Lets play! Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 1

Given that there is a new meme for games of playing a game and taking screen shots, I figured I would slowy work on the two Super Robot Wars games that have been translated into English by the fine company of Atlus.

Anyway Super Robot Wars originally was a Japanese crossover game of various mecha anime in a tactical RPG system. Its one of the better selling games over there, and its still going strong with recent production of an anime tv series and a OVA. The writers are quite good, and they in the various games managed to do a good job of tying all the plots together and often made original characters to help better tie things. Eventually they created so many original characters that they could make up their own universe and this what they did with the OG timeline. And the OG games are probably going to be the only ones released in the US due to various copyright issuses that Japanese don't quite have to deal with.

Anyway for this game it follows the current standard SRW tropes of having super deformed mechs. It confronts you straight up with the most important choice you can make of determine who your main character should be. The choices are Kyosuke of the ATX team, or Ryusei of the SRX team. Both picks have their plus and minuses (the main plot difference is that the ATX team is fighting in space against the UCC while the SRX team fights the DC on the Earth), and to be told the first game is more of the SRX team story then it is of the ATX team, as the second game is heavily ATX focused.

But I like Kyosuke better, so I'm going to play him.

Thus without further ado.


Space! The final frontier. Men have finnaly built a spaceship to propel them to the outer edge of the system.

That doesn't look good ;(

Captain Daitetsu, he's the platonic idea of a anime space captain. He's pretty cool and ends up captaining the Hagane, which of course awesome looking sort of retro spacebattleship.

Sean Webbly, his XO, he's an ladies man.

Gigansucdo is the other blue object on the screen. Its a Super Robot, Earth's first actually, designed to be an anti-battleship unit.














By mid-game the enemies on the screen would be chaff for your weaker pilots, so yes we make them pay.






Pay attection to that, its important plot expostion, and Bian Zoldark is arugably the most important NPC of the game

Anyway the first mission premission plot appears. I had some screenshots but things got messed up so lets just cut here to Kyosuke talking with his current boss, Lt Colonel Hans.... Viper. Yes he is a villian.




Kyosuke: A test pilot who has experince in crashlandings and the devil's own luck is understandable wary of piloting a machine that is infamous for crashing. Of course this makes Col Hans angry.


















Its not quite clear why he does this. Or what he thinks he is going to get from trying to mess around with Mao Inc.




Irm. He's a quasi-miltary test pilot, son of a the main weapon designers at the very important resarch lab that makes the mecha, and sort of a Mao industries guy.








Haha, you're so predictably evil Hans
Here is a bit of a disjointed battle sequence due to the screen shot, but this shows the beginning menu. Notice the improbabilities of hitting? Attacking is simple, you fire your weapon and hope you don't get shot when they fire back at you. Defending is more complicated, you can counter attack, you can defend to mitigate damage that hits you, or you can attempt to dodge and lower the probability of getting hit.



Notice the tile map? Friendly units blue, and you can move around on it, various features give bonsus to hit rates, repair HP and energy.

Anyway when you do a high powered attack, often the pilot's face will appear followed by the attack.


An powerfu beam attack hits. Notice the bars up on the top? The top bar is HP, and bottom is energy. Energy is used for onboard energy weapon systems, flying, and shields. Important bosses often have shields, so you have to drain their energy before you can start hurting them.






After you defeat an enemy, you get money and XP. Pilot points are used to improve your pilot, money is used to buy upgrades or repairs to your units, and XP increases the pilot lvl automatically improving your pilot.

Here is the spirit command screen. As you gain in level you get to unlock more spirit commands, which help you. There SP bar is like MP, and probably the most oft used command is focus and flash. Focus decreases the enemy hit rate while increasing your own, and flash gives you an single perfect dodge on the next attack. You can only do spirit commands when its your turn to move the unit.

I used focused in this battle, and notice how the probabty of hitting is different then from before?

Battle Mastery's are important, basically they are bonus goals. If you achieve several of them you can unlock hidden units, items, as well as make the game more difficult.
















Who didn't see this coming? The unstable robot plane crashing?!






Ring Mao is Irm's former girlfriend, and CEO of Mao. This is why Irm gets so pissed off.












And when you do a mission you are brought to this screen. Here you can upgrade the base unit, the weapons on the unit, change pilots of different units or upgrade them, save your game and then move on to the next level.

Whew. This was alot of work for a comparatively short mission, but admittedly the main holdup was not playing through, but the uploading of the pictures.

