The Gun Griffon armored mechanoid is the most sophisticated military hardware yet to grace the battlefields of the 21st century. As a leading commander of the Asian Pacific Community's army, you control a devastating array of weapons in your bid to smash the enemy's defenses and destroy their key strategic targets before time runs out.
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The smell of tarnished metal...the steely iron clash. You're just one more pilot among them. Their fathers spoke proudly of serving the greater good, and their mothers saw the devastation lying ahead. It wages on into this 21st century of late-capitalist warfare, trading out cavalry for HIGH-MACS mechs. Nations conglomerate under defense pacts, water and other resources run scarce, and you're either going to survive a conqueror or become a statistic.
Gungriffon doesn't bash you over the head with its themes. Like similar mech action series (think Armored Core), it's about having a blast first & thinking of questions later. You can go from portentous briefing screens to hard-rockin' gunfights to a cheery high scores menu in a matter of minutes. The game combines a simple, fast, and engaging game loop with just enough worldbuilding depth to keep you hooked. As the first Saturn title I ever played & completed, I couldn't have asked for anything better.
This 1996 Saturn exclusive was something of a passion project for the late Takeshi Miyaji, one of Game Arts' co-founders. His fondness for Kee Games' '70s battler Tank, plus his work on previous successes like Silpheed, eventually led him & co-developers to make a 3D mech game pushing the Saturn to its early limits. In short, they saw the ailing system as a way to achieve something even more impressive. Game Arts had built their reputation on squeezing incredible audiovisuals & playability out of tricky platforms like the PC-8801. Even with the Saturn's faults, they could make something even the PlayStation would covet.
Rather than make either a strict simulation or arcade romp, Game Arts blended both approaches. Gungriffon isn't the easiest mecha game out there to learn, but it's on the easier end of simcade. Your face buttons handle everything from acceleration & deceleration to jumping & night vision. Movement involves a mix of the D-pad and holding down strafe. You can cycle through weapons quickly, turn only your turret while moving in a direction...there's a good amount of fluidity & skillful play here. Even if you're unused to first-person mecha action, the game's initial missions aren't that punishing, letting you get to grips with controls & mission progression.
Gungriffon consists of 8 main missions, 2 training sorties, and replay incentives such as end-of-level rankings & difficult modes. I wouldn't call it a content-rich experience, but what's here is quality over quantity. After a standard kill-em-all opening battle, your objectives branch out into escort jobs, stealth missions, & base invasions. The game ends on a tense, oppressive dive into a nuclear missile silo where you fight past other HIGH-MACS pilots of your caliber to deactivate a launch. You're able to simultaneously save in-between missions a run & redo missions for a higher score ranking. For its time, this was a player-friendly package.
Granular controls, well-balanced difficulty, a bevy of different foes, & mission variety are all well and good. But what sets this apart from MechWarrior 2, Thunder Strike 2, & other mid-'90s mechanized action classics is the aforementioned score aspect. Like other score-heavy Saturn greats (ex. NiGHTS), this emphasis on player skill & performance isn't just for earning bragging rights. The game wants you to play fast & aggressive, albeit with intelligence. Turtling is both harder & less desirable here than in Gungriffon's more sim-heavy brethren, but still viable when necessary.
None of this would be all that fun without the technical prowess needed for even early 3D military combat. I brought up Armored Core earlier for a reason. Both games wrought fast 3D graphics for the genre at key intervals in their systems' lifecycles. Gungriffon's solid draw distance, environment detail, & elevation in level design keeps it competitive with more ambitious titles later in the Saturn's life. You also get an aesthetically enticing but usable HUD mimicking that of cockpits from mecha anime & figher jets. With all the chaos happening on-screen, Gungriffon's a technical triumph for a console saddled with 3D woes.
Game Arts hardly skimped on the rest of the game's polish & presentation, either. Story scenes are efficient, painting a dire picture of a weaponized near-future forever embroiled in conflict. Sound design ranges from heavy clanking to atmospheric ambiance to the strident cries of your perishing comrades. Above all, the mercurial, genre-spanning soundtrack from ex-Shining composer Motoaki Takenouchi dominates the soundscape. I became a fan of his classically-tinged prog rock & ambient style here, finally shackled from FM synthesis & able to either rouse or discomfort any player. Were it remastered today, Gungriffon would retain its mystique through audiovisuals alone.
That's another thing it shares with Armored Core: an alluring combination of tests & tropes to keep you coming back. Mecha games struggle so often with presenting distant, sometimes alienating worlds of war in an entertaining fashion. They risk boring or frustrating players almost as often as they risk compromising the harsh worldviews they portray. Gungriffon succeeds at balancing the gravity of its story conflict with player agency & replayability. Much like From Soft's later take on the genre (just without the customization angle), Game Arts wants you to stay in high spirits even as you obliterate enemy camps & ace pilots like yourself.
Thanks to strong sales & critical reception, Gungriffon would become a small but notable series on Saturn, PS2, & Xbox. It dwindled away as Game Arts' other major IP, the RPG series Grandia, fell on hard times. The difficult move to HD game development ultimately pushed Game Arts and its properties into an identity-robbing merger with GungHo, but I hold out a sliver of hope for Gungriffon's return in my lifetime. At the very least, I'd love to see some developers create a throwback first-person mecha game in this vein, perhaps with more of an arcade bent to contrast the recent crop of Armored Core-like indies.
If you've got a Saturn or means to emulate it, Gungriffon's one banger of a system-pushing mecha classic. I've yet to try its Saturn sequel (which doesn't need an English fan patch, but could benefit from one), and the Xbox game's a blind spot for me also. I'll confidently recommend the PS2 entry, Gungriffon Blaze, strips away some of the sim-y bits while nearly perfecting the original's structure, adding analog controls & other modernizations. But I'll get into that later with a proper review. Until then, I hope the seminal Game Arts mecha FPS is now on your radar or higher up your shortlist!
