yohancuman
even if it has a wonkier narrative and isn't quite as good as the second game, the game is still fantastic. all the paris members are wonderful and the ride never lets up.
組手したり、暮らじたり
早食い競争したり、演じたり
いかにも、帝劇から巴里まで・・・
こんな短い間に、
感情の嵐が
吹っ飛ばす心ゆえに、
慕う。
𝙐𝙉𝙍𝙀𝙋𝙇𝙄𝘾𝘼𝙏𝘼𝘽𝙇𝙀 𝘽𝙔𝙂𝙊𝙉𝙀 𝙍𝙊𝙈𝘼𝙉𝘾𝙀
早食い競争したり、演じたり
いかにも、帝劇から巴里まで・・・
こんな短い間に、
感情の嵐が
吹っ飛ばす心ゆえに、
慕う。
𝙐𝙉𝙍𝙀𝙋𝙇𝙄𝘾𝘼𝙏𝘼𝘽𝙇𝙀 𝘽𝙔𝙂𝙊𝙉𝙀 𝙍𝙊𝙈𝘼𝙉𝘾𝙀
An enjoyable, but flawed, armored core clone with fantastic music, unfortunately forgotten by the internet in both Japan and the west.
I'm not fluent in Japanese so I could only understand so much of the story, but from what I did understand its largely uninspired and forgettable. It has all the beats you would expect from a mecha story and even has a Char Aznable clone of its own.
The combat can be best described as a poor man's armored core although that's not necessarily a bad thing. Its hard to make mech combat combat boring and the combat here is generally fast-paced and arcadelike. However, the game itself feels poorly designed. The strategy elements presented in the main map of the game are barebones and its just a glorified level select when the game decides to even give you that option. Once your in the game the field maps themselves are repeated throughout your playthrough and are largely empty although some of them do look charming. Due to the lack of any health items or any pick ups the gameplay boils down to sprinting to the boss fight to save health and avoiding or ignoring any enemies in the fields themselves. Driving around fast and blowing up little dudes is still fun mind you but I can't imagine this being the intended way to play the game.
The game's more house / chill 90's edm music really shines and I really do enjoy these tracks. They have a lot of personality and make the game experience much more memorable. There's some nice funk guitars and basslines spread throughout the OST and they're very enjoyable. Some of the more "actiony" tracks a bit uninspired but the good ones are REALLY good. I get nostalgic listening to these beats. I'd recommend finding the soundtrack online and giving a good listen to what's offered (They're not even on YouTube, but you can still find them).
The game even has JAM project singing the OP track, which like everything else they do, is phenomenal.
Its a shame that this game became so obscure even if it is flawed in many areas. I recommend it if you're looking for a short and enjoyable little adventure with giant robots, you wont need too much JP skill to actually play the game itself.
I'm not fluent in Japanese so I could only understand so much of the story, but from what I did understand its largely uninspired and forgettable. It has all the beats you would expect from a mecha story and even has a Char Aznable clone of its own.
The combat can be best described as a poor man's armored core although that's not necessarily a bad thing. Its hard to make mech combat combat boring and the combat here is generally fast-paced and arcadelike. However, the game itself feels poorly designed. The strategy elements presented in the main map of the game are barebones and its just a glorified level select when the game decides to even give you that option. Once your in the game the field maps themselves are repeated throughout your playthrough and are largely empty although some of them do look charming. Due to the lack of any health items or any pick ups the gameplay boils down to sprinting to the boss fight to save health and avoiding or ignoring any enemies in the fields themselves. Driving around fast and blowing up little dudes is still fun mind you but I can't imagine this being the intended way to play the game.
The game's more house / chill 90's edm music really shines and I really do enjoy these tracks. They have a lot of personality and make the game experience much more memorable. There's some nice funk guitars and basslines spread throughout the OST and they're very enjoyable. Some of the more "actiony" tracks a bit uninspired but the good ones are REALLY good. I get nostalgic listening to these beats. I'd recommend finding the soundtrack online and giving a good listen to what's offered (They're not even on YouTube, but you can still find them).
The game even has JAM project singing the OP track, which like everything else they do, is phenomenal.
Its a shame that this game became so obscure even if it is flawed in many areas. I recommend it if you're looking for a short and enjoyable little adventure with giant robots, you wont need too much JP skill to actually play the game itself.
I don't tend to enjoy most remakes since I find them either too different from the original to really be a remake (becoming a different game altogether) or just outright miss in capturing the magic of the original game. This one does neither and it absolutely rocks.
If you're deciding on which game to play, ideally you play the original and then this one later down the line to really appreciate the changes. If you're short on time or don't want to do that, then play this one instead of the first since it does have another spoonful of content added to it. I've included some of the changes that stuck out to me below, light spoilers ahead, but nothing explicit.
---=Changes from the Original=---
-All the old minigames are gone! They ended up removing all of them and instead turned them into simple dialogue trees. There is a single new minigame, but the loss of the old ones is unfortunate.
-All the CGs have been redrawn and there's a small amount of new cutscenes, but most of them are reused from the original game. There's a bit of an odd juxtaposition between the new cutscenes and the old ones but it never bothered me that much.
-Gameplay is based on the later games, and is generally faster than it was before. All the heroines ooze personality on the battlefield.
-All the girls now have small sub stories you can do with them akin to Sakura Taisen 2, that you can progress through during your daily life in the theatre. The rest of the side characters in the Imperial Theatre also have their own sub stories too. They're all great, although Kouran's subplot feels a bit out of character. Speaking of...
-Kouran gets her own chapter! She didn't have one in the original game, so having her have a moment in the spotlight was much appreciated. Its a pretty substantial chunk of writing and extra content and its all wonderful.
