Okay, I have sunk far,
far too many hours into this thing over the last handful of days not to make mention. I speak of the amazingly named
Space Battleship Story RPG! I'm sure it's a poignant and moving title in the original language. It's somewhere between a RPG, a strategy game, a monster collectathon, and an idle/incremental whazdinger.
Immediate note of the downsides, just to drive away folks from the start: The game engrishy as all hell, grindy as
goddamn and has multiple breakpoints where you'll find yourself slamming head first into a giant wall of incandescent Fuck You In Particular until you grind out almost obnoxious amounts of resources and progression, it's pretty slow in general, the gameplay itself is both fairly hands off, somewhat approaching clumsy/buggy, and can very easily be brutally unforgiving
anyway, there
are ads (post battle, generally, but most of the time you can just hit whatever your back button is and get right back to the game. They're pretty painless as mobile games go.), and there's probably other stuff I'm forgetting to boot. Game has flaws you can sling a wave motion gun shot through.
Despite this, this damn thing has been on and playing close to 24/7 for the last several days, on and going with me giving it at least half an eye while I do just about everything but drive, bathe, and sleep. What it basically amounts to is being the captain of a 2D side-scrolling Gundam space fleet, complete with giant mecha, massive space battles with gigantic tracts of your screen space covered in laser beams and explosions, and alternate dimension F18s that will drag you to the side of the space lanes and violently sodomize your everything. Also war crimes. War crimes as far as the eye can see.
okay, it's mostly just one war crime vigorously repeated -- the game's what-amounts-to-bonus-level that sporadically pops up consists of you chasing down and violently murdering an immigration fleet; i.e. a colonization fleet filled with who knows how many millions of civilians. This has one of the best time/return cost ratios for much of the game, and remains one of the better sources of population for even longer; also the main immigration ship, for all you won't be able to buy it for pretty much ever -- its cost is straight 9s, and I'm pretty sure the game's gold cap -- is one of the strongest ships in the entire gameGameplay is pretty simple, all told -- you have all of 10 buttons that actually do anything gameplay wise, one of which chooses your flagship's targeting priorities (you
can target manually, but you will probably not hit
shit if you do), four which designates targeting priority and formation for your allies (manually separable by ship type into three groups, plus your hanger minions), four which turn on and off your weapons and ship-board ally launching (which can be commanded with one of that first four-group), and one button to retreat. With these, you fly through side-scrolling levels, blowing everything to hell as you progress mini-boss (
usually just mildly beefed up normal enemies) by mini-boss, until it culminates in an end-stage boss fight, all of which are giving a solid go at returning the favor. Along the way, you collect money, population, and loot, then you go back home, spend loot on upgrades and allies, and repeat the process all over again.
The big bit, is the loot. Which is also the monster collectathon. Your enemies can drop their
everything, with some mild caveats (several types are rolled up into a single type for your minions, ferex) -- their weapons, their design schematics (which lets you build them, upgrade them with money, and use excess schematics to upgrade the design through murder), their subweapons, generators, if they have it, you can murder them and take it. This, mind you,
also includes the end-stage bosses. The asteroid fortress you run into in the first few levels? My current playthrough is using that as its primary flagship.* That bastard on saturn (or uranus or jupiter... can't quite remember which it was) that is probably going to be your first roadblock? If I pull together enough money and murder it enough to get its design, I can build that, drive it, outfit my supporting fleet with it, and if things get really frisky I might be able to stick it in my flagship's hanger and use it as my freespawn murderfodder. If I have enough load space (most boss items are incredibly heavy, several times the largest available space you'll have for a while -- don't worry, after a bit you start getting access to ships that can mount some), I can take their weapons and smash fleets to the metaphorical space ground with them.
Which leads to pretty much the rest of the game. You collect money and people by killing things, and spend them on earth for world investments (which unlocks a bunch of stuff, mostly formations and difficulty level access for individual stages, but also the occasional ship) and developing weapons (which you'll probably rather pick up, but sometimes development will let you get a weapon a bit ahead of the curve and sometimes you just don't want to grind that
one enemy in an available stage) and ships (which have to be developed initially to use, but cost less as the level rises via pickup). Also you can change the ability/skill you're leveling and promote your character if you've sent enough things to the grave (which primarily unlocks new skills, but also -- and rather importantly -- increases the number of non-hanger ally ships you can bring along) and spend resources (generally end of the level, well... resources... that's your third currency, used for chips and development) to upgrade "chips", which are basically special abilities (such as better auto-aim, more hanger space, faster distance coverage, status resistances, etc.), 23 in all and the lot of them random drops from specific stages.** Then you pop up to orbit, adjust your ship loadout (or not) and fleet composition (if you're not broke or don't want to), and repeat the process.