Anyway if anybody has suggestions of how to go, let me know. Also as a warning I'm not that good at this game, so I might give myself a bit of advantage if I get stuck.

Also....

I beaten Super Robot Wars Alpha while I was on my spring break. Thankfully I have a power converter for the laptop so when I was in the car going across half the nation, when I was not writing papers, I was playing that game. I feel sort of good about it, because its the first SRW game I beat without having to use cheat codes.

Though the last level was for me very hard, in that the way you had to go about beating the boss went against the tactics that had been working for me since my main character got very good at her ability to dodge people.

Also while I am on the SRW front, I been showing my friend OP SRW anime, which I now seen both the OVA and TV series that came out recently. I may start commenting about robots from there that are cool.

As for LOGH, I haven't done much with it since I saw the finale, which was great but I feel sort of burnt out watching it, and decided to take a break.

And commentary on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Facism? Its good book. It forced me to rethink the paradigm of fascism, but germs of the idea are out there, even admitted as such by presumably non-right wing professors. Main problem is that he needed to stop repeating himself in certain parts, but other then that, its a good "popular" history book that gives a strong enough argument to at least re look at idealogical DNA of fascism and American populism.

A thought in the night.

Its rather late, but something I was reading in a local Chicago magainzine struck me, and got me thinking about this line of thought, which I may expound on later. But every time I see intellectual or somebody that takes on intellectual airs talk about a complex situation that effects generally the less educated classes or lower socio-economic classes, I can't help but to think about Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and the concept that its easy to be a good person when you are strong.

People are concerned about themselves first, then their kin, friends, whatever perceived community they are part off, and then finally the larger concept of the nation. When economic change hits people, say for instance off-shore manufacturing, its seen as economists as good as it helps generally the poorer country who gets the factory but America as well as by lowering prices, millions are Americans can now afford a product cheaper, and in the process spawns new jobs, but for the 30 year old factory worker, its a bitter fruit as they have to now do something else then what they spent their life presumably mastering.

Its easy for a College Professor in Econ to say this is good, but its harder say for a student of that Professor to tell his father who lost his job because of that the same thing. Being removed from situation makes the purely rational easier in some ways, but it also hurts in that removes the human equation as well, and since humans are social irrational creatures, this is important.

Anyway, its tired ramblings of a bored mind.

Robotech

About sometime towards the end of Junior High, my family went on a trip to Door County, as had been the case of every time we went on a long trip, we often bought books for the ride, and on that occasion I had picked up for myself the first Omnibus trilogy of Robotech books.

Now this hadn't been my first exposure to Robotech, like many kids of the 80s I had seen it on TV, but I only seen bits of pieces of it, and outside of a single VHS that old movie store downtown, and a book from the middle part of the series that I had looked at on off, I wasn't well familiar with Robotech.

The books thus were my first real look at the world, and to this day remain some of my favorite. The Robotech novels took the story from the tv show and expanded on the universe in interesting ways (some of them are a bit odd like turning Protoculture from a power source to like the force but still it helped make some thematic sense and to serve as a reason for some of the deus ex machina moments) and were quite good.

When I got back, I became obssed about reading the rest of the series, and by that time next year or so, I had most of the the books, and later one I would read all of them, obtain two Robotech VHS, and later on a Robotech 2 Seintinels Comic Book. One of the first things I did on the internet was find some pictures of the SDF-3 at the local library. You could've called me a protoculture addict.

But I never watched the vast majority of the show. And in time, I saw Macross 2 (something I taped when it was played, which is still one of my favorite shows despite critics about it) and the Macross Do You Remember Love? movie, which was good, and then I saw the Shadow Chronicles when it came out and even had a argument with those who didn't like the retcon that brought about.

But I never watched the vast majority of the show, and so about after last Mother's Day, I bought the giant box set of Robotech, watched parts of episodes I already seen before to show my friend, the Robotech pilot episode for a sequel and then got busy watching other things. This spring however, I decided I was going to watch the show, and since I've been sick, that has been what I've been doing lately.

And so far, despite Macross saga's "quality" moments and English Minmei singing, I've enjoyed it. Its been utterly fascinating to me to watch how the directors and the American side staff turned three utterly different shows into a single coherent whole and they managed more or less to pull it off with some difficulty (the Robotech Masters sort of come out of nowhere, and script errors are very evident when they appear)

But so far, I've been enjoying myself, and that is good enough for me.

