Ronin 47

YOU become Commander Oishi, a mech pilot in future Japan, fighting against the gigantic sea monsters (“kaiju”) which terrorize humanity. It’s Robotech versus Godzilla! Battletech versus Megashark! Robot Jox versus Starro!

How awesome is that? Very!

So, you’re part of a the Japanese military, kaiju hunters in a world that has been terrorized and overrun by them for a generation. After your tutorial mission there is an attack on Ako Base – not one kaiju, but scores of them, a veritable army of mixed species, something never seen before. At the same time, a computer virus destroys every other mech, hideously killing the pilots, and the co-director of the facility escapes with a next-generation prototype mech.

You escape the slaughter at Ako Base, the last mech pilot, on a quest for revenge. Kira must be brought down to avenge your honor and to stop whatever he’s doing with a superior battlemech and a legion of giant monsters.

Review and Opinion

The writing is superb, as it always is with Jonathan Green. He draws a picture with words, and makes it feel immersive. And speaking of pictures, the illos by Neil Googe are absolutely wonderful! The one on page 159 in particular, the anime-style tachikoma straight out of Ghost in the Shell, machine gun blazing… wonderful!

The game system is advanced, too.There is melee combat with a katana and a blaster, as well as mech combat. And the mech combat is divided into long-range (rain of missiles! blazing lazers! pew pew pew!) and then melee (form blazing sword!). It’s like playing out an episode of Voltron. It’s awesome… except for the difficulty which I gripe about below.

There is a section where you hunt through the remains of Tokyo, navigating over a grid-map at your mech’s Speed, stomping over ruins and trying to find out who’s firing missiles at you. The hunt scene here is very cool, feels like hunting and being hunted.

And lastly, when it comes to the boss fight there are two distinct paths, heavy on melee or mech as you prefer.

So that part is really great.

But, the overall difficulty is way too much. Most of the monsters are able to wreck your mech even if you’re at full health, so if you survive a combat it will be with significant damage. I spent the first few weeks playing this a dozen times and could rarely survive a third fight and never a fourth one. Eventually, I just set my mech’s stat sliders to a total of 8 instead of 6, so I survive and find out what’s in the next chapter. Even with that cheating, the sheer number of required fights makes this probably impossible; even if your mech only takes 2-4 points of damage, it will add up over 30+ fights.

I really enjoyed this one a lot at first, but after twenty plays and only decreasing hope of getting the required items & keywords, it got old. Finally, forty plays and seven months later, I gave up and mapped it out just so I can be done with this book and move on.

Tips and Hints

Enhanced Scanners are used more often than any other mech upgrade.

When you get to Tokyo, you still need to know where Kira’s lair is. This can be had from a pair of GPS coordinates taken from a ninja mech in the Pacific Ocean and from the Oni mechs in the Tokyo grid. Without both… well, you can still get forward if you paid close attention at the Tengu Satellite Array.

To get into the lab aboard Gojira, the pass code is 52. You don’t actually need to solve for all four values, just to know their sum.

On 594, the lab combination is 481. This is 1 squared, 2 squared, 3 squared, …

On 420 the grid map of Tokyo, there enemy is at both the northwest area surrounding C9, and also at the southeast corner surrounding I2. Any of those squares adjacent to those will get you to 215.

If you go into Kira’s fortress on foot, you have a few reasonably difficult melee fights. If you go via mech, you must have have befriended Kanesada in the Wreckers’ base so you can get the antivirus, and also have either the correctly configured DNA Bomb (BCD) from Yokai Base and the Gojira, or the signal generator and the 5 Hz tone (also from Yokai Base and the Gojira) or else you will be overrun by kaiju in a cut scene. And you cannot use the signal generator at all if you befriended Kanesada. Overall, the on-foot path is much easier to achieve.

Errors

There are several spots where you’re pulled away from a fight, then asked to resume it… but he forgot to tell you what page you came from. Here are the ones I noticdd:

77 and 55, to finish your fight with the isonade (mega shark) see page 120.
412 and 471 when the second Oni mech joins, the first mech is on page 274.
103 to finish the mech fight with Ivan in Volos, see 181 for Volos’ stats.

The keyword “Untested” is not used. There is only one place where you can activate it (page 438) and it just says “If you have a signal generator” instead of the keyword.

If you fight Kira in the mechs, at a middle point you are asked about your mech’s gyroscopic stabilizer. There is no such upgrade. There is a one-off mention of your mech’s gyroscopic stabilizers in one paragraph, but it was not an upgrade, just a description of maintaining balance.