... and that's the formula. You go, you kill in epic 2D space genocide competitions or get blown to hell trying,*** you come home, tweak your ill gotten gains, then do it again. Theoretically there's a plot but A) it doesn't matter and B) it's sufficiently poorly translated (no ill word at the dev, though, the current version is still going through the translation process) you probably won't understand it anyway. The graphics are fairly low-fi pixel-y, but it's the kind of 2d low-fi that means several hundred/thousand projectiles and a few dozen ships can all be on the same screen, and are generally good enough for what they do, there's sound but I haven't bothered to listen to it, but mostly you're just driving your ride and accompanying minions through a hell wall of death and jink, and it's pretty damn great, particularly if you're fairly fond of mostly hands-off games that still have a bit of investment and need for attention. Reminds me of an RPG-ish 2D side scrolling Liberation Army, and that is a complement and a bloody half.
Anyway. Initial caveats aside, I'm basically loving this vaguely beautiful attempt at putting you in the driver seat of the space fleets in a giant robot anime, and after this much time sunk, feel this bloody thing needs to have a recommendation.
Couple parting tips: Carrier allies increase your hanger space, up to a maximum of 3 -- this is very,
very nice once you get superweapon level load space, since it means you can stuff another three full on cruisers into your mechapocket. Also on the ally front, once you find yourself with melee weapons (you'll know them because they're little no-range crescents that probably seem completely bloody useless when you first try one out) and proper gunboats (not the little patrol boat or whatever, the type will say gunboat instead of small boat), you will be very interested to know having those gunboats in your fleet increases your weapon range at a ratio of 1 per two gunboats, max of +2 at four boats...
and that includes the melee weapons.
This will turn the previously complete crap melee weapons into the deadliest mid/short-mid-ish range weapons you will have access to for a very,
very long time, particularly if you manage to off a metal SF or murakumo and get their swords to drop, and render the previously kinda' iffy SF mecha into tiny little deathbeasts, particularly once you hit the initial specialist and beyond. Also gunboat+metal or murakumo sword is quite possible the best anti-projectile piece of equipment you will find for basically ever so far as your sub slot goes -- if you're having trouble with something that shoots a single large projectile into your face, or fires in a straight line, hunt yourself down one of those two, get your gunboats, and laugh in the face of glowing projectile death.
And don't forget to visit the wormhole when it first shows up! Leaf 32 is a wonderful place full of money and glee that you'll want to avoid bringing your friends to when you initially scope it out unless you're already flush with cash and have some excess population laying around.
* It's the cheapest thing you can buy that's able to mount boss weapons and actually do anything... and more importantly, if it can mount boss weapons it can mount most
ships you'll see for a while, so you get to stop spitting those piddly mass produced mecha or tiny boat ships or fighter planes out of your hanger and start spitting full fledged battleships. Also has a pretty decent sized hanger, which is just icing.
** Tip: Farm the training ground until you get its chip.
Farm the training ground until you get its chip. I think it might be a guaranteed drop, but if it isn't, keep popping the deathstar balloon
yes there is a deathstar balloon until the chip falls out. It's what lets you speed up the rate fights progress, and is the difference between getting ten hours of progress in ten hours and getting fourteen.
*** Very much bonus points because you
are going to die, the losses for your flagship getting blown up are
usually pretty small. You don't lose anything you collected up till that point in the stage, and as near as I can tell the only costs involved are replacing any non-hanger allies that may have gotten ganked in the process of your ignoble end, most of which are fairly cheap. Key word there being most. You get that asteroid fortress minion blown up and you just lost a few dozen thousand gold and a good twelve thousand lives. Deployment and crew costs go down as ship design level goes up, but the big ones cost so much it's going to be a
long time before it makes much of a difference for 'em.
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