by the fans for the fans

Robot Alchemic Drive

Ahh, one of my favorite games from PS2 - Robot Alchemic Drive (RAD), a Japanese-made title which was also marketed in North America under the name Gigantic Drive.




Developer(s) Sandlot
Publisher(s) Enix
Designer(s) Toshihiro Kawamoto (character design}
Composer(s) Masafumi Takada
Platform(s) PlayStation 2
Release date(s) JP 2002-08-29, NA 2002-11-05
Genre(s) Action
Mode(s) Single-player, two-player versus
Rating(s) ESRB: Teen (T)
Media CD-ROM
Input methods DualShock 2



Basically, an alien invasion force of giant robotic war-machines called the Volgara have arrived to conquer the Earth, and the only one who can stop them is of course the youthful protagonist (a character played by you), by piloting a similarly large man-made robot giant. This powerful machine was built by an organization founded by your late father, who foresaw the possibility of alien invasion decades earlier.

The story exposition is cartoonish, but the action is great and the spectacle is larger than life!









The voice-acting is conspicuously wacky, but the best by far is the German chief-scientist -- he is just simply Wunderbar!

I admit, action games staged in conventional settings like Modern Warfare 2 tend to bore me.
Why would I want to see something conventional reproduced in 3D? I prefer the sci-fantasy games that provide amazingly different or surreal situations that are absolutely impossible to have in real life, and can only be depicted in a 3D virtual world.

Trust me - this game is totally RAD!

HEHEHE

NICE. FIRST VIDEO WAS LIKE A POWER RANGERS EPISODE.

LIKE THE ANIME.

HEHEHE

Oh trust me, the action keeps getting bigger and better!












You have a couple of other robots to choose from, for you to control:



It's literally framed along the lines of an animé TV series.
It has all the animé clichés, but that just helps to make it feel like an authentic animé of its own.

This game is totally over the top!

NOW THOSE ARE MUCH BETTER.

HAVEN'T PLAYED MECH GAMES IN A WHILE SINCE GRAND THEFT AUTO AND OTHERS LIKE IT CAME OUT.

MIGHT GIVE THIS ONE A TRY.


THE LAST ONE. WHO ARE THE ENEMY? VOLGARANS?

Yeah, they are the invading enemy aliens trying to conquer and destroy humanity. They have various different types of robots which they send down to attack Earth's cities and installations. You have to try to stop them with your mech.

The cool thing about this game which makes it visually way more impressive than any other mech games is that you're always seeing the action from the viewpoint of your tiny guy, who is never in the cockpit of the mech - because the mech has no cockpit. Instead, you're just a regular-sized person who is always near the action, and so you have to avoid getting stepped on, squashed, or otherwise injured. This always keeps those giant-sized mechs looking gigantic to you as they tower overhead.

If you've ever played any other mech games, or even that recent Godzilla game for the PC, you just don't feel like you're a huge giant. Instead, you feel like a regular-sized person surrounded by miniaturized buildings, etc. So the effect of such games was not to make you feel tall, but to make your surroundings feel smaller. The whole thing about mechs or big-ass monsters that makes them impressive is their giant size, that makes them tower over everything. Without that, then they're not impressive at all, and are boring as hell.

This game was very clever with its innovation in visual perspective.



I would love to see a sequel to this game. Perhaps we'll see Sandlot come out with something one day, on a next-gen console.