Game 13 - Hero Senki Part 3 (Final)

The heroes have now made it into Solomon City by a back way, and the first task is to take care of traitor Jared, who comes out with his new mech, the Psycho Gundam

He shouldn't be able to use this

One annoyance of the battle system is that there's no way to revive a character in battle. Many bosses have multiple attacks per round, and so you can get unlucky with critical hits and have a character defeated with no way to bring them back. This happened to me in this battle with Ultra Seven (the healer), and I was just mashing buttons to get the game over but somehow I won instead.

While I'm at it, the special moves are not very well balanced. For instance, Kamen Rider's Rider Kick costs 25 TP. His ZX Shooting Star costs 440. The ZX Shooting Star only does at most 4 times the damage of the Rider Kick but costs 17 times at much TP. Kamen Rider's TP at the end of the game for me was around 1500, and TP restoring items are rare and not buyable until the end of the game. What's worse, the special attacks can miss. So if you use the higher attacks you quickly run out of TP and run the risk of blowing 1/3 of your TP on a miss. Bosses often take virtually no damage from regular attacks. This means that the higher level attacks are rarely useful, and you mostly just want to use the cheap moves.

After beating Jerid, the group goes through a series of events to get them into A Bao Qu city. Once there, they fight Scirocco.

Ji O

He's not especially hard, but after he's defeated, Gilliam returns! Unfortunately he's now working for the enemy, having recovered his memories. He won't kill us (of course) but he gets us out of the way with a teleporting attack.

Auf Widersehen!

This means that once again the team splits in 3. I don't like these portions of the game. It's not fun to have 1 vs 3 or 4 when the 1 has no healing and has to rely on items. Each section involves the hero trying to get back to Dakar City to rejoin the group.

First up is Kamen Rider, who wakes up in a coffin. His goal is to stop some missiles from being launched, which I assume is based on some storyline from the series. Along the way he learns the weak spot for Kaiser Grow, a monster that seemed to be immune.

Ultra 7's story is confusing. He begins in a city that looks like Zeit City but the mayor is a robot. Escaping from this he follows a boy through the forest to the real Zeit City only to find out the boy was a ghost or something like that. This was really hard to follow and I was never really clear about what was going on with the fake Zeit City. Ultra 7's ultimate goal is to stop the enemies from using a bomb to make lava flow down and destroy Zeit.

Finally, Amuro needs to get money to repair the road from Shangri-La City back to Dakar. He meets Char who joins him to find some hidden Zabi money, promising to give Amuro (and Judau) some of it. He also encounters Shuu Shirakawa (Masaki's counterpart from Super Robot Wars).

Shuu

The boss of this section is annoying because neither Char nor Amuro have any healing; fortunately the best healing items are soon buyable so I was able to use up a bunch of items to get by.

Around this time there's a little cutscene that shows the goals of the enemies, but it's a cookie cutter "Destroy the world to rebuild and save it" plot.

Now the group has reassembled in Dakar, and this is the final portion of the game. First we have to sneak into A Bao Qu (along with Seabook Arno from Gundam F91). Before that, there are some optional things you can do that ritchie doesn't list in his walkthrough on GameFAQs. On the off chance that anyone ever checks this who is playing the game, I'll list them since they help a lot.

• If you go back to Shangri-La, Judau has opened a store that sells the best equipment and TP restore items. You can find all the equipment in the last dungeon so don't waste your money on that, but the TP items are useful.
• Go back to Lido City and talk to an old man who gives you a choice. The top choice gives you Shuu, the second choice Masaki. After that you need to look at a wall in the final dungeon (This site gives you a picture of where), and then Shuu or Masaki will be in a room in the next area. They join at level 99 so this helps a lot.
• In Zeit City, at the city hall, Ultra 7 can learn his ultimate move (which often does 9999 even to bosses).

After you beat the Lafressia there are a few more things you can do:

• In Mousa, talk to the nurse on 2F of the hospital and pick "Yes". She will show up in the last dungeon to heal you and sell you healing items (including TP recovery).
• In Shaoyan city, find an old man who will give you a message from Ultra King. In the final dungeon, he'll show up and give you Ultra 7's best equipment.

All of this backtracking is annoying given the method of travel in the game, but it's worth it.

The final dungeon is fairly long, but at least the nurse is there to heal us.

The final dungeon

At the end of the dungeon we fight six bosses -- Birdon, Yapool, Ji O, Kaiser Grow, Shadow Moon, and XN Geist. Fortunately they don't have to be fought back to back. With Ultra 7's Ryuusei Kick and Shuu's Granzon the fights aren't very hard except for Kaiser Grow. Only Kamen Rider can hurt him and he can heal himself, so it's a bit tedious but ultimately not too bad. After the first five I returned to heal up.

Does she get hazard pay?

The final boss is Apollo, in the XN Geist.

Looks like something from Super Robot Wars

XN Geist was quite easy; I thought he was easier than some of the previous bosses. Afterwards, it turns out that Apollo was actually Gilliam. With his future sense he thought the world was heading into destruction so decided to do the "wipe out everything to save humanity" deal. But now he can see a brighter future with ZEUS fighting for good, so he's not sad to die. The epilogue then shows some of the side characters during the game, and also indicates that Gilliam may have survived the final fight.

Now that I've played this I'd like to see Gilliam's first appearances in 4 and Original Generation again to see what connections are made. I know they make him a dimension jumper that actually exists in the different universes.

My final levels and time before the boss

Ultimately I was really disappointed by this game. It turned out to be a below-average button masher with a confusing story that seemed made mostly for fans of the series. Unfortunately the next game on my list (Song Master) is also known as a kusoge. I assume I'll reach good games eventually? It's a little disheartening that out of 13 games I've played so far, the only good ones are Heracles III and Dragon Quest V.