Robot Alchemic Drive (2002)

I started this one just last night. It's been on my to-play list for so goddamn long, as I'm a big mecha fan, but I just haven't gotten to it. The premise is that you control your human character and their mech separately. There's no cockpit, so you need to run around the environment while the carnage unfolds, swapping to your mech's controls in real-time. Your perspective is always that of the human's, so positioning yourself to get a good look at the fight is essential, but you place yourself at risk of getting caught up in the destruction if you walk too close. If either you or your mech are defeated, it's a game over. Also, your mech's controls simulate an actual control panel; the bumpers operate each leg, respectively, and the joysticks cover arm movement. It's mecha QWOP.

I'm not sold on the experience, as much as I love the concept. It feels like there's never an ideal place to just sit and watch the mech fights, and without being able to properly gauge depth and relative positioning, I'm never compelled to attempt my more-complex attacks. Instead, I just want to flail my arms around until I make contact, lest my uppercut graze the side of my target. And if it does, how much do I need to rotate until I'm aligned? Most of any fight has been just trying to face my damn opponent.

Also, the feedback on your attacks is lacking. Punches feel weak, laser blasts are so tiny they're nearly impossible to see, and so on. When you hit something, it feels like you're clumsily knocking a tower of cardboard boxes over, rather than forcing it down.

I picked the Laguiole, as I like transforming mechs, but the plane mode sucks ass. It's only capable of cruise control speeds, when I thought it'd be like a fighter plane. It almost felt like a joke when I rode on its back for the first time, cool though it is that's possible.

In fact, the whole game feels like one giant shitpost. The best thing going for it so far is how comical everything is, because it's difficult to tell what humor is intentional. The voice acting is some of the worst I've ever heard, but is it a sendup of old English dubs for kaiju movies? Not all voice performances being equally bad throws that theory into question.

The slapstick gore effects are hysterical. I can't remember the last time I laughed at a game as hard as the start of story mode, where I was told a train was pulling into the station I was at. I walked onto the tracks with my schoolgirl friend in tow, thinking I'd just be pushed out of the way by the incoming train model. Instead, we're sent flying like ragdolls in a shower of blood dozens of feet away, screaming as my health bar depletes. Then we land, dust ourselves off, and take the train home.

I think the most fun I've had with the game is vaulting over the cities using my anti-gravity jumps and seeing how high I can go. There's barely anything going on outside of fights, which is a shame, as that means I can't (easily) deliberately walk in front of cars and shit. The city may as well be papier-mâché, merely a setting to place loading zones on. It never feels like a real location.

Also, there's frame drops out the ass. I looked it up, and apparently this is just part of the game and not an emulator issue. It's fairly unpleasant.

I'm not giving up on the game entirely, but I'm unsure if I'm going to return to it at this point in time. The gameplay feels too arbitrary to be fun, since the forced perspective means a lot of my ideas fail for reasons not entirely known to me, and there seems to be nothing outside of the mech fights. The story is a total farce because of the voice acting, and while that's certainly funny, it keeps me from becoming invested. Yeah, it cracked me up to hear a news reporter say in complete monotone, "could this be the end of humanity," but it's not like it became funnier when they said it again in the next stage.