Release date: September 30, 1999
 |
| Cover |
Koutetsu
no Gunzei (tl: Steel Force) is an SRPG. You can say it's sort of a
Front Mission 3 clone, missing some features. It's the only SRPG of
the VOTOMS games, and although it has an interesting setting, the
game itself seems to be actively trying to make you stop playing it,
some times.
About
the story: what I gathered from it is that you play as Maxwell, a
member of the Gilgamesh army, who was sent with his squad to a planet
called Magdalena. Magdalena was under attack by Baralant forces, and
your first mission was to fight through the siege. One thing of note
is that the story is told through 4 chapters, and there is a timeskip
between each. In the first chapter, you're fighting the Baralant
siege, and it ends with a Baralant victory. The second chapter begins
with a resistance movement being formed by a man named Hathaway, and
Maxwell joining it.
 |
| Map screen. |
The
game loves to take stuff away from you without any warning, and this
is pretty bad for a SRPG. You usually lose a lot of stuff between
chapters, but also lose or switch ATs a lot between stages. For your
horror, your final team is a mere shadow of your "mid-game"
team, down to your available ATs being low-end or mid-end machines,
instead of some high-end ones you got through the game.
 |
| In-battle screen. |
Again,
it's a Front Mission 3 clone. But a little dumbed-down. In KnG, you
cannot counterattack when attacked (neither can your enemy), ammo is
infinite, and the customization options are pretty shallow, even in
comparison to other VOTOMS games. You can only equip weapons onto
your AT, nothing more. About tactics, this is even more dumbed-down
than most SRPGs, even the simplest ones. Everyone already starts on
the map at once (no reinforcements), but every enemy will rush you as
soon as the battle starts. There's no concept of holding position or
trying tactics. One thing of note is the existence of "glass
cannon" units, like tanks and helicopters. Those units are very
brittle, usually going down in 2 attacks, but they hit like a truck.
A single helicopter can attack three times on a turn, and each attack
does at least 200 damage, which is enough to take down any AT you may
have. So if you have the bad luck of getting into the sights of a
helicopter and don't take it down as fast as you can, you can kiss
one of your units goodbye. Even so, there are not a lot of difficult
spots in the game, although Maxwell has the tendency of being shot
down in every single stage, it's not even funny.
One
last thing about the gameplay is the leveling system - it's pretty
bad. You gain levels by hitting the enemy with attacks, and every 100
exp is 1 level. However, the way the experience is given is what
makes it bad. See, exp is given for hitting an enemy, not necessarily
killing it. And each weapon has a "exp ratio", which is
some sort of formula that gives more or less experience per hit,
based on a weapon. You may see how easy is to exploit this - just
find a weak weapon that gives you enough experience, but doesn't
outright kill the enemy, and you can start farming experience since
the first stages. And the discrepancy between levels can be pretty
high, as far as one character being level 81 while all the others are
level 25. It may seem like a bad joke, but it isn't. If you don't get
used to this system fast, you'll see that people will start to
straggle behind others, and it'll only snowball from there. They
tried to balance the levels with a fatigue system, making sure that
if a single character acts too much, he/she'll fill their fatigue bar
very fast, and it'll take them much longer to get another turn.
However, this just means you'll waste even more time seeing your
characters being shot at, not being able to do anything (remember,
you can't counterattack).
The
game has some pretty nice 3D used in the battle cutscenes, but for
all of its beauty, there's little to no variation. So you'll end up
turning those animations off pretty fast. They are a little
overbearing too, since there are cutscenes even for just moving your
AT around. People who like hearing the VRRRRRR sound of the AT's
roller skates will love it, but not when you're seeing the same
animation for the 25th time. One nice thing is that the 3D map used
in cutscenes is more or less a representation of the 2D map where
your units are set. If there is a steep incline in the 2D map,
there'll also be one in the 3D map.
One
thing I noticed about the story was the lack of named characters on
the enemy side. There's a grand total of ONE named enemy. Also,
there's no final boss. Your final stage, which depends on the route
you've taken, will most likely be fought against a bunch of grunts.
VOTOMS:
Koutetsu no Gunzei is a good game in theory, but the execution is
severely lacking.
Any good points?
The game uses a lot of AT variations that didn't appear in the TV show, only in novels and additional material. For example, you get a very expensive prototype called Spending Wolf, which was used in the development of other ATs. You also get an Avalanche Dog (Snow Scopedog) and some fanservice stuff like the Burglarydog.
Can I play this without knowing japanese?
If you can play SRW in japanese, you can play this.
GameFAQs has a save game: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/576038-soukou-kihei-votoms-koutetsu-no-gunzei/saves
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário