Venus Senki

"One great idea is unfortunately not enough to make a game."

There are games which are fresh and original, giving the player a total package of entertainment with superior graphics and sound, a compelling storyline, and fun gameplay. Then there are games that are utterly standard with the exception of one innovative, genuinely good bit that tries and fails to carry the rest of the game. Venus Wars is one of the latter.

Venus Wars, like Villgust, is a game that ties in with an anime film. In this case, the game appears to be based on the film instead of the other way around. The film, in turn, is based on a manga which apparently goes into great detail on the fictional history of the colonization of Venus. You don't need to know anything about the film or the manga, though, since the plot of this game is very simple: In the late 21st century on the terraformed planet of Venus, the army of the continent of Ishtar invades the continent of Aphrodia, and you and your rebel biker gang (seriously) are the only ones that can stop them. Add to that the lack of dialogue outside of simple mission briefings and a few one-screen cutscenes and this game barely needed to be translated at all. (Though J2E being J2E, they still didn't translate the ending, which I'm guessing is a generic "Good job" message anyway.)

Venus Wars is a turn-based tactical game like Advance Wars, with your gang of eight bikers, supported by two transport trailers, fighting through 15 maps to retake the capital city of Io, destroy the Ishtar armada, and defeat General Donner. There is a wide assortment of enemies: fighters, mechs, tanks, and such. You have to combat them in three different mission types. Normal missions give you the simple task of blowing up all of the enemies, and number about half of the total game. Most of the rest of the missions require you to attack a certain objective, while a couple require you to keep the enemy from landing on a certain square.

The strategy for all of these missions is simple, since you'll generally end up destroying every enemy no matter what the mission objective is. Since the enemy can win simply by blowing up both of your trailers, the easiest way to play the game is to have four of your characters surround one trailer while the other four surround the second one. Since the trailer also resupplies your ammo, health, and fuel, you kill two birds with one stone. You can also arrange these two teams so as to block whatever you're defending, if applicable. It helps that the AI is pretty dumb; the enemy seems to get the idea of ganging up on one target, but a lot of times it goes after that target regardless of the battle situation. So while most of the enemies are attacking one of your teams in an assault mission, you can send the other up the other side of the map and take the objective if you wish.

You probably won't wish until the end of the game, though, since Venus Wars has a simplistic RPG system. Destroying enemies gives you XP, up to about 10000 per character, with a maximum level of eight. Though each character has quite a few attributes (speed, strength, ammo capacity, and so forth), the only ones that increase are maximum HP and possibly the amount of benefit that the character gets from resupply. It's pretty simple to max out most of your characters with little effort since the enemies give you a lot of XP, especially near the end of the game. So leveling is mostly irrelevant, but still worth destroying all of the enemies on a map for.

So far, Venus Wars sounds a lot like Military Madness. It even looks a lot like Military Madness, taking into account the Famicom's graphical inferiority to the TG16. So what's that one interesting bit I mentioned earlier? It's how the battles are played out. Instead of the usual screen you get where the two units battle it out automatically and win or lose based on terrain and unit strengths and weaknesses, you instead physically maneuver your biker from a behind-the-back view in an action sequence. Each enemy unit contains ten large vehicles and a multitude of small craft, both of which give you experience per kill. Only the large ones count towards unit strength, so you have to blow up all ten of them to destroy the unit. You have a minute to do this; if you fail, the combat round ends and you'll have to try again with another biker or wait until next turn.

You fight the enemy with a blaster that has unlimited ammo and does damage based on the character's strength, as well as a missile launcher that destroys most craft with one shot. The missile launcher has to be gradually resupplied, though, and only one character can carry ten missiles at once. Each craft requires a different strategy to defeat; some hop up and down trying to dodge your shots, while others try to stay a bit off to the side, where they can shoot at you but you have a hard time shooting at them. On your part, you can move from side to side, accelerate to a higher rate of speed than normal, and even pop a wheelie to shoot flying objects as well as use ground craft as ramps to boost off of.

After a few missions, you'll also be confronted with units comprised of single megatanks, which can be considered the bosses of the game. These are fought differently, through a top-down perspective similar to Metal Gear or a thousand other games. The different types of tanks all look basically the same (with the exception of Donner's tank at the end), but have different weak spots and turret emplacements. Unlike the normal battles, you can retreat from bosses at any time. An odd effect of this is that the bosses are completely incapable of starting a fight with you unless you want them to, making them easy to destroy if you're patient enough to wait for missile resupply.

Unfortunately, this doesn't keep the game from becoming tedious about halfway through. There's no intrigue to the story to keep you playing, nor do the other aspects of the game present a challenge or anything new after the beginning. Even the action sequences themselves get boring after you've seen all of the different tactics that the enemies use, which run out long before the end of the game. It's a great idea to allow the player of a strategy or tactical game to control the actions of a unit in a manner more like a shooter because it gives more human control to the outcome of battles. It also hasn't been done very often. But it just isn't enough to make Venus Wars more than a passing curiosity.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/06