I will start off this review by saying I did not finish this game, I don't think this game is worth finishing. The appeal of this game is mostly in its "real time dramatic simulation," not the obtuse political system or the horrendous combat system.

Story: it's mostly just framing. We're on water-covered Mars in the year 2252, and the first Pan-Galactic War has just ended two years ago. Unfortunately the Martian economy had over the course of this war become dependent on exporting deuterium to maintain itself, and the war having ended there is far less need for deuterium to provide fuel for spaceships. As a result Mars has destabilized and radicals calling for independence from the central government on Earth have begun gaining quite a bit of power.

Beyond that, the Naval Witches (pretty much the Meltrandi from Macross:DYRL) desire revenge for their defeat in the aforementioned war, and the paternalistic aliens from the Country of Light seek to put the Intelligent Races of Sol (as might be guessed by the talking cats and so on, humans aren't the only intelligent race from Earth anymore) under their "protection. All things point towards the outbreak of another violent era.

The protagonist is the player and the player is the protagonist; that is to say you who are playing the game are part of the story. You've been called from the real world to inhabit the body of a synthetic human in the Martian Independence Army, and bring about 100 years of peace (and remove the Martian dependence on war and/or make Mars independent although that's not required to get an ending.) This might sound like spoilers but it's actually the first thing you are told after starting the game.

The setup probably sounds really broad and it is. There's a lot of background information you can learn from in-game books or talking to characters (which is where most of the game is) but there's not much of a fixed story. As far as I'm aware after the tutorial the only real cutscenes are in the ending.

There are some brief text sections that will occur occasionally when pass time doing something (like eating, or maintenance on your mech) that provide some snippets of what's going on elsewhere in the near galaxy but for the most part these just provide you more context and while they do have story arcs they aren't really involved with you directly. Some of the characters from these text bits can join you on the submarine however. You’ll also sometimes get events when boarding a city ship, which tend to be where most of the direct plot is but it’s usually fairly vague and mainly meant to lead to new characters joining the ship.

The best way I can describe the structure of the game is "Social sim focused rekoeition game." Most of the story is indrect, and you feel more like just some person trying to achieve a big goal in a big world. It's pretty interesting and unique, although unfortunately I think the game doesn't fare too well outside of the social sim aspects.

https://imgur.com/2MzG9BN

We'll start with the combat system. I don't really know how to describe it other than "you are a triangle trying to overlap yourself on other triangles so you can incapacitate them. Torpedoes and mines are triangles too, and they desire the same thing." It's horrible to look at in large battles, and really isn't that engaging.

You have a variety of moves to better overlay your triangle but ultimately it's just a case of getting there and once you're there you will probably be able to instantly kill the enemy with your shield ram, or they will surrender, because missing is very unlikely. Also, if you gain enough momentum (you will as a pilot, because you will be killing so many people) you become able to instantly kill with torpedoes and your melee weapon as well as momentum increases your damage.

You may think "well why is it that you won't miss? If you can instantly kill then besides positioning accuracy should be the main thing in this combat system, right?" Well, because accuracy is determined by momentum which as mentioned before is easy to accumulate. It also makes it harder to hit you, which meant that I never used evade or defend once in this game. I simply did not get hit, and killed my enemies before they really ever got the chance to send out enough attacks to hit me.

There is a piloting skill, according to the wiki it adds more commands to better move your triangle (mech). I don't think I ever realized I gained commands from this because I got to 99 within the first 3 days. All skills that you can train for directly (everything besides "Adult" which is used for what you can imagine) is pretty easy to raise. I imagine if you just made an effort you could get all skills to 99 within an in-game week or so since your main character doesn't need to sleep or eat (remember me saying they weren’t human?) and sitting and standing up from a sofa reduces your fatigue enough that it's never an issue.

So the balance for combat and skills isn't great. Admittedly for rekoeition type games I don't think balance is all that big of a deal, the main thing is that the niche that your filling is fun to do (being a swordsmaster in Taikou Risshiden, trade in Uncharted Waters etc) and at least from the jobs I did (pilot and captain, technically did flight chief as well but that was mostly to test the meeting system as I couldn’t stomach captain long enough to get to it as the captain) I can't say that Kenran succeeds there.

Pilot doesn't do anything but participate in the awful combat and maintain their mech. Unfortunately this is the best way to ensure your sub doesn't get destroyed while talking to people (much like any game like this, never trust auto-resolve/simulated combat) so I never moved from it until I tried captain, which convinced me to finally put this game to rest.

Captain, besides being information overload (getting yelled at in German in Silent Hunter 3 was more relaxing than this shit) also has to participate in the awful combat, but on top of that whenever you issue a command in the combat the game switches from the combat screen to the in-game bridge to show you doing it (this slows down things a lot.) Besides that you have to rely on the AI to actually be at their posts, which admittedly I’m mostly fine with as the AI seems to do ok with this during actual combat, but it can add to the frustration.


