Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Live-a-Live #11 - Mech Suit Mayhem

Our heroes have no choice but to flee from the evil laboratory. They'll be back, though. Watanabe will be avenged, as the second-longest chapter in the game continues.


Back at home, the doc tells us that the only hope left is to pilot the mech that he unearthed. Only someone with intense psychic power can pilot it without dying afterwards.

 Don't worry, I'm sure the guy with YOUR PANTIES ON HIS HEAD is of sound mind.

 Yuki is really into wrestling, and thinks Misawa could beat down the bad guys if he were here.

 
Wow, this is quite a seedy bar. Let's get out of here.

 It doesn't get any better, either.

 Secret of Mana?

 Akira goes home to find the orphanage in flames. He pissed off the wrong people, it seems.

 He rescues Taeko from the burning house.

Akira finds his little sister, Kaori. At first she appears to be dead, but then she Hulks Up.

 "LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHIN' BROTHER" she says... then the house collapses on them.

Life is a bitch.

 Despite being drunk and high on shrooms (seriously), Matsu thinks he can pilot the Buriki Daioh mech.

 A couple is having an intense conversation in the park when the ground begins to rumble...

 Buriki Daioh is moving! Matsu somehow did it!

 He pilots it straight towards the laboratory of the skull-masks. Vengeance will be his.

 But first, he stops by the burning wreckage and plucks Akira and Kaori from it.

 The gang is all here, so it's time for Matsu to reveal his dark secret.

 ...he killed Akira's dad back in the day. Akira's dad worked for the government, while Matsu led a resistance faction. His faction has now been twisted to evil. What is with all this heaviness in a previously silly game?

 He then proceeds to tell Taeko to sit down and shut up, or something.

 ...then he dies, because piloting this mech took too much out of his psychic energy. This is so completely bizarre that I don't know how to react to any of it.

Akira takes the controls. He's finally pissed-off enough to use them.

The final area for this scenario is a temple with a familiar name.

 The government actually sends tanks and fighter planes to try and take down the giant mech stomping across the city. Buriki Daioh pretty much steamrolls through all of them.

 This is actually kind of awesome, I gotta say.

 This is like the Giant of Babel in Final Fantasy IV, except YOU CONTROL IT.

 Boss fight... sorta. This airship is powerful, but it still doesn't pose too great of a threat.

 I'm too late. They've liquified enough people to create a god, or whatever they're trying to do.

 Okay, we get it.

 This statue...is made of PEOPLE. IT'S PEOPLE!

 Akira now dumps the bad guys into the pool of humans, where they presumably burn up as well.

 ...and then he wakes up?

 Seriously? That was all a dream? What the hell.

 Credits roll.

"It was all a dream" is such a cop-out ending. I was really digging the idea that this near-future dystopia was so completely fucked up.

Calling it now, that was my least-favorite chapter in the game. It was too long, made little to no sense, and had no point. At least it had a mech.

More Live-a-Live Posts HERE




5 comments:

  1. Can't believe they copped out with that ending. Well, actually I can. It came out 20 years ago. I feel like it must not have been the plot designers' own decision to make it a dream sequence. It feels like their boss saw this and was like "we're a kids' game company; there's no way we can allow this" so they reached a compromise.

    I was right with them until the cop-out though. The plot came together pretty well and was a great example of the pessimism about the future that is a part of a ton of Japanese art. Let's pretend that scenario actually happened.

    Props to them for the Giant of Babel sequence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So far the short scenarios are beating the long ones. I wonder if the same awesome team did all the short ones and they got to graduate to CT.

      Delete
  2. Man, I was really getting what was going on there too, of course you would send a giant robot to fight an artificial diety. Then it never happened. Oops.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't know if we can say it never happenned. After all he has Matsu bike and he has the items and level he got during the scenario. The last scene was probably him reminiscing of what happened before.

    The thing about Buriki Daioh is that nobody could ever pilot it but Matsu overdosed on matango, sacrificing his life to start up Buruki Daioh and then he could pilot it for a brief moment before the overdose killed him. Akira had natural psy powers and since the engine was started it was enough to use it up until he killed the boss. After the scenario it's shown that Akira can't start it up by himself, Buriki Daioh could only start because Matsu sacrificed himself.

    I thought it was pretty cool. Maybe it isn't what happened but that's what I got from it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whoa, you understood this game a lot better than I did. I had no idea Matsu was on shrooms.

      Delete