I did manage to finish the game this week. I’ll write a bit about the game and then do the introductions of the other series.

I decided at some point to stop trying to catch up the low level characters for two reasons — first off, it was making the stages take too long because even the grunt enemies had to be whittled down. Second, you reach the point where you have such a huge set of characters that you have no hope of actually getting all of them to a decent level without doing a bunch of training outside of the stages.

So I started using primarily the main robots of each series and putting most of my money into them. This turned out to work well, for the most part. The game will often require you to use some of the characters you haven’t levelled, but in almost every case they allow you to choose enough of your own preferences that you don’t have to rely on the bad units to succeed.

The exception to this is the last two stages, where you go to the moon to confront Granddark. First off, they throw a dirty trick at you in not letting you save between the last two stages. One issue with this game that I didn’t mention before is that you can only save between stages, which means you sometimes have to do fairly long sequences of story and multiple battles without being able to stop playing. This is a problem that most reviews I’ve seen mention, although if you are playing on emulator it’s not so bad.

But after stage 47 you do not get to spend any money; I had some money saved up that I was going to spend on upgrades and items before the last battle but I was unable to use it unless I wanted to do stage 47 again. But this means that you have to fight eight battles over two chapters without any chance to save your game, which to me is an unforgivable error in game design.

As it turns out the final boss is not that hard so I could have used a lot more of my items earlier in the process (the second to last boss is far more difficult than the actual final boss). In chapter 47 you have to split your team into 4 or 5 different groups to take on different units — this is the only time in the game when it really is helpful to have some of your backburner units levelled. I still managed to win the stages, but in a few of them I had to load states in order to do it.

Ultimately this game isn’t all that good, especially if you are not already a fan of the Brave series anime. The plots are thin and not well developed in the game (a lot of them get ignored in favor of the Baan Gaan storyline, which itself is pretty simplistic). The battles are pretty repetitive and rarely involve anything more than a very basic strategy (nor does the game itself give you the potential to use more than very basic strategy).

There is a Brave Saga 2 that came out in May of 2000 so we’ll see this game again; hopefully they’ve addressed some of the issue in this game (but given the short time between games I somehow doubt it).

The Brave Express Might Gaine

The main character here is a teenage billionaire who fights crime syndicates; a bit different from the other series. I guess because it takes place in a fictional version of Tokyo, this game has Might Gaine be a fictional series within the game. Everyone knows about it from movies and such, but then by some hand-waving stuff they allow Might Gaine to get sucked into the “real” world. This series has shown up in Super Robot Wars as well.

Brave Police J-Decker

This returns to the more kid-friendly ideas of the earlier series, and as the title suggests, is police themed. It has a similar “robot/human friendship” idea that the original series had.

The Brave of Gold Goldran

Apparently this series is a bit sillier than the others. It is similar to Da-garn in that it has 8 power stones that the heroes have to track down.

Brave Command Dagwon

This series pits teenage students against aliens who have escaped from a space prison. According to Wikipedia, the main characters were of the “bishounen” archetype and this series was more popular among girls.