@GungJoe #eureka7
The Eureka Seven PS2 games are wild in that they contain:
- Ground-based mech combat with vehicle modes.
- Aerial mech combat.
- Liftboard air surfing and racing.
- On-foot gun and melee combat.
And went to the trouble to design a game engine that allows all of these except air mech combat to seamlessly transition between each other, as you can get out of your mech, fire a pistol, punch a guy, sky surf to another mech, hop in, turn to a car, and drive off.
@GungJoe And they did all this while also implementing a real-time physics system for terrain objects during combat.
It is _absurdly_ ambitious.
_and it runs like the jankiest thing_, with framerates dropping to single digits during cutscenes in coffee shops from rendering too many coffee cups onscreen, weird animations, mechs being knocked over by tiny barrels flying into them, and none of the elaborate transitioning between modes is ever necessary more than like, twice.
@GungJoe As far as I can tell by Google Translate, Eureka Seven started as another attempt by Bandai to do a multimedia franchise in the vein of .hack across anime, video games, and others, but entirely internally. And they just did not invest in the games to the same degree as .hack to get them finished.
There's remnants of what's clearly an _open overworld_ in the first E7 game! (The second is much more paired back and functional, and kinda good, but less absurdly ambitious.)
@GungJoe All this on top of going full into multimedia franchise of the early 00's mode and the only E7 anime character to show up in the games in any prominence is... Moondoggie.
Yeah.
@GungJoe And the plot of the games just feels like it's based on a different revision of the series bible than the anime eventually went with, with weird setting details on military structure or such.
that said, the main protagonist mech of the games, the Terminus r505 rules
@GungJoe There's also an updated version of the first game (New Wave) in Japan, New Wave GRADUATION that was a pack-in with the E7 movie DVD?!? Can't find anything on it...
Games are like 50% cutscene, and I'll end on two notes about the plot in a spoiler tag..