Release date: October 29, 1993
The only VOTOMS game for the Super NES, VOTOMS: The Battling Road uses Mode 7 effects (think Mario Kart). It's an action game with a third-person view of your AT, with two modes of gameplay: free roam, where you play inside an arena against opponents, and on-rails, where you must dodge and destroy enemies on a linear path, fighting a boss at the end. You play as a Battling pilot called Famin/Fa Ming, an engineer whose parents have been killed in an incident. He uses Battling (a sport in VOTOMS, where people fight with ATs) as a way to have his revenge. The story is told through cutscenes between stages. The game is 8 stages long, and you have 3 continues. Don't worry about a game over, since if you lose all your continues, the game gives you a password.
Now for the gameplay. The controls are rather simple. Up moves the AT forward, down reverses it. Left and right "nudge" the AT to the sides, but only when it's already moving. By itself, they do nothing. Y and X fire your equipped weapon, B and A change the equipped weapon. L and R use the AT's turnpick to turn the AT towards that direction. That didn't make a lot of sense... it's like this: the ATs in VOTOMS have a stake in each leg, called a turnpick. When the AT needs to do a quick turn, this stake slams into the ground, holding the AT in place, while it turns around.
Lastly, push SELECT to see the enemies' health. This isn't mentioned anywhere in the controls, but it sure makes your life a lot easier.
This game is rather short. Being only 8 stages long, you can probably complete it in under 2 hours. Almost all of the stages are Free Roam, with only two of them being on-rails. There's a cutscene after every stage. They're pretty well drawn for a SNES game, although there's some repetition. A pretty good job, all in all.
There's not much variation of ATs in the game, sadly. You play most of the time with a Scopedog, with minor alterations. The first version only has a punch, the second version has the assault rifle, and the final version, the Turbo Custom, has an assault rifle and a rocket launcher. In the two last stages, you'll get a Gusty Dog. I don't remember this one appearing in the anime, so I guess it's exclusive to this game. The enemies also don't show much variation. You fight against Scopedogs (assault rifle and rocket launcher variations), Standing Tortoises and a few exclusive bosses. The first boss is a tank with a giant Scopedog scope, and the final boss is an exclusive too. At least something new for the fans.
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| Famin's final mech, the Gusty Dog. |
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| Final boss. The grey shell on top is another layer of armor. Once you destroy it, the real AT comes out. |
However, as is the fate of almost all of the VOTOMS games, the controls really suck. The little nudge your AT does when you push left or right isn't enough for good turning. You'll have to push L or R to turn in that direction, but that stops the AT on its tracks. So you'll have to do lots of little corrections while pursuing enemies.
My main problem with this game is balance. I guess either they didn't bother to test it throughly, or were inexperienced developers at the time. First, the weapons: you can get three of them in total. An arm punch, an assault rifle and rockets. The first two have infinite uses, while the rockets have different ammo counts depending on your mech: the Scopedog Turbo Custom has 10 rockets, while the Gusty Dog has 15. The first problem with the weapons is that the assault rifle is really useless. It sprays bullets all over the place, the bullets don't go very far, and the damage is very, very small. And this isn't just on your side: the enemies' bullets are also very weak. This leaves us with the arm punch, which is too strong for its own good. Once you realize its power, the game becomes much easier. While you need 10~12 seconds of connecting bullets to down a single enemy AT, you can do the same with 5 to 10 punches. And since the enemies' bullets are as weak as yours, rushing them and punching them to death becomes a very viable tactic, all the way to the end of the game. I'm not kidding: you can just run up to the enemy and punch it 5 times, all the while getting peppered with bullets, and not lose even 1/10 of your health bar. The enemies have as much trouble hitting with bullets as you do. Huge win...?
The other problem with balance is in enemy AI. It's very easy to exploit. See, the enemy moves just like you. It needs to use the turnpick to turn around. However, the AI doesn't know how to do a quick turn while in place (up+L, down+R, vice-versa), and this will lead to the biggest exploit. The AI has something I call "pursuit mode". When you accelerate towards the enemy while they have their back turned to you, they'll try to out-turn you, all the while accelerating forward, because as I said before, the AI doesn't know to quick turn in place. If you keep pursuing the enemy's back, it'll keep failing to out-turn you, because you can turn faster than them. This'll make almost every fight a game of "grab the chicken". And since the enemy only attacks if you're completely in front of them, they'll very rarely attack you. Just don't let them face you, and you'll almost never get shot at. This could be a problem in stages against multiple opponents (you can face up to 3 at once), but I realized the enemies only pursue you if you're inside a certain radius around them. If you keep pursuing a single enemy and keep away from the others, they won't bother you.
The reason I believe this game wasn't thoroughly tested is because sometimes you'll see enemies shooting at each other. It happens all the time. I looked for a reason in the story (such as a Battling battle royale), but this happens in every stage with more than 1 enemy. It's cool that the enemies can hit each other - but this is not just a case of friendly fire. You can be half a stage away from them and see two ATs shooting each other to death. So I think it's an AI issue, and not done on purpose.
Yet another issue with the AI is that it doesn't seem to know where it's moving towards. Some stages have mines on the ground, and the enemy will trigger them without a care in the world. They'll also hit the stage walls and try to futilely turn to the side, and just hit another wall. The only thing the AI seems to know how to do well is shoot you when you're in front of them.
I said balance is a problem, but at least in this game, the balance is totally skewered towards you. Thus the game is too easy once you realize how you can exploit it. And you don't even need to look for ways to exploit it - this just happens naturally as you play the game. Usually game balance is against the player, but in this game, it being good to the player just makes everything too easy.
One last thing with balance is that, while some enemies have rockets too, they're finite, just like yours. So if you're having problems with those yellow Scopedogs, you can just try to run circles around them while they waste all their rockets. Then hit them back with impunity. It seems enemies can't do arm punches in this game. At least I've never seen it.
The game also has a 2 player mode, which can be rather fun. There's no option to play against the CPU, just against another player. The modes are:
- Death Match: you against another player.
- Battle Royale: same, but with CPU-controlled opponents too.
- Panel Battle: you have to pass over colored panels on the ground. Each color gives a certain ammount of points. Whoever scores most points in 3 minutes wins. You can also kill your opponent, but both of you only have arm punches, and they're much weaker compared to the Story Mode version of the weapon.
For Death Match and Battle Royale, you can select your mech and also its colors. There are only four mechs: Scopedog (arm punch), Scopedog (assault rifle), Scopedog (Turbo Custom) and Standing Tortoise. It looks like you can't choose the Gusty Dog or the Scallops (final boss) here.
In the end, as is the fate of most VOTOMS games, this isn't something you'll spend a lot of time on. But play it at least once and see for yourself.
If you're looking to get a little more out of this game, look at the Cheats page on GameFAQs. There's a lot of good stuff there.
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