All of that would be fine because you don't have to be the captain in this, so you did it to yourself, but unfortunately you are unable to determine where you go on Mars if you're not the captain. As you might imagine, entrusting navigation to the AI in a game is miserable experience, and in the 40 hours (according to the emulator, I think actual time played was probably more around 25 hours) I played I think I saw the same 5 or so cities over and over since the AI captain decided to just screw around.


This is actually the fault of the AI politician and not the AI captain, since it’s the AI politician that determines what the ship does next and the captain decides to accept or veto that. Technically I believe anyone on the council can propose, but since the politician is allowed to bring up a topic first and it seems only one topic can be brought up, I think it was always the politician for me. I suppose if you wanted to best control things you’d become the politician, but then you’d be completely reliant on the AI for combat which is a terrifying thought but perhaps more dramatic.

https://imgur.com/hvC7fq2

The politics system is complicated and really not something you can interact with very well (the politician can be sent to do various things but I don’t think I saw him do this more than 2 or 3 times.) More or less there are 5 political alignments going from far left to far right (the names seem to indicate a left-right axis, and the wiki I used refers to them by a left-right axis so we’ll go with that although I really have no idea what it means in this setting.)

I have no idea what the different alignments do besides if there’s a difference they’ll fight, and you want to avoid it. If people are unhappy they become more radical, and if they’re happy they’re more moderate so I think you want to make everyone more moderate but then you also need everyone to be revolutionary (far left, the alignment of the Martian Independence Army as far as I can tell) to create an independent Mars so maybe you don’t at the same time. You can probably just ignore this system entirely and be fine, just pray or something that not too many ideological conflicts happen (such as the case of far-right Earth invading far-left Venus immediately after I started.)

https://imgur.com/LIZa2sT

The economy is presented as the main villain of the game and I have no idea how you’re meant to interact with it. I think your main interactions with it are mainly meant to be through trying to prevent wars with politician actions and/or starting wars? You can’t directly control anything related to it as far as I can tell. Since preventing wars is all you want to do anyway, its inclusion is kind of mysterious. It’s incredibly in-depth, to the point of including people voluntary unemployed vs involuntarily unemployed but it’s mostly in the background and difficult to monitor as it has so many parts from the individual underwater cities on mars to the various powers in space.

Before I finally get into the social system (which is the actual game) I’ll mention that since both politics and economy are difficult to decipher the best way to get an ending in this game seems to be taking out enemy craft yourself. You gain 10 years of peace for every 50 craft you take out up to 450, so you can get most of the way there from that and just hope that shit goes right and you get the last 10 years somehow otherwise. This is mainly what caused me to quit since I wasn’t interested in playing for another 40 hours just to have to hope that I get lucky and peace happens. I think this is meant as a failsafe to ensure that most players get an ending after playing long enough since I don’t think anywhere in the game tells you this. I found it on the wiki for the game.

Character relationships are determined by 4 stats: friendship, eros, affection, and loathing. I believe you gain interactions with characters from all four, although I never saw fights in my time playing which is unfortunate as they were always an entertaining part of Gunparade March. This system is fairly versatile and can bring about some interesting relationships like my eros heavy affair with the executive officer of the ship despite not really being that close with her otherwise. I think Gunparade Orchestra also uses this but I’m not very familiar with those games. It’s a good system, no real complaints with it.

The AI of the various characters is interesting and admittedly feels fairly realistic which is surprising from a PS2 game from 2005. They’ll occasionally do some very odd things like bring up getting their gift rejected half a year ago and how awful that was but I guess that’s also realistic and the whole setting is so surreal odd behavior doesn’t feel out of place. There’s not really examples to base talking cats and dolphins and exosuits off of anyway. They can be pretty temperamental (admittedly I think this is more funny than anything,) and you have to base your interactions with them off their schedules but I find this just encourages you to interact with more of the crew of which there are so many members, especially after recruiting more.

The long “events” from Gunparade March aren’t really present anymore, but if you ask characters about their past, etc, you’ll get similar information and occasionally they’ll just tell you randomly like Gunparade March characters did. When I figured this out I felt like a bit of an idiot because it’s incredibly obvious in hindsight. I think whether you prefer the better characterized events of Gunparade March or the more fluid system of Kenran is ultimately a matter of preference however.

Character variety is also very very good. Probably one of the better sci-fi casts I can think of in a game. It probably helps that it has a Suikoden level of crew members (36, not including main character and the ship’s AI.) I’ve mentioned the talking cat, but there’s also a talking squid(?) man who has his own little language which you can read about in the library to figure out what the hell he’s trying to tell you. Gunparade March had a pretty good cast too, so I guess this isn’t too surprising since they’ve got a setting that supports even more variety. Also, if you ever wanted to beat up Yuri Shibamura, he’s in here too I think.

I guess the final thing I’ll mention is that you can board the city ships and wander around on them a bit. There’s usually some flavor text while exploring and as I mentioned before text events when you board that lead to recruitment of character/getting bullied about the economy again (the game will do this to you a lot.) It’s more or less just a flat image and you click around it to go to places, kind of disappointing but not that uncommon for rekoeition type games really.
Besides that there’s some minor things like time passing in-game depending on real time, but since it’s limited to 30 days at max and you have 3 years I don’t think it’s a big deal. There are methods of PS2 clock manipulation you can do to get around it if you really want to, or just use save states I guess. Since wars and so on take forever you’ll probably want time to pass though.

