Metal Max, a Series Introduction
As anyone who knows me by now knows, I loves me some video games, and by far the ones I love the most are the /weird/ ones. The obscure RPGs and odd little genre-defying stuff that never gets enough love. Following some discussion with someone the other day I have thus been playing one such game, Metal Max Xeno Reborn. And ohhh boy, this game....
The Metal Max series as a whole is one for which I have a certain fondness, especially since it falls into the "Never got popular in the west" category quite heavily. Counting remakes, which we need to do for /reasons/, there have been 11 of them. Here in the west, we've seen... uh... three(sort of), and not the best ones, if we're being honest. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm feeling chatty, so let's take this from the top. As with all sorts of blogs of this sort, this is a mixture of personal research and personal conclusions based on the information I could get, which is limited at best. I may get things wrong, though not intentionally, but I have Opinions, dammit.
At its heart, Metal Max is a post-apocalyptic turn based RPG in the vein of Dragon Quest. While every game in the series (With one exception) is its own thing and not a sequel, they all share the same background and themes. In the near future, the planet is in a bad shape, so humanity creates a great AI, dubbed NOAH(Or Noa, or No.A. It's had a few translations, and this will become a theme) to help it combat the decline of the earth. Noah takes a look at things and comes to the decision that humanity is the problem, then promptly unleashes nuclear hellfire and mutant bio-cyborgs on everyone. Oops. Almost all the games use this premise as the backdrop, but end up typically fairly loose on story and more open, encouraging the player to go and explore, find new goodies, and take on bigger and nastier WANTED monsters. And to its credit, yes, it does two things different from its other RPG brethren, and it does them pretty damn well: Tanks, and Wanted Battles. Your primary target is almost always WANTED monsters, giant boss creatures for which there is a hefty payout, and for which you will generally want some major firepower, and that is where the Tanks come in. Being a post apocalyptic world, magic is right out. Screw fireballs, I have a howitzer! Tricking out your tank is like half the game's progress in many cases, as it uses its own build system and of course, tanks don't level up. What's more, while the games do tweak the specifics from time to time, the system is largely the same across all the games, so if you manage it in one, you know how to do the rest, more or less, which makes it a lot easier to bumble through the basics even if you're a little rusty on the language. The Tank system in and of itself is so ingrained into the series that it deserves its own specific entry, and that's what it will get.
#Rpg #obscuregames #metalmax #videogames