機動戦艦ナデシコ NADESICO THE MISSION, released 8/26/1999, developed and released (I think) by Sega

I don’t know how well people remember it now, but Nadesico was a big deal in the 90s and 2000s — I remember people being fans of the anime. I have never seen it but I am familiar with the series through its many appearances in Super Robot Taisen. The series was praised for its offbeat style that mixed comedy and drama in a way that was going against the usual “horrors of war” mech series (while still having some of that content).

Unfortunately, after the TV anime, the series faltered and never regained its footing. There was a movie, but it was widely criticized for the drastic change in tone and what happened to the main characters from the TV series. It also required a Sega Saturn game to fill in the gap between the TV series and the movie, a game that was never released in English.

Apparently the movie was intended to be the first in a trilogy that would conclude the storyline, but the other two movies were never made. I was not able to find out definitively if this was because of the negative reaction to the movie (I am also not sure if the reaction in Japan was as negative as in the US).

This game came out about a year after the movie, and takes place after it. However, it does little to advance the plot, and I assume the developers were constrained in what they could do because they had to fit their game into the (possibly unknown) remainder of the storyline. Despite the ending of the movie, Akito does not appear at all in the game (I did not even see a mention of him), and the main character is a faceless player self-insert that accidentally becomes the temporary captain of the Nadesico C. The plot involves some elements of the movie but does nothing really to advance on anything that was covered there. Fans of the franchise who are looking to this as the “last” Nadesico offering will be disappointed if they are hoping to get any clues for how the story would have unfolded in the remaining movies.

The game begins with the main character (you) doing a training exercise on the Nadesico C, which requires putting you in as the captain. But then some real stuff starts going down when Jovians attack, and for some vague reason the control can’t be switched back to Ruri. You soon have to pick whether you want the captain to also go out in the Aestevalises (the mechs); I chose to do this and I think that makes Ruri captain again, perhaps if you choose the other option the main character will remain captain in the battles? I’m not sure.

After the opening battles you get drawn into a plot by the Martian Successors and the Crimson Group to kidnap Ines and plunder more of the ruins of Mars, and you have to stop their plans.

The battles take place on maps like this (they are only two dimensions). Each units’ turn, they can take as many actions as they have available. Which actions are available depend on the strategy you chose for the battle — in most missions, several crew members will offer their own strategies. For instance, Prospector might suggest going around the enemies and coming at them from behind. Ruri will suggest waiting outside their range until Gravity Blast is ready. Ryoko will suggest charging in from the front. The goal of the mission tends to be the same, and you don’t necessarily have to follow the strategy you chose, but it will affect the commands you can use.

So in this case, for instance, I have four commands — raise defense (distortion field), lauch Aestevalis, Repair, and Attack. Depending on the mission you might also have Dodge, and you may have multiple of the same thing (for instance, you could have three Attack and one Launch and that’s it). You can use a “change” command to switch out commands during battle, although you won’t be able to use a command the same turn you switch it.

Each command also has little boxes with it — I’m not entirely clear on how these boxes fill up, but you can use them to do greater effects, like use more powerful weapons or launch more than one unit at a time.

In the first couple of missions you only get to use the Nadesico C, but you will soon get to use the Aestevalises as well.

The Aestevalises have to stay within a certain range of the Nadesico to recharge their batteries, otherwise they will only have a limited number of turns before they power down. They also have hissatsuwaza (strong attacks), that use up the IFS percentage you can see above. This is one aspect of the game I never figured out — I don’t have the manual and there is no walkthrough site I could find, and I never figured out how you actually build up a pilot’s IFS value to use the attacks. For the most part the game isn’t very hard, but on the final couple of bosses I had a rough time not being able to more freely use those attacks.

Moving is always an action you can do.

You can see how you are moving on the inset map at the bottom plus the top. There are two annoyances I found with it — if you put in an illegal move you lose your turn; for the most part you can see when you can’t move somewhere but you have to be careful. Second is that it’s not always clear whether you are moving into melee range for the Aestevalises or not. I had a number of times where I thought I had gotten into melee range but actually did not.

When attacked, you can choose to dodge, counter, or put up shields (if you have the necessary power).

The graphics on the whole are pretty good, as you can see.

After a battle you get this reward money screen with Prospector, but I don’t think there is any way to actually spend the money, it’s just a joke (unless there is something I missed).

Sometimes between battles there will just be a story sequence, other times you can move around on a map like the above. As you move forward, you may encounter hidden enemy ships. Periodically you can also use the “rest” function. The first couple of times you use this there are some side stories, but after that you just get a limited number of actions to teach your pilots new moves or upgrade the Aestevalises.

You can upgrade your pilots with points you get from post battles, and you can also switch Aestevalises as well as equip different weapons and items.

The story sequences are done through a combination of animated sequences, voiced dialogue sections, and unvoiced text.

