Legend of Dynamic Goushouden: Houkai no Rondo

"There's Mazinger Z, Devilman, Getter Robot, Cutey Honey... what is this?"

There are games in our life which really surprise players in many different aspects, this being one of them, as I doubt anyone outside Japan has ever heard about this game. It indeed features some amazing details not usually seen in RPGs, but there are also some ugly bugs that may upset even the strongest player.

I have to start by referring to the story, in which the hero and a girl friend of his are strangely transported to another world.There, they first get to meet Akira and Honey (from Japanese anime series Devilman and Cutey Honey) and you are given your first choice, the one of making the leading character accompany either of those 2. Whatever your choice is, the main story will generally be the same, only some minor events will be changed to reflect your first choice. Also, and depending on what path you initially took, you will meet different characters, like the ones taken from Cutey Honey, Getter Robot or even Mazinger Z, among many others.

As soon as you start playing you will notice that battles may seem simple at a first look but eventually they will become harder as you advance further in the adventure. In order to effectively face (and hopefully defeat) the many foes you will get the chance to confront, you will have to properly equip the characters currently on your party with not only items (which are still important, but not as much as one could think) but also other characters. Confused? You shouldn't.
Around here, when someone joins you they can do it in 2 different ways, as "partners" or "battlers". The second group is that of the ones you can add to your party and actually use in battles, while the first one is composed by a group of characters you can "equip"on the battlers.

Depending on the pairings you make (with up to 3 characters being able to associate with each battler) you may gain not only the usual bonus (each character has a specific bonus associated to it) but also the ability to use more than 1 new attack, being this the method you will have to follow in order to achieve the many strong hidden attacks that most characters can use.

Unfortunately, most characters only come with 1 or 2 attacks when they first join your party, making you venture into the the above mechanism a lot more than you could have wanted. Also, the most annoying bug about this (amazing, I gotta admit it) feature is that each time your party changes you will have to do it all over again, unlike what happens with the items. If this didn't happened many times I guess we could stand it, but as you advance across the game up to its ending sequences such thing will be more and more noticeable and annoying. You can not only equip them from the usual main menu but also from the battle one, in spite of not being very nice to have to do it once, again and again many other times.

Oh, back to the battles, in them you can strike with any of them attack each character currently has, use items, equip different partners or even run from the battle, all of which are performed in turns. No, the battles are not in real time like in most other games, but that doesn't ruin the experience at all.

Now, about the adventure itself... usually you will control the main character and hang around with him, you can move to other places on the world map or just in the middle of cities and you can interact with anything at all with a single touch on the A key, which is nice. The few dungeons you will face are not very long or very hard, but due to the enormous amount of random battles the player seems to be confronted with you may sometimes take more time than you should in order to complete them. Some boss battles are more difficult than you can suppose, and despite that being a good thing, it will also imply that the player must spend a lot more time performing level ups than it is usually wanted in this genre.

A special mention must be done to the ability to use giant robots (like Mazinger Z or Getter Robot) not only in the world map (as enormous flying fortresses) but also in their battles, a function that only isn't perfect because you can only use them in their own battles, not being able to put them in your party when it comes to random characters facing each other.

There's a value shown on the place where you save which enables you to see how much of them game you have currently completed, which is always nice but it kinda spoils you, turning into a bad way for easily knowing how far from the ending of the adventure you currently are.

As unlockables, the game features not only dozens of characters but also an interesting encyclopedia showing all the information you could want about every character available in the entire game, including a special option that enables you to see the special move(s) of that character, if he has any.

Another interesting feature is that you will need to complete the game twice in order to access the third (small) storyline, in which some interesting events unfold. Usually this could be seen as something great, but since most of the events on the game (mainly... the boring ones!) are common to the 2 initial storylines, you may get fed up with it after a while.

Concerning graphics, they are good and quite detailed but sometimes you can see some pixels out of their proper place, which isn't very nice. There are some images that seem taken from an anime series to be seen sometimes, but unfortunately those are not very detailed and they don't even seem to matter at all.

About the sound, that's one of the biggest flaws of this game. I am obviously taking this with irony, but it seems that the game only really features 2 different songs: one for the environment and another for the battles. You will be hearing the same songs all the time and, even if it wasn't like that, each and every song is simply boring. No, in case you are wondering the game doesn't seem to feature any musics taken from the actual series, unlike what usually happens in the famous Super Robot Taisen saga.

So, who should get this game? Fans of older japanese anime series will surely love it, but so will people who want to play a different RPG. Oh, and knowledge of the language is obviously required, as in this game you may have a really hard time finding where to go next.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/11/06