Zoids is one of those franchises that I engaged with pretty strongly. We had a handful of model kits that I enjoyed building with my brother, watched Chaotic Century and New Century avidly, and played the heck out of the Zoids Saga RPGs on GBA in both Japanese and English. What can I say, it’s hard not to love robot dinosaurs, especially with some juicy anime melodrama on top!

So out of Japan we have something different from the usual RPGs and arena battlers of the franchise: a sidescrolling action game. It’s a decent idea done well enough to get by, although it ends up feeling short but also repetitive. At least it manages to hit the Zoids notes: a variety of mechanical dinos and animals with guns bolted on, the ability to customise by swapping out weapons, and some tropey anime characters.

In this case, there seems to be a grand total of two characters: Protag-kun and his dumpy friend Nerd-chan. They find a magic ring or something in the opening cutscene, and apart from a few text boxes halfway through there’s nothing else until the final cutscene. I didn’t take the time to translate anything and didn’t feel the need to; story is clearly an afterthought with Dash. What I do know is that for some reason in this particular continuity, Zoids aren’t gigantic beast machines but rather the size of a person. I wasn’t sure why this was the case; I guess so you can see environmental details in the levels at a relatable scale?

Anyway levels take place in different environments, like a swamp, or ruins, or a volcano. They’re drenched with filler drones like Molgas and Zabats, which you can just ignore as you run around until your radar points you to the objective, a particular stronger bot. Then you spam your weapons (if your limited ammo (yes even for claw attacks) runs out it will refill shortly) until it blows up, or you do. Towards the end of the game this process becomes a bit more enjoyable as some trial and error with weapon choices or battle tactics enters into the equation.

New levels are unlocked by speaking to the nerd guy, except when they aren’t for a reason I couldn’t discern. In those cases I played a level or two I’d already cleared and eventually he came up with the next thing. You also unlock more Zoids to play as; eventually you can pick three out of the available five: Liger Zero (rad), Red Horn (tanky and useful for spamming at range), Salamander (fun to fly with but useless once you can strap wings to something else), Iron Kong (too slow), and Geno Saurer (yesssss). And then suddenly the final boss shows up, a cool fight against an actually massive polygonal Ultrasaurus-type thing in the background. You destroy each section of its body and armaments in a very different type of battle to the other 95% of the game.

So the game has a solid concept, and the spritework is nice, there’s just not much variety. Information on the game is really scarce online, especially in English, but it’s definitely worth trying for Zoids fans who want a different genre. Otherwise it’s not especially remarkable but I had a nice enough time with it!