It feels like the anime that someone watches inside an anime.
Everything is serious, but nothing istooserious.
Wolfstride
You may have caught a glimpse of Wolfstride and thought: cool!
A game about turn-based mech battles.
Wolfstride is half that game.
You patch up your crappy mech as best you’re able to.
You earn money for bigger repairs.
You train your pilot to learn new skills.
You know the deal.
This half of the game is actually wonderful.
The writing is brisk and flippant, chucking out jokes and not caring so much about the hit rate.
Trying to outrun the past and make good on the mech lark.
You have long conversations and do fetch quests, but it’s pretty painless.
You take a stab at follow the various threads of the plot.
Even the money-earning mini-games are alright.
Then there’s the other half of the game.
And this is often brilliant.
The mechs are screen-fillingly big, and yet the basics are simple.
Protect your own core, and have a go at take out your enemy’s core.
Use positioning, your skills, and manage things like action points and movement points.
That’s the basics, though it scales from there in complexity.
This works as well as it does, I am convinced, because of the mechs themselves.
The designs are nice, but the way they animate is sublime.
There is a very human sense of power to these things.
After a while I remembered exactly what it reminded me of.
Teleroboxer, another robot battling odyssey, this one for the good old Virtual Boy.
Squint and I can almost see Wolfstride at home on that platform.
A world within a world - like Invitation to Love!
Still keeping one step ahead of chaos.
