This is a pretty long game, and I’m not even sure I will finish it by the next post. It’s 48 stages plus 29 subscenarios. A good number of the main stages have multiple battles per stage. My time counter is at 21 hours and I’m not even quite at the halfway point yet.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about the story. The stages up to now have mostly been geared towards introducing the various series, and the stages themselves are often just little episodes that don’t advance an overall plot. Grandark is still recovering his power so he hasn’t been doing much.
The main plot element that has emerged in the Baan Gaan storyline is about Shunpei’s friend Hiro. In the first stage Shunpei and Hiro were facing off in the finals of the VARS tournament, and when the building collapsed, Shunpei thought Hiro had died. But actually he has reappeared as “Guilty”, an enemy who follows (or is controlled by) Grandark. He’s helping raise the bad emotions of humans to help Grandark recover.
On the gameplay side, I’ve generally been using my lowest level units in each stage because you never know what units they are going to force you to use. One annoyance that many reviews of the game point out is that if one of the mechs has multiple forms, or if they combine into a better mech, the levels do not carry over. Ideally you would then just be able to use the combined forms or the upgraded forms, but some maps force you to use the original mechs instead. I don’t know if this happens often enough that you really need to make sure the weaker mechs are keeping up in levels, but I’ve been doing it anyway.
One thing that does help is that once the weapon upgrade place is accessible, you can fairly cheaply upgrade the weapons of the weaker units and it will often unlock newer weapons they can use.
Before I unlocked the weapon upgrades I just spent all my money on items to unlock all the items. After that, I focused on the heal items, particularly the full party heal items. I usually buy a few of those and then spend money on upgrading the weapons of the lower level units I will have to use. I’ve also upgraded Baan Gaan’s weapons since he is present in (almost) every stage.
The battles themselves are pretty much the same thing; each map does not present a unique challenge in the style of Fire Emblem or the like.
I think what I will do with the rest of this post, and next week’s post, is introduce the Brave Series components (partly just so I can learn about them). Apparently the initial idea was that the series would be simpler and more suited for young children than a lot of the mech anime at the time which often had more complex themes and violent content. However, this was not always adhered to, and many of the series had fans beyond the 3-5 year old children that the initial audience was supposed to be. But this explains why the story isn’t really moving overall; the original anime were basically just single episode storylines with not much of an overarching plot arc.
Brave Exkaiser
The story behind this series is that space pirates have come to the Earth seeking treasure, and the Space Police Kaisers put their spirits into inanimate objects to help catch them. The leader, Exkaiser, inhabits the car of an elementary school student’s family (Hoshikawa Kouta) and Kouta becomes friends with the robot as they seek the lost treasures that the space pirates steal. Unless I overlooked something there’s no clear reason why Kouta’s presence is important to Exkaiser, but it may be that the writers didn’t really see a need to explain that given the target audience.
The space pirates are goofy characters that show up a lot in the subscenarios; they often misunderstand the “treasure” they are going after — for instance, they hear that mothers are a treasure and so they start kidnapping moms.
The Brave of Sun Fighbird
The setup for this series is essentially the same as the previous one, except that this time the invaders ally with a mad scientist and the hero protagonists put their spirits into robots being built by a Japanese scientist to serve as rescue vehicles. There’s the same deal where the grandson of the scientist makes friends with Fighbird (who also has the name Yutaro Katori).
The Brave Fighter of Legend Da-garn
This series was intended to have an ecological theme, which is where the “enemy sapping the energy of the trees” episode from the first post came from. In this series the main character obtains a jewel called Aurin which is the soul of the Earth, and he has to track down the 8 brave robots which are sleeping as 8 Brave Stones. As with the previous series, the adversary is an invader from outer space who is trying to steal the planet’s energy.
In addition to the main Brave series there are three cameo series which are non-Brave mech anime — Votoms, Dagram, and Galion. It seems like the way they are using these is that Shunpei briefly gets put in an alternate world for him to learn something about himself or the reason why he is fighting. So the characters from those series only show up for a couple of stages and don’t join the main cast or have anything to do with the overall plot.
Next week I’ll cover the other Brave series…maybe I’ll actually be done with the game by then?
