Thursday 30 January 2014

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 104: The Robot Tsukuruuze ~Gekitou! Robot Fight~

Before playing this game, all i knew about it was the title, an from that, I assumed it would be a game about giant robots, or maybe some kind of Angelic Layer/Plawres Sanshiro-esque affair with toy robots fighting. The second guess was the closer of the two, though unlike the fighting toy robots seen in those shows, the robots in this game are much more realistic. Rather than being tiny mechanical superheroes, these robots are
blocky machines, awkwardly stumbling about just like bipedal robots do in real life. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen robots pretty similar to the ones in this game in real life, but searches for "bipedal robot sumo/fighting/etc." proved fruitless.
Anyway, the fighting portion of the game has your robot facing another in a sumo-style arena, victory coming from either depriving your opponent of their balance points and knocking them over, or by pushing them out of the ring. The first robot to win three rounds wins the fight.
Of course, the robot in-game belongs to and is controlled by the teenage members of an after-school club, and between the matches, you can instruct the four members of the club to either perform one of four actions (making new robot parts, programming new special moves into the robot,
repairing the robot's parts or changing the robot's parts), or they can spend the week studying to increase their proficiency in one of the four actions.
The makers of the game really got into the high school anime presentation style of the game, even going so far as having the game's intro be in the style of an anime intro, complete with vocal theme song and a fake time stamp in the corner of the screen. The developers' (HuneX) back catalogue (at least as far as their Simple Series entries go) is largely made up of visual novels and romance games, which shows in this game in the form of the unbelievably lengthy dialogue scenes that occur almost constantly between fights, delivered in the format of static pictures with text boxes beneath them. I don't feel like I'm missing much
through my inability to read them, and to be honest, my enjoyment of the game shot up immensely after discovering that you can skip entire scenes of dialogue in one go by pressing select.
In summary, this is a fun game with a nice, friendly atmosphere, even if you skip all the dialogue scenes. It' also very well made, with great production values that really hide the fact that it's a Simple 2000 game. I definitely recommend it.

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