s nature, we’ll probably have more to say about the pretty robots than the pretty girls.

Over at Game Watch they have a nice new breakdown of the Lord of Elemental DS port. Covering all the main characters and their respective mecha. The official site has also received an update and what’s most interesting for us, is that the original Super Famicom music is playing in the background. This may mean that the original maybe intact in the DS port, with any luck at least. The only concern we have at the moment is that the “System” part of the site is still under construction. Now, we’ve already had a fair few Super Robot Wars games on the DS, all of the pretty well wrought too. However, Lord of Elemental’s setup was intentionally quite straightforward for the time. Whether that’s retained or updated somehow is still very much unknown. The game is still set for a May 27th release in Japan at 6,090 yen and you can pre-order it here. Still no word from Atlus on whether this will be released in the West though.

Courtesy of our good friends at HobbyLink Japan, we’ve been sent a toy from Victory Gundam to review. Specifically, the Robot Damashii V2 Assault Buster Gundam. In addition, to give the toy some context, we’ve also linked some anime and gameplay footage of it in action in Gundam vs Gundam Next Plus at the end of the review.

This has been going the rounds as of late, as it seems that a live action Gaiking is in production. The teaser trailer shows that, much like Michael Bay’s recent Transformers films, this Gaiking remake is massively over detailing its designs. The reasoning behind this is obviously because some muppet thinks that this makes the mecha look more realistic; the problem is that they picked Gaiking.

Gaiking is a super robot with MASSIVE horns on its head and a giant mouth in its chest. I mean, honestly, it’s hardly a realistic place to start. Yet going to all that realistic detail in the cockpit and all the visual kibble adorning the mecha’s body is utterly missing the point. At least with the recent animated sequel a few years back they managed to at least get the tone right. This just looks very silly, simply because it’s taking itself desperately seriously. Super robots are meant to be preposterous fun, making them realistic just makes it all very dull.

Gaiking was also one of the mecha mecha in the Shogun Warriors toys/comics line. These were basically a means to sell totally disparate Japanese mecha toys from separate series all under one line back in the late 70s and early 80s (a bit like a super robot version of Robotech). The only heartwarming thought about all this is that Go Nagai might get to finally see some Gaiking royalties if this is actually made.

The original Gaiking and its recent sequel have also been featured in numerous Super Robot Wars games over the years. Our personal favourites are Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 and Super Robot Wars K. Both games come highly recommended.

Thanks to Plastic Pals for the heads up.

A few places have been covering the recent release of the Metal Composite Gundam Unicorn toy as of late. Despite being a remarkable piece of engineering, some inevitable comparison shots between this toy and the previously released 1/100 scale Master Grade kit have surfaced. Now, before your brain melts out the side of your head, the Master Grade is on the left and the new Metal Composite toy is on the right. The fact that they look nigh on identical is testament to the technological advances Japanese toy production has made in the last decade. Bear in mind that the kit on the left would have had to be assembled and painted by hand, whereas a factory produced toy – which has a diecast endo-skeleton no less – looks just as good out of the box. This is why the Metal Composite toy also costs in the range of 18,000 yen but unlike a kit you can actually play with a toy without it breaking. In short this looks like the ultimate incarnation of Hajime Katoki’s brilliant design and is well worth grabbing before it goes out of stock. The Unicorn was also featured in Gundam vs Gundam Next Plus, a game we enjoyed quite a fair bit in our review.

At the recent Tokyo International Anime Fair a rather interesting new anime series, called Kihei Senki Legacies, was announced. Now, we know this is primarily a mecha gaming website – so why cover an anime series announcement?

Well, the first reason is that the mecha design is being helmed by Kunio Okawara. The granddady of real robot mecha design and a designer that has worked on numerous mecha games over the years. The second reason is down to the narrative premise of Legacies; as the series’ protagonist is an ardent gamer and as such is ideally equipped to pilot the Omega 99 pictured above (which looks like an interesting fusion of Gundam and Patlabor design sensibilities, with a dash of Mr. T thrown in for good measure).

Now this is not the first time a mecha gaming nerd has fronted an anime like this, as Overman King Gainer did it not that long ago. What’s interesting about all this is that gaming is entering more into the world of mecha anime, as it’s normally the other way around – with games referencing anime based functionality to form the base rulesets for the mecha.

The TV series is planned to have a 52 episode run and there’s no word on a release date as yet.

A very entrepreneurial Japanese modeller, by the name of ostraking, has managed to inject a selection of lights into the various Kotobukiya and Hasegawa Virtual On model kits. From the Type 94 Temjin from Fragmentary Passage, based off the MBV-04-G Temjin kit from Kotobukiya, to the HBV-502H8 Raiden from Oratan (also from the Kotobukiya line). What’s impressive about these is that much of the surface light sources in the games aren’t easily backlit in a real world kit, this is especially true of the Fei-Yen from Force that has very flat skirt sections – something ostraking has handled with great skill.