Aura Battler Dunbine (聖戦士ダンバイン 聖戦士伝説), launched 3/4/2000, launched by Bandai
Dunbine is a 1983-4 anime sequence by Yoshiyuki Tomino, about younger man who’s summoned to an alternate phrase Byston Effectively to combat a warfare within the small magic-mechs referred to as Aura Battlers. I’ve by no means seen the sequence though I’m fairly aware of it from its repeated appearances in Tremendous Robotic Wars. There will probably be spoilers for the sequence in right here for those who care a couple of 40 yr outdated anime being spoiled.
Fairly than instantly following the story of the anime, the sport includes a brand new particular person from Earth as a predominant character, who will get summoned to Byston Effectively after which quickly finally ends up because the king of one of many small international locations. The entire characters from the unique sequence seem within the anime and the story can roughly observe the trail of the anime though there are quite a few branching paths.
The 2 main story branches are the “Legislation Route” wherein you combat towards Drake Luft (as within the sequence), and the “Chaos Route” the place you be part of him. Inside these routes there are 4-6 endings for every one, though a few of them appear to be slight variations of one another.
There are a whole lot of selections you make throughout the recreation, though it’s laborious to inform what number of of them are literally affecting issues or whether or not they’re simply barely altering the subsequent battle’s structure.
There’s no good walkthrough for this recreation (yow will discover one for those who use archive.org however even it doesn’t cowl every thing) so I simply made no matter selection I felt like. I ended up getting the ending that’s principally the TV sequence. I opposed Drake Luft. About 2/3 by way of the sport, the occasion occurs from the sequence the place a personality named Jacoba Aon sacrifices her life to expel all Aura Battlers from Byston Effectively to Earth, and the remainder of the sequence takes place on Earth. The sequence ends with nearly all the characters being killed in a climactic last battle, though I keep in mind studying that there’s some indication that their souls would possibly go to Byston Effectively. That is clumsily dealt with within the recreation; after the straightforward last battle the place nobody on my aspect died, there’s this obscure ending narration that might be incomprehensible if I didn’t know what it was imagined to be describing from the anime.
The ending display screen then says “Recreation Over”; I don’t know if it at all times does that or if it merely signifies that I received a foul ending.
The (now deleted) web site I discussed above did appear to incorporate all of the endings, a few of that are higher than the TV one. Probably the most intriguing ending is one that you would be able to get by not utilizing any aura battlers throughout the recreation and doing another issues, which ends up in your characters not being despatched to Earth with the remainder of the characters, and ultimately residing in peace in Byston Effectively. I suppose this might be thought-about ending? In one other one, you may defeat Drake and Bishott earlier than the “expel aura battlers” occasion happens, which is one other approach to have a extra peaceable ending.
Total, although, the story appears form of skinny — a lot of it’s simply “OK now which goal are we going to assault” with out a lot improvement of the characters or conditions. This may occasionally have been necessitated by the excessive quantity of variation in what characters you’ll have in your group, what the alliances can be, and so forth.
Your total pressure begins out as these dragon issues which I don’t keep in mind from SRW (in all probability as a result of they don’t seem to be mechs). When you progress within the recreation a bit you can begin shopping for and creating aura battlers. There are one thing like 60 completely different ones you may get, however this facet of the sport is fairly clunky and undeveloped. The story principally forces you to go to particular locations so your alternatives to purchase ABs are very restricted, and it’s not significantly simple to search out new ones to develop both. I hardly developed any mechs all through the sport, relying totally on those that the sport gave me. It simply didn’t appear well worth the cash or bother to attempt to get that system working.
Luckily (or sadly) you don’t really want to develop any mechs as a result of the gadgets you may equip on the mechs are extraordinarily highly effective and may simply make even the Dunbine or different early-game mechs aggressive on the finish of the sport. I spent the vast majority of my cash on these things — you may also purchase some new weapons as properly however I just about ignored this too. You possibly can at all times construct up more cash by going to the native forest for a free battle however this didn’t appear needed.
The battles are additionally fairly disappointing. There isn’t a lot care put into the map design; principally it’s simply your pressure towards a bunch of enemies all put collectively just like the picture above, and you’ve got little to do however simply transfer in direction of them and combat head-on.
The sport is on a speed-based flip system, so velocity is an efficient attribute to extend through gadgets. You possibly can transfer after which assault — one factor that I didn’t understand at first is that it’s a must to manually change your going through on the finish to be sure you are in the appropriate path to make use of assaults. Ideally you need to assault them from behind, in fact. You possibly can counter, dodge, or block (though some choices is not going to be out there relying on distance and going through).
You will have an Aura level meter that goes up because the battle proceeds, and you need to use that to do particular assaults. I didn’t discover the particular assaults did all that rather more injury than the common hits.
Often you even have these one-on-one combats. First off, the 2 photos above are the common picture after which the second has 4x inner decision turned on, which makes the sprites look rather a lot higher.
In these one-on-one combats you simply wait till the flip bar glows after which you may hit circle to decide on a command (I believe for those who let it replenish fully it does extra injury). You might need to maneuver into vary if you wish to use a melee assault. These additionally had been fairly primary and boring as a result of the animations take so lengthy; so long as your predominant character’s mech has sufficient good gadgets on it it’s laborious to lose any of the fights.
On the entire I discovered this recreation pretty disappointing. The battle system isn’t developed sufficient to make it enjoyable to undergo all of the phases, and the mech improvement is proscribed. The story is OK however as I mentioned above, too reliant on lengthy stretches of plot improvement that’s little greater than “right here is the place we must always go subsequent”. The a number of story paths and potentialities for endings are fascinating and do give the sport some replayability if you wish to go that route. The “no aura battler” factor can be very powerful.