-The 5th chapter of the game got an overhaul.
-There's also more romance and scenes with your heroine in this game in general, by a decent amount compared to that original game. Not quite as much as the 2nd one, but everything extra is still good stuff.
-The endings are the same as in the original, so don't go in expecting anything brand new.
-The game is also more connected to the later games, but I wont elaborate on this.
-Shower scenes rock now. I wont elaborate on this either.
If you're deciding on which game to play, ideally you play the original and then this one later down the line to really appreciate the changes. If you're short on time or don't want to do that, then play this one instead of the first since it does have another spoonful of content added to it. I've included some of the changes that stuck out to me below, light spoilers ahead, but nothing explicit.
---=Changes from the Original=---
-All the old minigames are gone! They ended up removing all of them and instead turned them into simple dialogue trees. There is a single new minigame, but the loss of the old ones is unfortunate.
-All the CGs have been redrawn and there's a small amount of new cutscenes, but most of them are reused from the original game. There's a bit of an odd juxtaposition between the new cutscenes and the old ones but it never bothered me that much.
-Gameplay is based on the later games, and is generally faster than it was before. All the heroines ooze personality on the battlefield.
-All the girls now have small sub stories you can do with them akin to Sakura Taisen 2, that you can progress through during your daily life in the theatre. The rest of the side characters in the Imperial Theatre also have their own sub stories too. They're all great, although Kouran's subplot feels a bit out of character. Speaking of...
-Kouran gets her own chapter! She didn't have one in the original game, so having her have a moment in the spotlight was much appreciated. Its a pretty substantial chunk of writing and extra content and its all wonderful.
-The 5th chapter of the game got an overhaul.
-There's also more romance and scenes with your heroine in this game in general, by a decent amount compared to that original game. Not quite as much as the 2nd one, but everything extra is still good stuff.
-The endings are the same as in the original, so don't go in expecting anything brand new.
-The game is also more connected to the later games, but I wont elaborate on this.
-Shower scenes rock now. I wont elaborate on this either.
2010
Drop the reaper plot.
Make the game entirely about Shephard and friends goofing about in space.
Balance out the loyalty missions a bit more and avoid pandering to fan favorites. (I love Tali but come on, Thane and Samara get the short end of the stick content wise.)
Expand and refine the rpg elements from the previous game as opposed to dropping them completely.
You would've had a much better game.
(It is also worth mentioning that for a human supremacist organization that did a whole bunch of unethical acts in the previous game, Cerberus ended up being boringly sterile in this entry. Its like the writers wanted to include taboo subject matter in their game but were either on a leash or refused to explore to any of their more interesting ideas.)
Make the game entirely about Shephard and friends goofing about in space.
Balance out the loyalty missions a bit more and avoid pandering to fan favorites. (I love Tali but come on, Thane and Samara get the short end of the stick content wise.)
Expand and refine the rpg elements from the previous game as opposed to dropping them completely.
You would've had a much better game.
(It is also worth mentioning that for a human supremacist organization that did a whole bunch of unethical acts in the previous game, Cerberus ended up being boringly sterile in this entry. Its like the writers wanted to include taboo subject matter in their game but were either on a leash or refused to explore to any of their more interesting ideas.)
1996
Great adventure game with tons of sole. Main nitpick is that I really don't think its possible to beat without using a guide at least once. I understand the setting is supposed to be cartoonish and nonsensical but that didn't mean the logic for
the puzzles had to be cartoonish and nonsensical too.
the puzzles had to be cartoonish and nonsensical too.
1996
An absolute mess of a game with some great ideas. It seems like with every novel idea they develop they end up shooting themselves in the foot some way or another.
The cast of aliens are now handcrafted puppets and most of them look great and have a certain charm to them, but the ones that don't look really bad.
The star map now has a search function and tags so that you can easily search for any system you're trying to find, but the map itself is impossible to read because of issues pertaining to depth perception.
Races from the previous game return and join forces with the protagonist, only to be either underutilized, repeat previous dialogue verbatim, or have their backstories retconned. (The Syreen in particular frustrated me as their backstory in StarCon2 discussed how they developed primarily due to their agricultural society which was safeguarded from the hunter-gatherers tribes by the mountainous regions of their homeward until war and conquest was an impracticality. The sexual and political structures for the Syreen differed from humans similar to how the sexual structures in chimpanzees and bonobos differ in the real world. In StarCon3 their backstory is boiled down to "we never had misogyny lol")
I still enjoyed parts of the game for what its worth and I can still recommend it, but you need to go in with the right expectations to enjoy it.
The cast of aliens are now handcrafted puppets and most of them look great and have a certain charm to them, but the ones that don't look really bad.
The star map now has a search function and tags so that you can easily search for any system you're trying to find, but the map itself is impossible to read because of issues pertaining to depth perception.
Races from the previous game return and join forces with the protagonist, only to be either underutilized, repeat previous dialogue verbatim, or have their backstories retconned. (The Syreen in particular frustrated me as their backstory in StarCon2 discussed how they developed primarily due to their agricultural society which was safeguarded from the hunter-gatherers tribes by the mountainous regions of their homeward until war and conquest was an impracticality. The sexual and political structures for the Syreen differed from humans similar to how the sexual structures in chimpanzees and bonobos differ in the real world. In StarCon3 their backstory is boiled down to "we never had misogyny lol")
I still enjoyed parts of the game for what its worth and I can still recommend it, but you need to go in with the right expectations to enjoy it.
1994
A truly phenomenal game with some deep flaws involving pacing / padding. Lots of novel ideas that were never brought back in sequels spiritual or otherwise.