Preface: I've only ever watched most of "Zoids: New Century" on Toonami back in the day, and very little of the first anime series. This was years ago, so besides knowing what Zoids are and some types of them, anything else Zoids related would go over my head.

Luckily, the story is stand-alone. Besides most people looking very young when they are actually centuries of years old, everything is pretty easy to understand, being character driven and all.


Story
Once a new game is started, the story immediately begins with a flashback. At the end, we meet our protagonist Pana, who wasn't able to save a life for the first time in her long career as a healer.

By going around town and talking to various people, I assume that the person who died was related to a man named Avery in some way. This is the guy who gets stuff rolling, tasking you with taking Tavin, their prince, to the front lines of war at the behest of the prince himself. The event snowballs Pana into joining the front lines herself, where it becomes a tale of war and the people affected by it.

There's much more to the world, but unless you read the gamepage, you won't understand the origins of the playful Goddess Sylvanr, or her brother, and why things are the way they are. However, what I found the most amusing was the interactions between the various characters. NPCs have conversations with you, gone are the days where you talk to a child and the only thing she says is "WHEEEEEEE~". I think Sviel overdid Adele's unskippable "..." though.

It made exploring this new world much more fun to see how people reacted to one another. If you spoke to people as just Pana, they'll say something new when another party member gets in a few lines of dialogue as well. Pana, being the healer she is, also makes much more sense than in other RPGs when taking on quests from the people around her. She knows these people, and has been caring for them throughout her long life. (Long by our small age standards anyway)


Gameplay
This first thing I became introduced to, completely accidentally, was that Pana could heal all the dying plants around her. Smaller ground plants just require stepping on them, as the bigger ones elicit and event before she heals them, sometimes finding items and equipment. After stepping on a bunch of smaller plants, you have to heal a larger one in order for the event that raises your healing power to commence.

So basically by healing plants throughout the game, your character's healing skills will become more effective. This mechanic was very unique, though very easy to abuse, since leaving an area resets the plants back to their wilted form.

Once you get a new party member, you'll get a manual for their Zoid, which explains all the skills they'll eventually gain by leveling up, which is neat. Battles themselves are pretty strategic for not having that many skills to start. Instead of doing nothing but dealing damage with the occasional heal, you'll want to employ strategies that ensures your more frail members stay alive. Juno, our resident tank, has an ability that tries to get enemies to attack her instead, with sometimes unpredictable results.

Another character, one of the more frail, greatly benefits from setting up before attacking and has an ability to try and hide from enemies; this is especially helpful during bosses, which pack quite the punch. Sometimes though, you'll be focusing more on protecting everyone than on your enemies. This can be good or bad depending on the player's preferences, but at the very least it's not the type of battle system where you level up and keep getting slightly better attack skills to keep up with the next batch of enemies.

The TP system in this game isn't randomized like in default ACE games, but it doesn't carry over either. At first I thought it would bug me, but you never start off with 0, instead with a flat rate of 15, which will allow you to start off with lower level skills at the beginning of every fight. TP is known as adrenaline in game, so it fits the concept well.

One thing that confused me though, were the good number of status effects that I had no idea what some of them were doing. Some like Drilled and Slashed I realized lowered the afflicted's defenses, but Prone never lasted long enough for me to see what it actually did, though I assume it also lowered defense. That's a lot of defense lowering states.

And the character who is supposed to tank, Juno, actually loses HP while moving around on the map, and during battle. Perhaps a small percentage of HP loss in battle per turn was your goal (I didn't even notice it in battle), but going to a place with no enemies getting to walk around a lot, and then randomly finding out her HP decreases because she's in the next battle with only 1 HP was unnerving. It became annoying once it was brought to my attention, and I had to keep her HP up while walking around, so I wouldn't be screwed in battle.

Outside of battle related things, there's tons of optional content, enough to effectively double the length of the main game thus far. Since I liked interacting with just about everyone, I was more than happy to go all over the place to fight stronger optional bosses and get cool items by completing their quests. It also helped the world feel more alive, if a little bit small.


Graphics
The first thing that stood out was the beautiful custom title screen, which I assume was evented with some scripting help, because the cursor would sometimes move down or up twice when I only hit the key once.

All map graphics are standard RTP, and the mapping is at least above average in all aspects, sometimes being downright beautiful to look at. I'm not one to be turned off by RTP done right; one thing I think really helped were all the flowers you could grow just by being on the same ground tile. It added variety and color to any outdoors map.

The battlers kind of clash in my opinion, but not enough to make it impossible to tune out that line of thinking. Besides the Zoids battlers, some RTP styled sprites and faces were custom as well.


Sound
A lot of the songs I haven't heard, but those I remember come from various MMO games, so I assume the ones I don't know are at least other videogame tunes. The music fits the situations well enough, but what stood out was each boss having their own song.

My personal favorite of the boss songs was the one when facing off against the Sabre Tiger Captain, which isn't a song I recognize, but after looking it up it too is from a MMO.

The songs that I heard to the very end while playing the game faded out and didn't loop.


Bugs for the Dev
♦ I understand the plants that wilt again is intentional, but you should make them wilt after the telport part of the event takes place, so I don't see everything instantly wilt again all at once before I transition to the next map.
♦ Not really a bug, but it's odd how you marked the teleport events from the Underground River in between two rocks overlooking a cliff. It'd be better if there was another hole in the wall to exit from.
♦ The amount of Core Coating you actually have is different from the key items if you trade Glimstones, also when trading Glimstones the number that you give away is never subtracted from key items, but is subtracted as a variable, so everything still works as intended. I just found it a bit odd that my save file said I have 100 Core Coating, when it said 67 in the key items menu.
♦ Also not really a bug, but when enemies tell each other to retreat, they actually don't go anywhere. I think it'd be better if they said to cease fire since they couldn't win.
♦ The battlestart graphic before battle is also RTP, which isn't wide enough to handle the new screen size. Instead the image loops so you see two cut off circles instead of the one. I'd either get a custom one, or change the original size to fit the window.
♦ Juno losing HP while on the map; I hope that's not intentional.


Stray Observations
♠ When I realized the plants could be re-healed by exiting and entering a building, I got my "Gardening Score" to at least 100 before continuing the story.
♠ The various variables that track player progress are interesting.
♠ Every time Pana asked Juno if she wanted to try healing a plant or two, the results were amusing, especially when Death appeared.
♠ For a while I had no idea that by stepping on the plants and making them larger, that it would count towards my number of plants healed.
♠ The manuals detailing each Zoid in my arsenal was interesting to look at, for those with the patience to do so.
♠ By the time I was done healing the plants in the Village of Songs, I had several plant based pieces of equipment to throw on my character.


There's a couple things holding this game back from greatness, including the whole "I have to keep this girl from dying while walking on the map" that made my favorite character harder to keep around in battle. I still had a good time though, and look forward to seeing what happens next.

PS: Never thought I'd ever see anything Zoids again.