Well as promised I played Mugen no Frontier (endless frontier) Super Robot Taisen (wars) OG (original generation) Saga for the DS until I got the first mecha unit and thought my arm was going to fall off. The DS is really below ideal for marathon gaming sessions. Of course at this point in my life I might be the one that’s below ideal for it.

Anyway you fill out your party with Kos-Mos (version 4) before you get your first mecha “Phantom” the “gespenst” (which you could arguably translate from german to english for phantom and is as good of a fit as any literary alternative, they can’t call it ghost or specter you know?). It’s actually called a few different things in the game, like every thing and every one else therein. I almost think that they put names so many different ways to pander to international players, especially people who know english as Harken uses “katakana english” almost every time he gets a text window. Anyway the mecha in this game are a more practical size at over 3 meters tall instead of the usual over 20 meters tall. Weight isn’t mentioned. By the time you get your gespenst you see some data and the characters theorize it’s that size to fit in with the size of the dolls like Suzuka’s Jyakigunou. And probably it is for scaling purposes as opposed to for instance Xenosaga where your characters would just get into typical really large mecha. Although the main difference is actually that instead of the mecha being piloted vehicles they’re AI controlled robots. In spite of the fact that you have two androids in your party though the mecha don’t communicate at all. They probably went this route because if they were intelligent then there’d be no reason for them not to be full members of the party and they didn’t want to do that.

So as the manual states you are only allowed to have the mecha in the “back” of your party which means that they are inactive in battle and can only be used for support attacks. There are a couple of quirks to that which were probably also in the manual but I didn’t understand it at the time. First of all your mecha are fixed into the 5th (of 8) party slot which means that they’ll always be the first support used regardless of anything else. Second when you get the Gespenst Harken unlocks a waza {technique} (flying gespenst kick, Kai Kitamura’s signature attack from OG 2 onwards) that targets two enemies and is basically a combination attack between him and the gespenst where the gespenst uses its normal single character attack that it hits you with when you fight it. Oddly I think the single target support attack is its group attack when you fight it but I wasn’t paying that much attention.

According to the manual you learn new wazas featuring the mecha as you level up. I don’t know whether different characters other than Harken eventually get these combination wazas or not, and whether different characters get different wazas for the different (apparently just 3, the gespy, the alt, and the weissy) mecha. Like let’s say that harken gets the gespy, kaguya gets the weiss, and aschen gets the alt. Since Reiji and Xiaomu combine their moves with each other it doesn’t seem likely that they’d make use of the mecha. Suzuka already has her Jyakigunou, and KOS-MOS is no stranger to getting left out of using mecha. But I wouldn’t be surprised if only Harken gets wazas for the mecha, wouldn’t be surprised at all. Although I thought the manual said “level up” and not “progress through the game”.

I am not yet clear whether when you have additional mecha you will get to use them 2 or 3 times in a row to each support in random order, whether only one is randomly chosen to support a single time (which I’m pretty sure is what the manual is saying), or whether it’s decided at the start of the battle which unit it will be and you’re stuck with that. Of the 3 the last would actually be more convenient. It’s hard enough to chain in support attacks with your regular attacks without even knowing what you’re going to get until it’s out there. On the other hand also you have to imagine that the Alteisen is the strongest of the 3 if only because the other two show up sooner. I’m not quite sure what was up with the gespy being stronger in your second encounter with it than the weiss was in your first encounter with it even though the one follows the other in the order of boss battles. At that rate I think Kaldina (W06) was stronger than it in that enounter too.

Well once again I’ll write more when I find out. The one point I want to reiterate is that as the game wears on the flaws wear on you. The main thing that I noticed today is that as you progress and boss fights get tougher and tougher you are more or less required to make more and more use of the battle menu if you want to survive. And this would have really benefited from letting you use the stylus because the controls are pretty sluggish. The regular party menu navigation isn’t great either as regardless of what the option is you have to cycle through your party in its order rather than just being able to do what they did in RPGs for 20 years (and in Xenosaga I think) and first select the option (like status) and then the character. They also could have used a button and stylus combination for the menus like in the Code Geass game. I know the games were developed by different companies even though they’re both published under bandai namco but still, you’d think that someone would be around to say or realize something about that. As it is I suspect that the game is on the DS rather than the PS2 because of budget and possibly the size of the prospective audience. More PS2s have been sold, overall but more DSes have been sold in the world than japanese PS2 so that means more ds owners can play MnF “naturally”. But that’s not that important. I’ll gripe about other things and the differences between MnF and Namco X Capcom later.

But really quick let me tell you my “boss party”: Harken (luck for twice money, the group fighting spirit to increase everyone’s critical rate), Suzuka (cheer to let everyone get double experience), Kaguya (for love to heal everyone and prayer to cure status effects), and KOS-MOS (revive, prayer) or Reiji (friendship for healing and soul for damage). Until I got the gespenst I liked Xiaomu in the first support and Reiji in the second with Aschen in the third. In reality I would often get caught unawares by bosses and have weak parties where Xiaomu ended out being the star (she’s probably the most versatile character and the easiest to chain together all 5 of her attacks with two support attacks and still lead in to another character) and if it was the all female party before getting KOS-MOS (really only two and a half dungeons) then Aschen ended out being the hammer. So my regular party is Aschen, Reiji, Xiaomu and whoever from the remaining 4 is furthest or closest to leveling up. Because characters join you needing the full exp for their level to level up I had KOS-MOS in my party for a long time since when I got her most of my characters were a battle away from leveling up.

General hints I have are to stock up on the weakest items that don’t require any com% to be used in battle and that the bonus percentage effects typically outweigh slightly stronger stats. Look for equipment that increases critical percentage and evade percentage, for some reason with +25% crit Harken seems to critical almost every attack (according to the manual the chances are one in ten to critical) and ends out doing by far the most damage. And not to bother making a concerted effort to level. If you don’t run from fights and you use luck and cheer (have to use it on each character, wait until you only have one enemy left so you don’t have to re-cast it, luck effects the whole party so as long as one person is left alive it will always remain even after reviving a character) in the boss battles (you almost don’t get enough EXP to level up otherwise) you’ll have enough of everything to get through. The boss battles are just made to be annoyingly long anyway. The regular battles are pretty even (techniques and support attacks add to the time with their cut-ins) but the boss fights just get longer and longer. Conversely speed is the most important stat, for regular battles you want to have all 4 characters faster than the enemies, I think Reiji, Kaguya, and KOS-MOS are the slowest. On the other hand in the boss battles you’re better off if your order is staggered because the single target boss attacks nearly wipe most of your characters out in one go, and typically if one attacks that way the other will use a group attack and you’ll lose a character if they go right after each other. Fortunately you rarely fight more than one actual boss (although they always have at least two grunts those have more endurance than power) up to the point you get the gespenst but I imagine that will change going forward.

The thing I’m grateful for after getting the gespenst is that you summon it for a support the normal way. Listening to Professor Marion’s description when she said “call gespenst” I thought you were going to have to try and use the crappy microphone and actually do it. Fortunately you just press the left button and the characters do the calling for you. Suddenly I feel like the Gespenst resembles Pegas from Tekkaman Blade, it’s probably the “ear” antennas that they share. Don’t they?