RETRO REBOOT | Robotech Battlecry (GameCube/PlayStation 2)

Macross is one of the landmark anime franchises that influenced the mecha genre for its time and went toe to toe with Mobile Suit Gundam. It had a long running story that spawned multiple sequels, spin-offs, side stories, continuations and reboots to this day. Most mech titles that came after Robotech also utilized it’s musical scores to accentuate the epic struggle mankind was facing, Chouju Kishin Dancouga, for example, my personal favorite mech series.

Robotech, the much-maligned butchering of the Macross story, is the localization produced and distributed by Harmony Gold USA for as long as I've been born. But that is a long-winded story for another time. Just mention Harmony Gold USA in most anime circles, and the reactions will be venomous. TDK and Vicious Cycle combined to produce a third person shooter action game for the Nintendo GameCube, Xbox, and PS2. Given the solid gameplay of the Mechwarrior series and Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Side Story for the Sega Dreamcast, I was anxious to see how this would turn out. It's quite entertaining, and better than it has any right to be.

Questions I had was 1) How will they incorporate the veritech’s multiple transformations? and 2) Will each of these forms, the Battliod, Guardian, and jet fighter mode, have their own separate stages? The aforementioned games, Mechwarrior and Mobile Suit Gundam, are good games in their respect, but featured giant, slow, lumbering machines of death. Admittedly, I preferred these towering sentinels as opposed to today’s sleeker, faster and more agile mechs in anime, but for sake of discussion in terms of a fun video game experience, Veritechs are perfect units for mobility, and this turned out to be one of the better anime games I played at the time. And the 2000's were chocked full of really mediocre slop just to capitalize on the growing popularity of anime and manga.

Other anime games I’ve reviewed from this era thus far have had a rather bland color scheme and muddy visuals. Robotech is one of the earlier games I remember that used cel-shading quite effectively. While most closeups look like mech models were outlined in a 0.7 Sharpee permanent marker, its impressive. City and metropolis layouts are richly detailed and a treat to stare at, with civilians walking about in some stages (you can’t step on them, not for a lack of trying, mind you). There isn't a lot of shading, so many of the objects and models do kinda stand out with their flat coloring.

The animation is fluid, explosions are beautiful, the enemy’s trail smoke when they are badly damaged, so if a target strays out of sight, tracking them down is easy as pie. Action can get really heated and the screen will often become cluttered with missiles, bullets, and explosions. throughout all of this, I witnessed, no slow-down, mangled sprites, or lag time. For such an action packed game, I was expecting this to be a massive issue, since Armored Core 2 had some of these problems.

Voice actors who worked on Robotech reprise key roles, and they all do a great job. Cam Clarke, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Leonardo, voices the game’s original lead character, hotshot rookie pilot Jack Archer, and does a good job with the role, hamming it up to Patrick Seitz levels of smug. The Robotech fanfare music is back, or at least a modified version of the theme, and based off that, gives it probably the best BGM in an anime game I’ve played.

While the controls aren’t the worst I’ve ever played, given the medium, they can be a mixed bag. Granted, it’s a nice touch that each of the three modes are ready at your disposal, the Veritech handles a little on the sluggish side, and that becomes very clear during certain missions. The training mode doesn’t quite get you up to speed as to just how cumbersome it can be to handle this machine.

This isn’t the first, nor the last game I review that does this, but in a game that involves absolutely no stealth, why a sniper rifle!? It’s not like there a lot of bluffs, cliffs, or tight corners to hide around and as soon as you shoot one enemy, you alert them to your presence they’ll be on you like bees on honey anyway.

Sniping is the last thing on your mind in these kinds of games, and makes the vulcan rifle Battliod’s only effective weapon. Agility-wise, battliod is the only form that can move in all directions and move backwards. Guardian mode moves faster and has the most agile missiles, but this form pisses me off the most of the three. You can’t move backwards, strafing speed is slow as all hell, and instead of pressing forward to move, X, the boost for Battliod, propels you. I hate this form, but you’ll wind up using it so much just to be able to move faster and for the missiles to take out larger foes. Jet fighter mode is the only one of the three that seems virtually flawless and the jet handles quite well.

These were nice attempt to make each Veritech mode feel unique, but it would’ve been much better if the left analog stick wasn’t so heavy-laden. It aims and moves, while the right stick just sits there, useless and ignored. I don’t know how that got screwed up, but right stick is just an alternative for targeting? Okay, thanks, but the bumper buttons have that covered. The stunning lack of weapon variety stuns me a bit.

Battlecry is a game with inconsistent difficulty levels, it varies from what kind of mission you are saddled with. (First, I recommend unlocking and completing the various side missions as well as aceing qualifications to get newer Veritech models. The extra boost to attributes and missile stockpiles will come in great assistance in later missions) Destroy all Zentraedi objectives are easy enough, but then the game starts getting cute with protect missions and rendezvous points that are unclear and poorly explained.

As far as its relation to the source material, Battlecry follows a random pilot as he does what I assume is a great deal of grunt work during the TV series and he’s recapping it as it happens, but honestly, I’m still a bit baffled by continuity issues in regard to Robotech, that this score might be irrelevant. In hindsight, since Jack Archer worked so closely with some of the major characters in the show, it’s pretty funny that he’s never spoken of in any kind of context. Soldier-A to a T...or A...forget that joke.

Control flaws aside, Robotech Battlecry is pretty fun experience and one of the better looking cel-shaded games at the time. There are a great deal of extras to unlock, including brief Q & As with some of the voice actors who worked on the original(?) Robotech series like Steve Kramer, Melora Harte, and Dan Woren. As far as anime games go, Battlecry falls in the “good” category, but is killed by some avoidable mistakes.