Patlabor Nerawareta Machi 1990 (Game Boy)

Original title: PATLABOR 狙われた街1990
Release date: August 25, 1990

I'm honestly not sure what is up with that title. I think it's the case title?

Anyway. This is a top-down strategic RPG. You play as an Ingram pilot (possibly Ohta?) while looking for opponents to fight in the map. When you touch an opponent's "area", you start a fight.

The difference between this and other games is that you don't enter commands once on each turn. You queue 5 actions per turn, and who plays each action is decided by some sort of dice roll. You can be extremely lucky and trigger all 5 actions, or not trigger any of them. This makes some battles a little too reliant on luck, because you can also get criticals (and your enemy too), which make that action repeat itself once more. So sometimes you'll just lose. Nothing you can do about it. Your Ingram has 3 statistics:

- HP: once this hits 0, it's game over.

- BP: battle points. This governs what you can do in battle.

- YP: sorta like experience points. You need them to buy skills.

BP is important because there are two command categories: attack and defense. Attacks use 10 BP per action, while defense recovers BP. In every stage, you start with 2 attack commands: Stake and Punch, and 1 defense command: Guard. The rest you need to buy, and are dependent on which stage you're at.

You'll need to enter the gray buildings in the map to enter the "shop" in this game. You'll be greeted by Noa (that's why I said maybe the Ingram pilot is Ohta), and she'll give you two options: Energy Refill, which recharges all your HP, and Buy Commands. Energy Refill is completely free, while to buy commands you need YP. Each stage has a different set of commands that can be bought. Usually you'll get "Revolver" and "Riot Gun" in the attack category. The defense category has more variety, with stuff like "Duck", "Dodge", "Convince" and "Repair". 

Since Energy Refill is free, you can just enter the building as many times as you want, while grinding for YP. The enemies present in the map are finite, but if you walk around, you can also trigger random battles. You'll see a message stating "Just stop right there~!" in japanese before a random battle.

So... this is a pretty simple game, right? Bust enemies up, get experience, finish the stage. All is good in the world. Well, not really. See, this game is only 6 stages long, so they needed to get as much out of it as they could. So every stage has a gimmick: you have to find a password and enter it inside a certain building in the stage. it's also a gray building (like the shop), but it usually has the strongest enemy in the stage right in front of it. To get this password, you'll need certain clues you'll find during the stage, and the clues change in each stage. There are 6 stages in all.

So, in this building, if you fail to enter the password 3 times, you get a game over, and it's back to the title screen. Not good. Like I said, every stage has a different set of rules. In the first stage, you already have a password, but you need to exchange some numbers for others. To get the secret numbers, you need to defeat the enemies. The enemies will give you parts of the clues, but not all of them at once. Some enemies also give no clues, they're just there for the YP.

Well, there's not much else to the game. Blow Labors up, get clues, enter passwords. The mech variety is pretty good for such a small game. You'll fight a Brocken right in the first stage, and there are already military Labors in the second stage.

Can I play this without knowing Japanese?
Hm... no. You need it to read the command names, but also to get the clues for the passwords. You can sort of brute-force the first stage password, but the others will not be so easy to guess. There's no guide for this game anywhere in English, either.

Take a look at the GameFAQS Cheats page for some nice stuff.