Looking back at this review it seems pretty negative but I have to stress how unique of an experience this game is. Sure, the actual big picture simulation stuff is obscure, and the combat and so on sucks but the experience of being a crewmember on a submarine on Mars is kind of irreplaceable. Besides that, as I mentioned earlier most of the time is spent on social stuff, which is the best part of the game anyway. My recommendation is to just ignore the 100 years of peace stuff and just enjoy the atmosphere. I think what ended up killing my enjoyment of this game ultimately was worrying about the political and economic stuff which is very difficult to handle.

ヤガミが艦橋で倒れました

Edit: I completely forgot that rekoeition game is a really obscure term so I didn't define it. Rekoeition game refers to a specific type of Koei simulation game that attempted to merge strategy and RPG. If you've ever played RTK10 or another Koei game with officer mode imagine something like that but a bit more story focused and less focused on military. Uncharted Waters New Horizons for the SNES is considered one.

I gave this game three tries across separate months in this year and could never get past the tutorial on each try. This is gonna be a long ass post because I wanna drop my thoughts on this game that no one cares about somewhere. This game is incredibly fascinating because "blatantly inaccessible" does not even begin to describe it. Every single aspect of this game is a filter on some level.
For the first filter, there is no real overarching story. The base concept is that that you play as a human from the real world possessing an android fighting for a military rebel organization in the 23rd century in underwater Mars. Your goal is to achieve universal peace in three years (there's a calendar system like in gunpa- I mean persona) or else every planet ever nukes each other and existence is over. Sounds like fifty SF story ideas put together but this isn't even the beginning of it. One would expect more of a story but there isn't one. The entire game is 80+ hours of talking to the 36 NPCs (some you have to unlock) on your battleship. The cast is equally as strange, it ranges from a dolphin in a cyborg suit to a giant octopus that's named "Ika" to a seven foot tall early 20th century Italian mafia named "Iron Sovereign". The strangest of them all however is this one kid who is just, a normal boy from our universe and that's his entire thing.
The second filter is that pretty much everything that's normal in other games is way overly detailed and has something stuck to it. What I mean by this is that, this game is tied to "realism" like no other. Aboard the battleship, whenever you want to use the elevator you have to actually wait for it and a lot of the times other NPCs are using it. I've never seen a game where you have to painstakingly wait at least a full minute or two for an elevator just like you would in real life. Some aspects are cool, for example you cannot offer the one Arab character alcohol because Muslims don't drink. Same thing with the underage members of the ship (you start being able to drink with them once they grow older). There's no fast travel or anything like that either, you have to walk across this gigantic submarine every time you want to go somewhere. Another thing is that, with Gunparade March I remember thinking that the AI in it felt incredibly realistic. Now I am glad that they did not feel TOO real because goddamnit this game goes way too hard. The AI in Kenran Butousai act just like real people, in that you can't even talk to them when you want. Aboard the battleship, pretty much everyone is busy with something and they all have their individual moods that you have to pay attention to. This doesn't sound all that special but consider this, if let's say an NPC is busy most of the time they will straight up not even respond to you. Not only that, there is a really detailed memory system where if you say you will go do maintenance for your mecha, the other NPCs remember that and go "Weren't you going to do maintenance? Stop being lazy and get to work." It gets really overwhelming especially with so many people on board, there's also like a dozen dialogue options for every single one of them and they always give some sort of new answer just like in Gunparade.
Oh yeah, the mecha. That's the third filter, besides the social aspects which are 95% of the game there's parts where you fight your enemies in your robot called the "Round Buckler". I can't even begin to describe the battle system, just skim through this clip here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NzKHCxP5V6M&t=535s .
Lastly, this game is a direct sequel to Gunparade March and there's a ton of returning characters. This being said, you won't even recognize any of them unless you know a lot about the overarching lore in the franchise and half of them aren't even actually the same people but alternate universe versions of them. In general, the game is so strange to me because it's like they saw everything people liked about Gunparade and decided to do the exact opposite. There's like a billion things I'm not going that into, such as the fact that the calendar system is actually tied to your real time too. Every time you save, dates pass by in the calendar. For example, if you save on August 7th and return to the game on August 14th three weeks pass in game. Not only that, but the game also counts your real hour play time too and that decides which ending you get. IIRC for the best ending you need to have over 50 hours in the game. All in all, I think this game is very cool and it's kind of lame that it's so unknown because I feel like some people would love it. But, I can't really score it and I never even got past the tutorial because I do not find it fun. If you love blatantly inaccessible games that are meant to be as overly complicated as possible this is your game. Either that, or this game is meant for people actually from the 24th century like in game. Oh and also, there's zero voice acting and this game has more menus you constantly have to read than probably any game ever AND there's a bunch of ship announcements that are in real time that you have to keep track of so... grinding a ton of Japanese is a must.