VOTOMS: The Real Battle (PC-98)

Original Title: 装甲騎兵ボトムズ THE REAL BATTLE
Release date: November 22, 1996

Quite a colorful game, this one. It came out 8 years after the first VOTOMS game (Black Unicorn), and 4 years after the SNES game (Battling Road). Of all the genres you’d think they would give a VOTOMS game, a simulation RPG would probably be one of the last.

Anyway, this is a simulation RPG, in the vein of a lot of PC-98 and early Windows 95/98 games. You have to manage the life of an AT pilot that was in a downwards spiral to hell (or alcoholism). He’s found in a scrapyard by Gohto, the old man who helped Chirico throughout the TV series.

When you begin the game, you can choose your name and your portrait. This option is interesting for two reasons: you can choose portraits of various VOTOMS characters, like Chirico, Fyana and even Kain McDougal (Blue Knight Berserga character), but your main character already appears in the opening, so I wonder if the choice of a portrait is just fanservice for the player. The second reason is that you can put a photo of yourself (or just draw something on Paint) if you know the file format the game recognizes. I remember the manual tells about it somewhere.

Profile screen.

Either way, once you finish with the profile customization, you're booted straight into the game. You start with a Scopedog with a single weapon, and are treated to a simulation screen, where you can choose between various activities: mining for Jijirium, being a bouncer at a bar, shooting people up (I believe you're working as a bodyguard or something), working at a factory, gambling and sleeping. There are those 6 main activities, and some side activities. The side activities are visiting other locations, like shops, Battling arenas and even a scrapyard, where you can get some items, if you're lucky. Each activity takes 1 day off your calendar. Ah, right. There's a time limit of sorts: you have 700 days until you reach a main point on the storyline, which is a Battling tournament. You can do anything you want until then. Anyway, each activity takes 1 day. When you complete an activity, your stats change accordingly: you gain in some areas and lose in others. You also lose HP and MP just by doing an activity, which you can recover by sleeping. The ammount you gain/lose is determined randomly, but an activity usually changes just a few stats, not all of them. For example, mining Jijirium usually only increases your HP and makes you lose a few other stats, but randomly you may gain/lose a completely unrelated stat, like Luck.

Ah, the stats. There are 10 of them: HP, MP, EXP, Attack (Weapon), Defense (Weapon), Attack (Blow), Defense (Blow), Operation, Maintenance and Luck.

Main screen.

About the side activities, they are: AT Factory, where you can customize your AT, Quick Repair, where you repair your AT quickly (uses 1 day to distribute repairs evenly), and Move. Move is a whole activity unto itself, because it's through it that you'll interact with the world and the other characters.

For a simulation game, the AT customization is really deep, although you won't see much of it in action (the battles are just numbers on a screen, really), but you can customize a ton of stuff, anyway. You can assemble your AT from individual parts, although they must match a "family", ie. you can't put a Scopedog arm on a Standing Tortoise. There are 5 screens to customization: AT, weapons, stats 1, 2 and 3. Those last three screens are important because you can fine-tune stuff on your AT, like the distribution of stats between head, arms and legs, the mixture ratio of the polymer fluid the AT uses, and so on. There's a lot of stuff.

About Move, this is where most of the action happens. You have 4 locations available to visit: Woodo, Zaza, A Coba and Scrapyard. In every city, there are the same facilities, just with different characters and items. They are: a shop, a Battling arena and a bar. At the shop you can buy parts/weapons for your AT, at the Battling arena you can arrange matches, and at the bar you can converse with other characters. There isn't much to this, actually. Most of the characters will always say the same lines over and over, except if you have a match arranged against them, or you ask them to be your partner in a Tag Match. In that situation, their lines may change. One thing of note is that this game seems to be set in a "limbo" version of the VOTOMS TV anime, because characters like Gregor and Leeman are seen together with the likes of Chirico and Kan Yu. The Gilgamesh-Baralant conflict was stopped, and it's in that time period that the game happens.

The shop owner in Woodo is Cocona.

The main part of the game is spent in Battling, but there isn't much to it. You just pit your AT against the opponent's, and watch numbers on a screen. You can choose between 3 speeds when you enter a match, the first choice being the fastest, and the third being a play-by-play of the match, where every action is narrated. You gain Fight Money by either winning or losing, usually you get double if you win. Either way, as is the nature of the ATs, the pilots themselves also receive damage, so don't expect to go fighting many matches back-to-back. The game takes note of this, because every match takes a few days to arrange (you can't just fight every day). The day of the match is shown as a post-it below your present day in the calendar.
From what I've gathered, the activities are really slow to increase your stats, so your main venue should be Battling. Although you can get a substantial increase in a few areas just in a few days, it takes far too long to be useful, and remember there's a time limit. Also, you need to repair the damage done to your AT during the battle, it doesn't repair itself.On Battling, there are a few types of matches:
- Single Match: against a single opponent.
- Tag Match: two against two. The matchmaker will tell you to arrange a partner, and if you didn't choose one by the day of the fight, the matchmaker will choose one for you. You can go to the bar and ask anyone inside to be your partner, but not everyone may accept. This seems to be chosen randomly, because even the weakest character may refuse your offer, while you can get the likes of Chirico or Shako (usually the strongest characters) to join you on the first try.
- Handicap Match: this is a kind of special match, where you and a partner have to fight against a Perfect Soldier. Who you fight against depends on the city you're at, being either Fyana (Woodo), Ypsilon (Zaza) or Neeva (A Coba). You gain a hefty sum if you win this battle.
- Battle Royale: I've only seen this once, and it was the first match in A Coba. It's a battle between 5 people at once. Usually the matchmaker will note who is the one most likely to win (excepting you).

One interesting thing is that your Battling opponents also level up throughout the game, just like you do. You can go to the bar at Woodo and ask Vanilla about the stats of any character - he'll ask you 100 gildan (the game's currency) to do it. Usually the top three characters will always be Chirico, Shako and Leeman (sometimes Carson). Who has the most victories in battle is chosen randomly per playthrough, but will most likely be one of those. Accordingly, the weakest characters will usually be Shifford or Bomo.

Rabidlydog vs. Rabidlydog

When you reach day 680 of the game (or 675, I kind of forgot), you'll receive an announcement relaying that the Gilgamesh-Baralant conflict will restart, so most activities are now put on hold. That means there will be no more Battling matches until day 700, which is your time limit. At day 700, a tournament will begin. This tournament will pit your character against the 3 Perfect Soldiers, one after the other, with 10 days of rest between each. In the order Fyana -> Ypsilon -> Neeva. If you lose to any, the game ends right there, with an ending narration. If you win against all three, Gohto will tell you there's a final opponent in 10 days: Chirico. Yep. Chirico is the final boss. He'll fight in the Rabidlydog (the AT he used during the final arc of the TV series). If you win against Chirico, you get a small difference in the ending narration.

The game contains crisp, beautiful art.

In my opinion, this is the 2nd best VOTOMS game, only behind the PS2 game. The art is very well drawn, the music is very good, and the setting is interesting. The only con is the battle system. You need some time to understand it, so you probably won't be able to get the best ending on your first try.

Can you play this without knowing japanese?

You can get by most of the game through trial and error, but without knowing what the weapons do, and what the options mean, you'll make a ton of bad choices.