Before I started something else longer once more, I decided to play through this odd little fighting game I came across. I actually originally bought this to stream on Twitch at some point, but after realizing that it both has no story and that I'm fuck-awful at it, that seemed like a less ideal use for it XD. I ended up just playing through it myself a few times on the easiest difficulty to unlock the characters and see what the final boss was like to play as. I played it on real hardware and I spent about 3.5 hours with it in total~.

This game really has no story to speak of. There's the slightest pretense of this alien invader thing that's drawing all of these universes or somewhat together, but to the best I can tell it's entirely in the manual. All you'll find in the actual game is a mysterious cutscene at the start informing you this boss exists, and another at the end informing you that there are still many more than the one you beat. It's not a complaint, given this is just a fighting game from 1998, but I still would've liked little story modes for the characters, even if that wasn't the most common thing in the world for a fighting game at the time.

The gameplay is where more or less all the content here is, and it's a Virtual On-style 3D mech fighting game~. Two third-person perspective robots enter, one will leave! Now I've never actually played Virtual On, so I can only kinda guess at how this controls compared to that, but given that this was designed for a normal PS1 controller (no analog controls here, despite the year it was released) and not the twin-stick setup that Virtual On has, I assume they're at least a little different. The game's controls are the bit I had the hardest time getting used to. You have a square button, a ranged attack button, a melee attack button, and a boost button to boost in whatever way you're holding the D-pad at the moment you boost. Holding R2 or L2 to spin the camera while you boost will keep the camera not spinning, but locked on your target, and you'll need this because you really never wanna not be boosting (because standing still means death). You really need that lack of control during boosting, because, not unlike Smash Bros., what direction you're holding on the D-pad indicates which variant of your melee and ranged attacks you'll actually do, so to do the side-hold ranged attack but not actually move to the side, you'll wanna be boosting.

The block feature can be used as a dash cancel, and you can also press R1 to jump, but I never really got the hang of that. With the jumping in particular, having to use R2 and L2 to be my constant lock on buttons meant that my fingers were rarely free to think about hitting R1 or L1 (L1 very confusingly being a duck button, though I have no idea why you'd want to ever use that). Circle strafing around people and avoiding bashing into the walls of the stage as best I could was my best strategy, but even then I ran into trouble just with how the game is balanced. Some characters (particularly the final boss, unsurprisingly) are just outright better than others, and the game's balance is not that great. Being able to fire projectiles with less cooldown (like the final boss can really disgustingly well) is your winning strategy, as melee was always far too fiddly to be worth it (though the payoff is certainly pretty impressive). I imagine someone better at fighting games than me could delve deep enough into these systems to get a much better idea on exactly how useless or not melee is compared to ranged attacks, but for me, I thought the mechanics as a whole were OK. Controlling it is awkward enough that I think most people save for those already interested in the Super Robot Wars-esque crossover nature of the game will probably be turned off at them and just play Virtual On instead <w>.

The aesthetics of the game are quite good for a 1998 PS1 game. Loading times aren't too long, and the 3D models are generally pretty good likenesses of their original mechs, though there is some very noticeable clipping with models and flickering of polygons present. The music is also pretty darn good in how they recreate the original themes of the shows, though there are some confusing music choices. The absolute banger of a main theme of Metal Armor Dragonar isn't used, and I actually have no idea what song they're using for that. The SRX team, Banpresto's original characters introduced in Shin SRW a couple years earlier, have their second ever appearance here as well, but very confusingly their main theme isn't used for them at all. The music used for them is some super forgettable entirely original thing, and it's absolutely baffling to me why they didn't just use the main SRX theme for this game, a theme Banpresto definitely have and have the rights to, for any of their own original characters. At the very least, I certainly appreciated the choice to have all 4 unlockable characters be original ones and not the licensed ones, so anyone buying this game based on a guy they saw on the cover would be able to pick up and play him immediately~.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I'd like to give this a higher recommendation, but I'm not really confident in my ability to judge fighting games enough to judge it mechanically, and the aesthetics and story aren't enough to hold things up otherwise. I think this is a perfectly fine game and a good time if you want super robot-y goodness but in a Virtual On-shaped package, and you really barely need any Japanese ability at all to be able to enjoy it as well. Pack that in with how the 4 unlockable characters (giving you a roster of 11) are unlocked with passwords, not gameplay, and you have something that's super easy to just hop into and mess around with if you want some crossover fighting game fun, even if it's not the easiest thing to control~.