Another Century's Episode Portable!

[Sage Shinigami]

Kinda. The Japanese fans had some pretty serious issues with it. Here's the ones I've read about. I'll note that Western players, on the whole, seem totally unconcerned with some of these problems.

1. Everyone hated the Tension system. Tension was meant to act like Morale in SRW. In SRW, as your morale goes up from fighting enemies and doing other things, your robot can start using bigger and more spectacular attacks. For whatever reason, Japanese fans playing ACE R totally hated this. They wanted to be able to do their upside-down HiMATs immediately rather than starting out using the beam rifle and sabers.

....I'm pretty cool with my beam rifle and saber to start. (Why do you need beamspam from second one anyway?)

2. Everyone hated the emphasis on Macross Frontier. I've read some forums call ACE R a Macross Frontier game that happens to have some other robots in it. The ACE R plot follows Macross Frontier in great detail while glossing over the storylines of most other shows. Many people bought ACE R basically for the Code Geass and Full Metal Panic inclusions and were then pissed to see the plots of these shows totally ignored.

That first show is awful and the second took too long to get to the mecha anyway, and Frontier is basically one of my favorite anime of all time. No problem there.

3. It was extremely buggy compared to earlier games in the series. And one of the more common bugs was a game freeze bug that could occur during a long Macross Frontier stage that mostly consisted of unskippable cutscenes followed by a period of token interaction that you couldn't fail and posed no challenge. Did I mention that one of the trophies involves playing through this stage with every unit in the game?

...WTF? That's...not cool. Suddenly I'm far less interested in this title.

4. Certain cutscenes were unskippable. Basically any cutscene that played a Macross Frontier song couldn't be skipped under any circumstances. All other cutscenes were skippable. This seems to be what really pissed off Japanese fans with regard to Macross Frontier's inclusion in the game.

....I'm okay with that. I loved Frontier's music. (Granted, in a replay I might get pretty ticked. Don't make me hate What 'bout my star.)

I'd rent this game, but that's pretty impossible. Maybe I'll try to find someone with a copy of it.

Doing this would eliminate some really popular SRW mainstay units like Daitarn 3, most carriers, definitely any Macrosses, and Gunbuster. On the "small mecha" end, you'd eliminate Tekkamen, the SD robots of the early 90s, playable human-size guys like Alberto the Shockwave and Gai Shishio, the Megazone 23 units, the Dunbine units, Steel Jeeg, and possibly the Valkyries themselves.

It would also eliminate Gurren-Lagann from ever appearing in the series since size scales in Gurren-Lagann increase exponentially throughout the course of the series (parodying the way size scales in actual Super Robot shows got progressively more ridiculous as you move from the 70s to the 80s). Personally I think a mecha crossover game that can't absorb the super-sized units of the early 80s or the tiny units of the late 80s is intrinsically flawed.

Saying that means all mecha games that aren't SD are intrinsically flawed though, does it not?

SRW's gameplay goals are just very different than ACE's. SRW is turn-based and grid-based, while ACE is an action game. An ACE-style size system in SRW would serve no purpose beyond limiting series selection artificially. Likewise, an SRW-style size system is highly impractical for an action game where levels are designed such that you can never control carriers. Using carriers wisely is a cornerstone of good SRW gameplay since SRW is tactical.

Yeah, I see the reasoning for leaving SRW around. My initial comment was just to the idea of a mecha crossover game that WAS action, as opposed to T-RPG.

 

[Lynxara]

....I'm pretty cool with my beam rifle and saber to start. (Why do you need beamspam from second one anyway?)

My guess on this is that ACE R also introduced systems that ranked you on your performance, based on things like how quickly you cleared the stage and "glamour," which amounted to how accurately you emulated a pilot's canonical fighting style.

I'm betting that some Japanese players found it oppressively difficult to get high rankings and blamed it on difficulty raising Tension. Personally, I think they're just annoyed because prior ACE games would let you use high-tier moves from the start and people got used to spamming them.

I'd rent this game, but that's pretty impossible. Maybe I'll try to find someone with a copy of it.

Generally for licensed games like this, you can buy them super-cheap if you wait about a year after they're initially issued. Sometimes you also find them for good prices on eBay.

Saying that means all mecha games that aren't SD are intrinsically flawed though, does it not?

I don't think so. I just think that if you're going to consider the entire breadth of the genre, you need some mechanic in mind for representing this. I've seen other mechanics attempted, such as arbitrarily making everything the same size, assigning different units to different "scales" of combat, or representing units in a visual style influenced by wargame miniatures. ACE solves the problem by not focusing on the entire breadth of the genre, which is also a legitimate design decision.

 

[Dark Kabuto]

Did anyone else have a hard time controlling the Macross Frontier units in ACE R?

 

[arnoldmcguire335]

Not me, but at first I had difficulty, until I tweaked the settings.