Mori no Oukoku (森の王国), released 10/21/1999, Asmic Ace Entertainment

This is a pretty minor game that seems to have come and gone without much notice. Contemporary reviews were mixed, and what I can find of recent reviews are the same. They all pretty much agree with my impression — some good ideas, but the game plays too slowly and the graphics are bad.

Even though I was around in the Playstation era, I feel like this kind of 3D graphics just never looked good. There was never a time when the bare fact that it was 3D instead of 2D made it acceptable to use graphics like this. By 1999 many companies had figured out how to do better than this, though. This looks like very early Saturn/Playstation efforts. The battle graphics are a bit better:

However, the map cannot be rotated and there are stages with large trees or buildings that make it hard to keep track of where the enemies are.

There are also animated attack sequences which can fortunately be turned off.

The interface is pretty frustrating. It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but there is useful information you can’t see in battle, the status screens involve needless amounts of button pressing because information is spread across several screens for no reason, and in the shops it’s difficult to see clearly what you should buy for each person.

The storyline is serviceable but nothing special — I played about half the game, though. The basic idea is that your main character, who is still a kid, is visited by a fairy and given power to fight (along with making his raccoon friend able to talk). Because he has the pure heart of a child he will be able to stop the useless wars the adults are engaging in, which are being influenced by some kind of dark power. The first section of the game involves trying to rescue a princess who was kidnapped; the princess’ own kingdom thinks that this was done by the neighboring kingdom and they prepare to go to war.

The battle system is basic player turn-enemy turn. You can freely choose the order of your characters. The move ranges look like this:

If you move to the blue area, you can do an additional move after your attack (with your remaining movement spaces). If you move to the green area you can attack/magic/etc but then have to end your turn. If you move to the red area, your turn ends there. The enemies of course have this feature as well, and sometimes it can be tricky to deal with enemy spellcasters who can move up, use a spell, and then retreat back out of your range. Height and facing are both important for attacks.

Each person has three experience levels — attack, magic, and treasure (which goes up when you open a chest or find a hidden item on the map). Any action will give experience to all three, but most of the XP will go to whatever action you did. Each level raises your stats. Once you gain enough levels in one area you will increase your rank, which may allow you to learn a new ability — these abilities are based on the character for the most part. You get attack moves, spells, and passive abilities (from the treasure level). One very helpful one is “cheer” which automatically recovers MP of surrounding characters at the start of each turn.

If the main character reaches 0 hp it’s game over. Otherwise the character dies. To revive them, you have to have a certain consumable item (which can only be found on some maps) and you have to return to the Foresty Kingdom town to revive them in the church. As you travel around, the maps you have cleared are slowly re-taken by the dark forces. If one of them gets fully red you get a game over. I don’t like the possibility of this making you restart from the beginning — as far as I played, none of the places even got down to half green, and when I rescued the princess it restored them all to full green. So it may be that if you play normally, there is no real danger of getting a game over from this.

The battles themselves do require some degree of strategy. Your field of vision is limited so you don’t know who all is on the field. Especially at the beginning, the enemy magic is rough, and you can lose a person if you aren’t careful. The limited resurrection items does make you think about whether you want to use one or keep going.

Ultimately I think I could have finished this game if I had to. The interface and slowness of the game are a problem, but the gameplay is OK. I still had quite a bit to go in the game, though, and so I decided it wasn’t worth it to keep playing.

Getter Robo Daisakusen (ゲッターロボ大作戦!), released 9/9/1999, developed and published by Bandai Visual

Getter Robo is a classic of the mech genre, and a staple of almost every Super Robot Wars game. It introduced the concept of the combining and form changing robot that became a standard element of many later series. I remember reading somewhere that by the 1990s, the “classic” mech anime like Mazinger and Getter Robo had largely been forgotten, but that the success of Super Robot Wars revived interest in the old series. This game is a combination of all the existing Getter Robo series plus some new versions (such as the “Getter Robo Zan” which can only be piloted by women). The storyline is essentially a new creation although it builds on the existing storylines from the anime.

The characters can also be freely put in any of the units (with some restrictions), and there is also a main character that represents you. So you can make whatever Getter team you want and aren’t restricted to keeping the units in their canonical mechs.

The storyline is told through a combination of short animated sequences, and dialogue both voiced and unvoiced. It’s not a particularly well developed storyline — if you haven’t seen the series it’s going to be difficult to get much of an impression of most of the characters, and the enemy forces also don’t have much development. The whole story has kind of a “monster of the week” feel to it (which I suppose mimics the source anime). On the other hand, if you are a big Getter Robo fan it’s a chance to see a lot of the franchise’s mech and characters (at least up to 1999), even some more obscure ones.

The battle animations are also well done, although they can’t be skipped. This is a huge issue but unfortunately is just where Bandai was at this time — the first SRW game to allow for skipping animations was Alpha, which is still a year away. When attacking or being attacked, you can choose on a per attack basis whether to dodge, counter, or defend. There are also certain “map” attacks that hit multiple squares — some of these will activate a defend for the units, others won’t (I don’t have the instruction manual so I’m not sure what the deal is there).

Getter units will do the “open get!” when they dodge — I don’t know if this means they actually have a higher dodge rate than other units, but they might.

I’m also not 100% sure what the different Getter modes do. They have different attacks and move differently, and the sea ones are most effective in the sea. But I don’t know whether the SRW style is being followed where you want to be attacking flying units with Getter 1.

One other annoying slowdown is the way that the Getters all start the map uncombined and you have to move them into a linear position and then combine them, then whenever you want to change forms you have to uncombine them and combine them again (at least this doesn’t use a turn). This contributes to the feeling of the whole game being rather slow and plodding.

I think the game is also poorly balanced in a way that doesn’t make the game necessarily difficult, just tedious. Enemy attacks do a lot of damage, meaning that you can’t safely use any attack except for those out of range of the enemy, or map attacks. But the map attacks use a ton of energy. Getters will automatically recover their Getter Energy, although you can put them back in a ship to recover faster. EN units have to be recovered in the ship or using a repair unit. But what this means is that you have to constantly be refueling your units or recovering them in the ship, and using them on a rotation. There’s no way I can tell to fight in an efficient way that doesn’t require your unit to return to the ship after a few attacks. This is an effective strategy but coupled with the constant combining and recombining and unskippable animations, it makes the whole thing seem like an exercise in patience rather than skill.

Because of this, I quit after the first 10 stages. The whole game is only 21 stages long and so wouldn’t take that long to play but I just didn’t think it was very fun.

There’s also an interesting “combination test” mode where you fly in an action-based system to combine with the other Getters. This raises the main character’s rank, enabling them to be put in the various Getter units. But it’s kind of incomprehensible and I’m not sure if the instruction manual makes it any clearer. In any case, its only purpose is to allow the main character to be transferred to different mechs so you can ignore it completely.

The game wiki entry on the game seems to basically agree with my assessment, that it has a lot of content that will make it appealing to Getter Robo fans but that as a game in itself it’s not especially good.