VOTOMS: Uoodo-Kumen Hen (Playstation 1)

Original Title: 装甲騎兵ボトムズ ウド・クメン編

Release date: April 2, 1998

Cover

Oh boy, this one. This is the first game where you play as Chirico, and it's all over the place. It's an action game where you control the title character through 10 stages of non-stop action. And frustration. See, this game is too hard for its own good. The movement is seriously borked - your AT moves slow as molasses, but that's not the worst. The main venue of movement of ATs was always roller skating along the ground, but this option is very, very limited in this game. To the point of being almost unusable. Ok, there are two bars present at all times on your HUD: they control the ammount of Polymer Ring fluid that's distributed between the roller skates and your AT's other systems. There are 5 configurations: 10% SYS, 90% Skates, 25% SYS, 75% Skates, 50/50, and the other way around. The Systems part controls your recoil (every time you fire you deplete it a little), and the Skates part controls your skating and also leg movement (limited). The bars replenish over time, but it's so slow that you'll have to stop completely and watch them refill. They also refill while you're walking, but it's much slower than when you're fully stopped.

The other thing? The aiming controls. They're completely manual. There's no lock-on (at first) in this game. So you have to shoot in front of you hoping you'll hit the enemy. While you're trying to dodge THEIR attacks. And this is where the system grinds to a halt. You can do a ton of cool maneuvers with this limited system, but you can skate for so little time that it has almost no use at all. Even the AI has problems trying to aim at you.

Compounding those problems, there is another: length. The game is short, only 10 missions long, BUT the missions themselves can be very long, just because you have to go through them very slowly. See, your mech can get destroyed very quickly (it's an AT, after all), but the enemies can also take a lot of punishment before going down, even the grunts. A police AP, which is just a glorified car, takes up to 6 seconds of non-stop machinegun fire to bring down. And you have to fire at it while strafing (very slowly), because it will fire back at you, and kill you pretty fast. The enemies don't have many variations, being mainly cops (yeah, on foot), cops on bikes or flying cars, APs, helicopters, turrets and other ATs. ATs are pretty rare in this game, probably 5% of the enemies are ATs.

One way you can exploit the system is by firing while strafing to your right. See, most of the APs and ATs fire with their right side, so by strafing to your right, you can hit them consistently and also dodge their fire. However, this doesn't work against boss ATs. There are very few of them, but trust me when I say they'll shred you so fast they'll make you cry. The best strategy I could come up with was to rush them and try to punch them (there's an Arm Punch) many times, and pray they didn't try to strafe away from me. It worked pretty well, and you'll see it's probably how everyone defeats the final boss.

Ah, the Arm Punch. It's a very strong weapon, but because you need to get up in the enemy's face, and your AT also stops a little when firing it, it's useless against almost everything you fight. Even the APs will try to back up when they see you close by, making the arm punch useless.

For all its failures, I guess the biggest one is the aiming system. There's no lock-on, but even then, you'll see that your shots are going through the enemy, not really hitting anything. This happens mostly against cops on foot - you can see your shots going through them, and the only way to connect is to get closer. Other times, you're shooting around corners (a valid tactic), but the game doesn't give you any indication that the shots are being stopped by an invisible wall (sometimes you see a small spark, but not always).

Because you're playing as Chirico, you can only use the Scopedog. The very basic one, with a machinegun and an arm punch. You can play as the Red Shoulder Custom (it has many weapons) during two stages, but that's it.

All in all, stay away from this one. Below is some gameplay I've recorded off it:

How do I get auto lock-on?
You need to finish the game once to get an item that enables it. There's a save game on GameFAQs:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/573558-soukou-kihei-votoms-uoodo-kummen-hen/saves

Can you play this without knowing japanese?

There is some narration between the stages, and a few missions have a failure condition, but nothing you can't discover through some trial and error.