Anime flashback of 2007

Some short reviews of the shows I watched during 2007 that I can remember

Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB6UQleD5DE
Its by the same people who brought us, Kannazuki no Miko, Steel Angel Kurumi and other things, and its shows and makes references to those shows in that it reuses some of the ideas and actual characters types and designs.

Its a show set in a future at a Academy about a high school girl name Kuu who feels empty inside and is writing to her dream prince, and her adventures in getting messed up in a conspiracy of the Ayanokōji family as each of the members use advance war technomagical war machines called Absolute Angels that look like pretty girls .

Its a pretty decent show, and if your a fan of the shows I mentioned earlier, you would probably enjoy it, though granted Kuu is pretty much the dumbest protaganist ever in anime, and that is saying alot. But it makes up for it by being at time so insanely silly and melodramatic and gives us one of the best reasons to be a villian ever, in that your brother steals your girlfriend.

3/5 average.


Heroic Age:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqFq_ChQVIc&watch_response

In the future Earth has been lost to Humanity called the Iron Tribe, against the combine might of the Silver and Bronze Tribe, their only hope in this war that is going against them is the single young Earth man named Age who had been child on a ship that was sent out to Gold Tribe's last known location when they sent a call to find them. The Gold Tribe had previously been the rulers of the Galaxy before they left and they had awesome powers, and controlled and imprisoned the remaining members of the stupidly powerful Heroic Tribe which were a race of gaint biomecha that had destructive effects on space and stars and had habit of blowing things up when they got angry and fighty which did they alot.

Age is a man who has teachings of the Gold Tribe, and as well as being the body that houses the most powerful member of the Heroic tribe (also called Nodoses with singular Nodos) Bellcross. By transforming into Bellcross he is the young Earth's Princess and her ship the Argonaught best hope to save humanity and the galaxy, but lying in his way are the space insects of the Bronze Tribe and their masters the generic pretty boy and pretty girl race of the Sliver Tribe who are just light years beyond the humans, and control the other 4 Nodoses.

Whew that was alot, but it was good set up. The show is combination of I think of a Super Robot War show meets Nadesico meets Legend of the Galactic Heroes, in that the there is a hero ship, heroic mech, and fleets that are thousands of ships strong line up against each other firing. Its a pretty gripping story, but after they retake Earth, things begin to get a bit sloopy and that is why I'm giving it only a 4/5 instead of a 5.

I'll stop here for now: Next update I'll be reviewing Tactical Roar, and Soukou no Strain, and Baccano!

On a side note, I've returned to playing through Super Robot Wars Alpha, and about half way through the game. Its fun and been pretty easy for me so far, though I have had some missions where everything went tits up, but that only happened twice, once against an EVA Angel, and another when the Macross transformed on me and blew up everything in front of it, which included half my units. But thankfully I had killed enough extra stuff to pay for the repairs.

Hello is this thing still on?

Yes it is.
To myself and my pretend loyal readers, posting shall resume in the near future.

Topics to look out for!
Belated: Anime reviews of 2007
Commentary on Jonah's Goldberg's Liberal Facisim
More pictures from LOGH
And other random musing of my mind.

A Profile of a Galactic Hero: Admiral Bittenfield

Admiral Bittenfield. Space Patton.

Bittenfield, what can I say about him? He's the wild boar of the LOGH universe, and he is a quite proud of it. He's loud, lacks social graces, but at the same time, he's honest and is one of the great positive characters of LOGH. Which is hard to see at first, since he is often the foil for Yang Wengli to trick taking advantage of his wanton charges.

But the thing about him, is that for the most part his shock warfare works in that keeps the enemy under heavy pressure, and he actually did in the last battle that Yang oversaw, do a great deal of damage to the Republican forces. He manages this feet by at some times through sheer force of will, just keeping his men going at it. He isn't a great strategic genius, but he is competent and this is seen towards the later part of the series in the battles of the civil war of the New Reich, and also during the last campaign of the Iserlohn Republicans in which if it wasn't for the actions of Julian when he was on board the Kaiser's ship would of saw Bittenfield just crush the remaining fleet that had been in battle against the Kaiser's fleet.

He is an interesting character in that he gets character development and becomes important, yet he is one of the few Admirals we don't see a personal side too.

Next time on the this focus of actual Heros, I shall focus on Alexander Bucock, probably the greatest FPA admiral outside of Yang Wengli or Dusty Attenborugh.