Ok this is my first ever review, so if it is missing some crucial information tell me I suck and just ask.
Well first off, this game was made by Giga/TGL, the same people who made the infamous and extremely good Steam Heart’s for PC-Engine Super CD-ROM, and later ported to Sega Saturn. They were also responsible for the Variable Geo fighting games which were available for a variety of platforms. Having enjoyed both of these “series” I decided to see if they had created anything else worth attaining. After seeing this game listed on himeya for less then $55, I decided to see what it was all about. After downloading the game’s intro from the main Giga Baldr Force page http://www.web-giga.com/baldrforce/bf_top.htm I simply had to own this game. The Intro is an amazing mix of fully animated scenes of the Robots you pilot and static CG images of the girls. Also the music is by the same group that did the intro song for Onegai Teacher and the result was that I was simply blown away, the intro was better then most Anime show intros that I have seen. Anways I bought the game.
According to the game’s intro, this is the “4th Installment of the Baldr series.” However as far as I can tell from my pitiful Japanese skills its only connection with the previous games is the combat system.
Game Genre: Baldr Force EXE (simply BF from now on) is a sort of combination/hybrid game that combines traditional adventure style story scenes with real time overhead robot shooting action. The closest thing I have played to BF’s battle system is Capcom’s CannonSpike for arcade and Dreamcast. Basically you run around the various levels from a top-down view and shoot everything that shoots you. However BF is much more involed then Capcom’s effort. You have three attack buttons and a “short-dash” button to use. Each of the three attack buttons will preform 4 seperate attacks each depending on how far you are from the enemy and if you are walking or dashing (double-tap a direction). The “short-dash” button will make you instantly dash a few paces foreward toward your enemy and is great if you want to move in for the close range attacks. You also can preform a “crush” move (Super Attack) by hitting all three attack buttons togeather once your “crush-meter” is filled by using normal attacks. So in total you will be equiped with 13 total attacks in every mission. The great thing is that you choose each and every attack and can customize your robot to however you want to play before the start of each battle. When you first start a new game you will have a very limited amount of attacks to choose from (15 normal and only 1 crush if I remeber correctly) but you will quickly gain more. Normal attacks become available in a logical sequence. For example, use the double uzis enough and the gattling gun will become available. However when you first get a new option you have to “build it” and you will not be able to equip it untill the next battle. Also what attacks you get are connected to the path that you take through the story. Also each and every weapon has its own experience level! Weapons start at level 1 at max out at level 3. Experience is gained by simply using a weapon regardless if you connect or not, however it takes a lot of usage to make a weapon go up a level. New “crush” attacks can only be gained by beating certain boss characters and winning duels against your teamates. In total there are about 50 normal attacks and 20 crush attacks.
As I mentioned before combat is similar to CannonSpike, with one major difference, the use of a “heat” bar. Basically every attack you use generates a certain amount of heat (the more powerful an attack is the more heat it generates). However this is not like say, the heat bar in Mechwarrior where you want to slowly fire weapons and keep from overheating. In BF the heat bar serves more as a combo limiter. You basically want to preform as many attacks as you can untill the bar fills up and then you can do nothing but move for about a second until the bar empties. The key to winning battles is combo, combo, combo. Manage your weapons properly and you can do an insane amount of damage. (My record is 236 hits equaling 296 damage, which is an instant kill on some enemies) Also as weapons gain levels they generate less heat so you can use more of them in sequence and they spit out more bullets so they do more damage as well. Sound confusing? Well thankfully before every battle you can enter practice mode where you can equip your weapons and come up with some good combo chains. You can even save up to ten different weapon sets per game so you don’t have to redo your changes manually everytime you want to switch. The battles are very fast paced and are all “kill all enemies” scenarios. You will automatically lock on to the nearest enemy and then you can dash around them in circles. You will keep the lock until you stop firing at your current target. Sometimes you will have a computer controlled teamate or two to help you out. Thankfully there is no friendly fire (although you can unlock an option to enable it) because battles get realy hectic. Also the AI of both your buddies and your enemies is very, very good and your buddies won’t run off and get wasted (If they die its game over). Anyways the battles are an absolute blast to play and never get boring and are reson enough to play this game. However I do recommend you get a good gamepad for this one since 8-way directional double-tapping on a keyboard is sluggish at best (BF supports any USB compatible gamepad device).