Overall this is an OK game. As I said above, while the storyline isn’t bad, it’s not especially good either and I think it will be particularly unsatisfying for Nadesico fans who are hoping to see the (unplanned) final entry in the storyline. As a game, there’s enough to do in the game that it’s fun, but the difficulty level is quite low — this may be because they wanted to make sure that Nadesico fans who weren’t strategy game players wouldn’t get stuck, but it does mean that a lot of the customization and upgrading options aren’t all that necessary.

Real Robot Battle Line (リアルロボット戦線), released 8/12/1999, developed by Winkysoft, published by Banpresto

This is a side game in the long running Super Robot Taisen franchise, and is the last game that Winkysoft developed (until they rejoined to work on the later Masou Kishin games in the 2010s). When I played Battle Robot Retsuden I said at the time that I remembered people talking about the game, but I actually think it is this game that I was remembering. Unlike BRR it’s very closely based on the Super Robot Taisen gameplay. This is a good thing because I generally like the SRT gameplay whereas I found the BRR system boring because of its heavy reliance on auto battle.

The setting is basically the same as BRR. People living on Planet Urs have used machines called “Duplicators”, which they unearthed from some past civilization, to bring in people from alternate dimensions — in this case from Gundam (first through Char’s Counterattack), Dunbine, Xabungle, and L-Gaim. Ryuusei (SRX) also appears as a hidden character. The people come into the world as perfect copies of their original selves, and the indication is that each person has been duplicated multiple times to fight in the wars between Azronia and Northern Bright. Unlike in the previous game, they don’t set it up so that all the heroes are duplicated by one kingdom and all the villains by another, so you often find yourself with people like Jerrid on your team, while you fight against Kamille and Shou.

One feature of the game is the expansive scenario chart. There are a total of 125 stages in the game, very few of which are just variations of each other. A typical playthrough will be in the 25-30 stage range, and there are at least five different story routes that focus on various mechs or series. While this is nice for replayability, it comes with the disadvantage that your team is constantly changing, making it hard to tell who you should be spending money on or giving the XP to.

The balance is similar to the old SRWs where you have a few units that are your aces, and then a bunch of people that can barely hit anything. Some of them have useful seishin like Love (which still restores all HP of the entire group), but mostly you rely on Amuro, Kamille, etc. One unusual aspect is that I never got any good mech upgrade for the original main character. I had her in the Hyakushiki for most of the game.

The main character is Mujika Fareden, whose father is a high official in Northern Bright. At the beginning of the game she’s doing some training when the place is attacked, and they are forced to use the nearby Duplicator to create some dudes to help — these turn out to be Gundam characters, including Char. Although Mujika is a big Char fan, duplicating Char has become illegal because the past 3 times he was Duplicated, he fomented a rebellion.

The only real change from the standard SRW gameplay of this era is that facing matters, so you want to attack people from behind.

Mujika has a warm feeling (and pity) for the Branches (the duplicated people), although it’s more common to look down on them and treat them as sacrificial grunts. This eventually causes issues with other people in Northern Bright and is the cause of several of the story branches.

The storyline doesn’t involve the original characters all that much — it’s mostly about the conflict between Northern Bright and Azronia, and the question of how to treat the Branches. The path I took ended up with the Char’s Counterattack storyline, where Char wants to drop one of the moons onto Earth so that they will have to go into space and evolve instead of relying on Branches so much. The last fight is challenging and I had to use up most of my resources to beat Char.

Once you beat any of the routes, you can wait until the credits, and then you play 2 bonus stages to conclude the storyline and find out the mystery of the Duplicators and the origin of the world. Unfortunately, the final stage is really difficult. The first of the two bonus stages is not that bad; the grunts are boss-class and there are two actual bosses but I was able to beat it with heavy use of Map weapons.

The second of the two battles, though, has more grunts, the same 2 bosses again, plus another Nightingale (Char’s unit), and then after those there’s another boss that uses map attacks and can only be attacked by a few characters — although it will lose its energy after a few rounds. The real problems are not just the strength of the enemies, but two big changes in the way they act. First, all of the enemies come at your characters from the beginning. This can actually be enabled on all stages as a hard mode once you beat the game. The second problem is that they will freely ignore your strong characters and go out of their way to take out your weaker units, meaning that your characters with the Love and Resupply seishin (etc) will be quickly killed. I tried this stage 5 times and was barely even able to take out a few enemies before getting a game over.

To see what happened, I put in a code for everyone to be at level 99. At this level, even people like Fa had 100% chance to hit everyone and 0% chance to be hit. I think to beat this stage you would have to do a few things:

• Make sure that you get any optional units that are good (I wasn’t able to do this; there is no walkthrough I can find that has this detail)
• Know in advance who will be in the final party on the route you are going on — this is a problem because units are constantly leaving and joining depending on the route splits.
• Make sure that you are spending the majority of your money on the units you will be using.

I assume if you do this right you can beat the battle, but it seems difficult even so.

I didn’t legitimately beat the game, in other words. With the exception of that final stage, the game as a whole was enjoyable and I thought the story was decent. The multiple routes give a lot of replayability, and there are even secret stages that you can only access on a clear file.