Tech Romancer

Pros • Collect & save powerups and weapons • Cities, mesas, military bases and other crushables • Lots of over-the-top, goofy attacks	Cons • Skims off the top of "deep," gameplay-wise • No training mode • Typical frustrating give-me-a-break bosses
Bottom Line All-out, anime-style giant-robot combat full of referential jokes, special power-ups and big-ass explosions. But yes, it's a terrible name for a game. This is robot fighting as the Japanese (and God) intended it, and by that I mean: Big. Way too freakin' big, We're talking stumble-back-and-ooops-I-wish-I-hadn't just-stepped-on-that-hospital-but-what-the-hell-I-got-a-powerup big. Anthropomorphized 'mechs. Jumps. Flying kicks. Double-bladed axes the size of Devil's Tower, drunken missiles and sixteen-hit combos that you'll never get to use if I keep shooting you in the face with bolts of roiling plasma from a quarter-mile away. If you have a favorite type of Jap/anime 'bot, you'll find a wonderfully uncredited tribute to it in here somewhere.

In a way, Tech Romancer is one of the dweebiest things Capcom has ever done---it's not only a console fighting game, but a console fighting game featuring big, hulking, Freudian-compensation homages to Japanese robots of both the classic anime and rubber-suit varieties---but in another way, it's one of the more accessible games they've offered. With two main attack buttons, a jump button, a defend/guard button and a very laissez-faire attitude toward button-mashing, it won't take even inexperienced gamers long to get into the roundhouse swing of things, especially since a number of said attacks are no-brainer long-range affairs such as 'drunken' missile swarms, laser blasts and other projective assaults. Of course there is a satisfactory number of combos, counters and ultra-kills, but the variety is nothing like the mind-numbing periodic tables of similarly-themed games, featuring combos with proper names like "Up-up-up-left-C+A-up-drool-pick nose/fellate controller-and-the-rain-rain-rain-came-down-down-down."

Which is not to say some of the resultant attacks don't look like they could warrant such Lovecraftian articulations/intonations, because they surely do. There seem to be as many screen-blistering, reality-warping uber-attacks as there are pedestrian ones, and some of them are the proof positive that A) Tech Romancer doesn't take itself too seriously, and B) the designers should pursue substance-abuse counseling sessions at the earliest opportunity, as long as they don't miss Product Milestones: the one that stands out most in my mind (of the attacks, not the substance-abuse counseling sessions) involves a half-robot, half-walking-Aztec-ruin thingum that conjured up some hellbound gateway in the ground, which proceeded to suck my robot down to perdition or some facsimile thereof before excreting me back onto the desert floor with the damage to prove my odyssey (I mean, the very idea). Another robot, which appeared to be a badly-cobbled-together mass of mechanical parts forming a rotund Frankenbot (piloted by a screeching big-eyed anime-chick) would routinely drop assorted playthings---little trains, soccer balls, probably some Pokemon crap I didn't catch---to the valley floor, where they'd proceed to get under my feet and generally annoy. I saw weirder stuff that had to be sleep-deprivation on my part...but you get the idea. Tech Romancer has the flat-out, bad-ass mech war stuff, too: When two 'mechs open up on each other with beam weapons, and said beams collide in mid-battleground, there ensues a button-mashing fest on both players' parts, each trying to overpower the other with the force of his/her respective energy stream. It's very anime----you can almost see the animated beads of sweat, almost hear the inarticulate grunts of exertion from the pilots of each battle-bot. "Pilots" take the form of humanoid heroes whose faces appear during the story mode's near-incomprehensible plot progression (this aspect, too, is very anime), and while the dramatic branchings make little or no sense, they propel the player along his/her course to see what ludicrous, overblown dramatic turn of events will happen next. Victories in both story and hero mode will unlock various goodies such as illustrations, VMU mini-games, and even a full animated movie. Neat.

Tech Romancer's other neat hook is that the battling 'bots are much larger than their surroundings, which means you can fight amidst urban blocks, military compounds, desert mesas and the like. Mostly you'll just step on said obstructions to gain powerups and weapons---and another neat hook is that you can actually store and use such weapons at will during the course of battle---but you can also use the sidestep function to duck behind these obstructions; why not let Devil's Tower take the brunt of your foe's plasma onslaught? Once the puny natural altar has been obliterated, you can walk over there and sissy-slap the evil anti-ecologist until he/she has learned his/her lesson...or at least until they try it again, or until you run out of natural wonders to cower behind. And despite what you may hear of Tech Romancer's less-then-ultra-sharp robot graphics, the explosions make up for everything---relentless, ridiculous, boiling, roiling meta-blasts that finally belch up into the sky with a big, mutating, blackening mushroom cloud guaranteed to bring the planet at least three months closer to nuclear winter at a pop. Never, never sell Tech Romancer short, satisfaction-wise.

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