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

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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.

VOTOMS: Koutetsu no Gunzei (Playstation 1)

Original Title: 装甲騎兵ボトムズ 鋼鉄の軍勢
Release date: September 30, 1999

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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