(Shout-outs to Thexder & Veigues for paving the way. Those are much simpler mecha action titles compared to what Game Arts later made, but you can see the evolution towards Gungriffon within them.)
Gungriffon doesn't bash you over the head with its themes. Like similar mech action series (think Armored Core), it's about having a blast first & thinking of questions later. You can go from portentous briefing screens to hard-rockin' gunfights to a cheery high scores menu in a matter of minutes. The game combines a simple, fast, and engaging game loop with just enough worldbuilding depth to keep you hooked. As the first Saturn title I ever played & completed, I couldn't have asked for anything better.
This 1996 Saturn exclusive was something of a passion project for the late Takeshi Miyaji, one of Game Arts' co-founders. His fondness for Kee Games' '70s battler Tank, plus his work on previous successes like Silpheed, eventually led him & co-developers to make a 3D mech game pushing the Saturn to its early limits. In short, they saw the ailing system as a way to achieve something even more impressive. Game Arts had built their reputation on squeezing incredible audiovisuals & playability out of tricky platforms like the PC-8801. Even with the Saturn's faults, they could make something even the PlayStation would covet.
Rather than make either a strict simulation or arcade romp, Game Arts blended both approaches. Gungriffon isn't the easiest mecha game out there to learn, but it's on the easier end of simcade. Your face buttons handle everything from acceleration & deceleration to jumping & night vision. Movement involves a mix of the D-pad and holding down strafe. You can cycle through weapons quickly, turn only your turret while moving in a direction...there's a good amount of fluidity & skillful play here. Even if you're unused to first-person mecha action, the game's initial missions aren't that punishing, letting you get to grips with controls & mission progression.
Gungriffon consists of 8 main missions, 2 training sorties, and replay incentives such as end-of-level rankings & difficult modes. I wouldn't call it a content-rich experience, but what's here is quality over quantity. After a standard kill-em-all opening battle, your objectives branch out into escort jobs, stealth missions, & base invasions. The game ends on a tense, oppressive dive into a nuclear missile silo where you fight past other HIGH-MACS pilots of your caliber to deactivate a launch. You're able to simultaneously save in-between missions a run & redo missions for a higher score ranking. For its time, this was a player-friendly package.
Granular controls, well-balanced difficulty, a bevy of different foes, & mission variety are all well and good. But what sets this apart from MechWarrior 2, Thunder Strike 2, & other mid-'90s mechanized action classics is the aforementioned score aspect. Like other score-heavy Saturn greats (ex. NiGHTS), this emphasis on player skill & performance isn't just for earning bragging rights. The game wants you to play fast & aggressive, albeit with intelligence. Turtling is both harder & less desirable here than in Gungriffon's more sim-heavy brethren, but still viable when necessary.
None of this would be all that fun without the technical prowess needed for even early 3D military combat. I brought up Armored Core earlier for a reason. Both games wrought fast 3D graphics for the genre at key intervals in their systems' lifecycles. Gungriffon's solid draw distance, environment detail, & elevation in level design keeps it competitive with more ambitious titles later in the Saturn's life. You also get an aesthetically enticing but usable HUD mimicking that of cockpits from mecha anime & figher jets. With all the chaos happening on-screen, Gungriffon's a technical triumph for a console saddled with 3D woes.
Game Arts hardly skimped on the rest of the game's polish & presentation, either. Story scenes are efficient, painting a dire picture of a weaponized near-future forever embroiled in conflict. Sound design ranges from heavy clanking to atmospheric ambiance to the strident cries of your perishing comrades. Above all, the mercurial, genre-spanning soundtrack from ex-Shining composer Motoaki Takenouchi dominates the soundscape. I became a fan of his classically-tinged prog rock & ambient style here, finally shackled from FM synthesis & able to either rouse or discomfort any player. Were it remastered today, Gungriffon would retain its mystique through audiovisuals alone.
That's another thing it shares with Armored Core: an alluring combination of tests & tropes to keep you coming back. Mecha games struggle so often with presenting distant, sometimes alienating worlds of war in an entertaining fashion. They risk boring or frustrating players almost as often as they risk compromising the harsh worldviews they portray. Gungriffon succeeds at balancing the gravity of its story conflict with player agency & replayability. Much like From Soft's later take on the genre (just without the customization angle), Game Arts wants you to stay in high spirits even as you obliterate enemy camps & ace pilots like yourself.
Thanks to strong sales & critical reception, Gungriffon would become a small but notable series on Saturn, PS2, & Xbox. It dwindled away as Game Arts' other major IP, the RPG series Grandia, fell on hard times. The difficult move to HD game development ultimately pushed Game Arts and its properties into an identity-robbing merger with GungHo, but I hold out a sliver of hope for Gungriffon's return in my lifetime. At the very least, I'd love to see some developers create a throwback first-person mecha game in this vein, perhaps with more of an arcade bent to contrast the recent crop of Armored Core-like indies.
If you've got a Saturn or means to emulate it, Gungriffon's one banger of a system-pushing mecha classic. I've yet to try its Saturn sequel (which doesn't need an English fan patch, but could benefit from one), and the Xbox game's a blind spot for me also. I'll confidently recommend the PS2 entry, Gungriffon Blaze, strips away some of the sim-y bits while nearly perfecting the original's structure, adding analog controls & other modernizations. But I'll get into that later with a proper review. Until then, I hope the seminal Game Arts mecha FPS is now on your radar or higher up your shortlist!
(Shout-outs to Thexder & Veigues for paving the way. Those are much simpler mecha action titles compared to what Game Arts later made, but you can see the evolution towards Gungriffon within them.)