Story: As good as the battles are, most of the game takes place in story mode. Story mode is your typical first-person adventure story game that has been used in who knows how many games before. Story mode in BF is friggen HUGE. BF starts off with a prologue section where you are part of an independant “hacker gang,” named Steppin Wolf (yeah you read that right). It gets mistaken for terrorists. Before I go any farther, in BF all of the battles take place in cyberspace, however everything that happens in cyberspace affects the real world (yeah its another Matrix rip-off… but its a good one). Anyway depending on your battle preformance during the prologue, you will enter into one of two main story divisions. If you are a good pilot, you will be forced to join the military and fight the terrorists. If you suck, you will join the terrorists in an effort to extract your revenge (Why do you want revenge? Play the game, I’m NOT giving it away). Once your main path has been chosen your early choices will get you on a specific path with one girl. Your choices will then determine what sex scenes you get and your final ending. I think there are 16 possible endings total but there may be even more. Your first time through the game is limited and most of the “true” endings will not be available your first run through. In fact some girls will not even appear untill you have seen the rest of them. Although some events will happen across several paths, thankfully none of them are even close to being “copies with different sex scenes.” Each story is intersting and they all have some very surprising plot twists that will shock you to the end. Of course some paths are better written then others, but its still worth seeing all of them.
With so much game to experience, BF may seem a little too complicated to play for a non-Japanese speaker, however this is not the case thanks to the best interface I have ever seen in this type of game. Besides the typical “right-click for the menu” that most of these games employ, if you move your mouse to the right edge of the screen, you will get a nifty little pop-up menu with helpful icons indicating what each one does. Click the bottom one and it will extend to the full menu which is in English! Also the game has a nifty flow chart which shows each and every chapter of each path that you have experienced. It doesn’t tell you how to get the other scenarios, but you will always know where you are headed and it is obvious when you have missed something. You are given a whoping 100 save game files, so you could have one for each and every scene and battle sequence if you so desire. Thankfully, from the main menu you can view both the CG’s and rewatch the scenes that you have whitnessed.
Also this game has a multide of options and prefrences. For example every character has their own font color. This is great if you are not to good at distinguishing Japanese voices from each other since you will always be able to tell who is talking whithout having to remember what each name is in Kanji. In fact you can customize every color to your liking. (I made it so each girl’s voice is the same color as her hair 
). When replaying the game, you can skip the scenes you have already seen. Also when you finish the game you will be asked to make a save. When you load this file you will start at the beginning with all of the attacks and experience levels that you had when completed so eventually you will be able to earn and master every attack and crush move in the game.
Characters: The characters are all very well drawn and the girls are pleasing to look at. As for the “variety,” all your the old favorites are here from the cute “teacher-type” w/ glasses to the stuck-up bitch and of course the lone lolita girl. Anyways all the characters are portrayed well and in the end I liked all of the people you are “supposed” to like and I realy hated the evil bastards that stood in my way. This is notable since I only understood about 1/30th of the dialog.
Graphics: As mentioned above the characters look as good as you could want them to and the backgrounds that make up the world of BF are varied and interesting to look at. The battle sequences are completely 2D with rendered robot sprites running across flat levels filled with objects that you can dodge behind etc. The battle graphics remind me a lot of how Starcraft looked, only with much better mecha designs. The only problem I have with the battle graphics is that the resolution is locked in 640x480. Normally this isn’t a problem, but when you preform a “crush” move the screen will zoom in so you can get a close look, which causes the sprites to become horribly pixelated, but they are still entertaining to preform and watch. The sprite animations are nothing special but they get the job done and I’m not complaining.
Sound/Voice: BF being a DVD game is fully voiced except for two characters, one being the nameless narrator who fills in the gaps, and the other of course is you, which is annoying since you do say quite a bit throughout your adventure. As for everyone else, each and every character is voiced very well and there are no annoying high-pitched sequeels that many B-games are notorious for having. As for the music, the vocal tracks were done by the Onegai Teacher group (Sorry I don’t remember the name) and are very nice to listiegn to. The rest of the music is very typical and consists of music for “danger, love, sex, mystery, sadness, joy, etc.” Nothing is especially outstanding but the tracks accomplished what they were supposed to and I enjoyed them. The battle sound effects aren’t perfect but are quite close. The shotgun sounds like a shotgun, the sound of gattling gun bullets ripping into metal sounds like it should, and there are no problems here.
Overall Baldr Force EXE (DVD) is a very enjoyable game, it was worth the money I dished out on it just for the battle system alone. However there are some problems, besides the pixelation issues mentioned above and the lack of a voice for the main character some mission variety is badly needed. Every battle is “kill everything that moves and isn’t a friendly.” It would have been nice to have something else such as an escort mission or two. Also this game should have had a multiplayer mode. Even just a 2-player on one computer VS. mode would have been a very nice addition, and I was suprised that it lacked this since the battles are so much fun. On the plus side, you can unlock a survival mode so if you just want to shoot computer controlled robots and bypass the story you can. When all is said and done Baldr Force EXE (DVD) is a solid B-game title and excellent work by Giga. If you are a fan of shooters, ADV games, or just want to get away from the typical point-and-click stuff that is so common give this one a try. Hopefully someone will pick this one up some day since I would absolutely love to play it in English.
Highly Recommended
9 out of 10