Love & Destroy [PS1 mech action + girls]

[Nana]

Yo!



At the advice of KAI, I both learned about and picked up this game, and it's absolutely fucking amazing. I had no idea that the PS1 was capable of anything this game pulls off. Being dropped into a huge city with huge buildings everywhere, and cars and trains moving about, and ALL of which fully destructible, while fighting huge alien bosses in fluid and beautiful 3D... it's absolutely stunning! The music's great too, and I also love all of the boss fights. The only real problem with it is that it's way too short (about 40 minutes or so... only 6 unique bosses), but there's also a dating sim mixed in with plenty of beautiful animation that adds replay value. And you have control of three different mechs which play entirely differently, too. If anybody has a means of playing Japanese PS1 games, I can't recommend it enough (though note that it requires dual analog sticks to play properly.)

So, anybody else played this? I'm having trouble unlocking a couple of the movies. I have each of the girls' good endings (or, regular good endings, so if there's some special 'true' ending for them, I definitely don't have that yet.), and I'm kind of at a loss with what to do next. Also, why does it seem like some of the dialogue I get in combat doesn't show up in the 'present' section? Is that only for specific comm messages?

[null1024]

Played it. Thought it was neat, was totally confused about how anything past blowing shit up worked.
And using proper DUAL SHOCK CONTROL is excellent. I really wish more PS1 games supported the thing.

[drauch]

I was about to say, looks like Video Girl Ai, and yeah, same dude. Looks groovy. What's a sane price for this thing?

[Nana]

@drauch: I got it for $30 on ebay, but you can find it for waaay cheaper. It's $8 or $9 on gameofjapan.com right now.

@null1024: I think the only other 'mechanic' in the game was the little dating sim, where all you do is press circle to select options after completing each mission. And unless there's a secret ending I can't find, as long as you pick ANYTHING at the screen, you'll be able to get the nice ending for whichever girl you chose, provided you played every mission with her.

[broken harbour]

Is this playable if you can't read japanese? Because a Mech / dating sim sounds quite.... japan.... and awesome.

[Nana]

Most definitely, Broken Harbour. That's why I got the game, and it's very playable and enjoyable without any understanding of Japanese. The cutscenes are fully (beautifully) animated and voiced, so you'll definitely pick up on the tone and emotion of each scene, and the gameplay itself requires no dialogue at all. Well, I think there's a part where your navigator tells you to run after defeating a boss, but you'll probably pick up on that after you die to the boss' explosion

The only advice I'd like to give for someone who doesn't speak Japanese at all is that to start a mission, you just have to go to the 'q-tron' tab from the mission display, then after choosing the pilot you want, go to the same tab and click on the pilot you already have selected. It took me a while to figure that out.

And again, when the 'heart select' screen comes up, press circle to choose an option. I didn't realize at first it was actually a choice you could make.

[shmuppyLove]

It looks ... ok

http://youtu.be/sNDzYc5mQcc

Footage looks like it's from an emulator, so I will cut it some slack for that, but everything looks pretty clunky to me, strong Megaman Legends vibes, a game which angers me. I didn't have the audio on so I can't comment on the music. The animation and cutscenes do look good though. I wonder if anyone tried to tackle subtitling or translating anything? A quick Google search didn't turn anything up ...

[null1024]

That video linked made the game look a hell of a lot clunkier than the game actually is. It's still a PS1 game, but it's not Mega Man Legends.

[Nana]

Yeah, that's a pretty damn bad video for representing the game. Not only do they control awkwardly, but it seems they fundamentally don't understand the game as well -- using the wrong shot types, not answering the navigator messages, and generally being pretty poor at it. To be fair, I don't know if there's a video that does represent it well, but that's definitely not it.

And nope, no subtitles or translation at all. Not surprising, since it's a very obscure game. I was actually thinking of trying to tackle this myself at some point, it might be a fun endeavor. Half of the dialogue is in gameplay itself, since there's a bit of a metagame where you're supposed to do different things in combat to get your navigator(s) to say different things to you, and collect all of the different dialogue that you can get. As a result, it would probably require an actual dub for translation, since I dunno if it's possible to cram in subtitles over the gameplay. But of course, subbing the anime cutscenes is much more practical.

Probably.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Having read what a mess Persona 2: Innocent Sin was to hack, I don't think anybody can judge from just playing the game.
Does anybody find the cover artwork well drawn/coloured? I don't.

[KAI]

Katsura sux at colouring.

[BulletMagnet]

Does anybody find the cover artwork well drawn/coloured? I don't.

Yeah, this is one of the few cases where (IMO, at least) the animated characters look better than their still art; those faces on the cover remind me of inadvertently walking down the pink aisle at the toy store all those years ago.

I'm not huge on mech games in general, especially when I'm not able to understand a fair amount of what's going on, but this does look like a pretty ambitious project for the time.

[Nana]

I don't like the cover, but a couple of the pics in the manual look really good IMO:

(click for a larger version)


And yeah, Obiwanshinobi, I don't pretend that I have any experience or even remote knowledge with stuff like this. I was just thinking from a standpoint of what exists inside the game and what would theoretically be possible should modifying it be accessible.