Regdren

It's not going to take long to figure out some of the drawbacks of Ring of Red. I love a lot of the ideas, but let's face facts: as I mentioned before, missions can drag quite a lot. There is in-mission saving; Ring of Red uses a quicksave method which deletes the quicksave upon loading it. While this is a tried and true tactics staple, I can easily see someone becoming frustrated after losing two hours into a mission.

I haven't really talked much about green squads so I'll do it here. They are secret squads that depend on you doing less straightforward things in a map. Sometimes it's capturing an objective instead of wiping out a whole map, sometimes it's triggering conversations between characters, sometimes it's defeating an enemy with a specific character. The game doesn't say what you need to do to get these squads which annoys me a fair bit. One thing that green squads all have in common is that they bend the rules of the squad type. They have strange strengths and weaknesses. Such as Kurita squad. It's a shooter squad with no ground skills that's god-awful at loading your AFW, a skill which shooters usually handle well. However, they carry a crazy number of special long range shells with them. I love that sort of thing so you should expect me to use those kinds of squads a lot in my playthrough. I'll try to make note of them whenever I can.

Looking back on it, mission 3 was fairly complex in its design and an odd choice for the first "real" map of the game. 3 and 4 could have easily be switched for a smoother progression in difficulty. I will give map 3 credit though, it clearly and sternly showed some of the problems in my sloppy squad setup. I'd like to think that my formation in stage 4 is a fair deal better. You be the judge.

These videos have proven time-consuming to make due to the editing involved. Doing live voice commentary is much, much faster to put together and upload, but I have some things in mind for the future that don't really lend themselves well to that style. Plus I don't think I'd be able to talk steadily through a game like this and keep my comments interesting.

Today we'll see what a decent anti-solider setup can do. Kinsato's machine is great for this but with the right squads any machine can fill that role. I'll try to assign the right squads in the next map. We also have night battles! Surprisingly, night battles can easily work in the player's favor. Many enemies don't have illumination shots to counter the night time accuracy penalty, so if you plan well you can easily get a big advantage in damage.

Augestein, that was pretty much my reaction too when I found out about Ring of Red. What impressed me the most was that it was a game about mecha where infantry plays a vital role rather than being essentially decoration. The setting and various game mechanics seem pretty creative too. A down side is that battles can drag on a bit and watching the troop skills play over and over can get repetitive. That's why I speed them up in my videos.

I'm planning to link a video every couple of days. I need to edit things a fair bit to make things run smoothly but I think it's worth the effort.

Alright, in missions 1 and 2 we had access to about half of the gameplay. Here we get the other half: soldiers! That's right, Ring of Red is about supporting your heavy (and light) war machines with people on the ground. It's the only mecha game I've seen that takes this sort of thing seriously and I think it adds a lot to the overall atmosphere. Your hotshot pilots alone are not going to win this one!

Mission 3 is the first place in the game where all of the basic mechanics are in place. We have soldiers as well as all of the main AFW types. This is where the player is supposed to learn how squads work and make some mistakes before the enemy starts to bring really nasty things to the field. And mission accomplished, I guess. At the time of recording I hadn't played the game in quite a while. If Dean Takeshi is correct about unskilled gameplay being authentic, my play in mission 3 is about as authentic as the game can be without a Game Over. Still, I'd like to think that I learned my lesson.

In that case I'll do my best. I've started the thread, hopefully it's something that people will enjoy. And thanks for the nice welcome!

Ring of Red is a tactics game released for the PS2 in 2000 for in Japan and 2001 abroad. It has an alternate history setting that has Japan's creative process all over it. Why else would there be giant walking war machines in World War 2? But mecha aside, the ideas are very interesting to me and have a certain feel of truth and plausibility to them. It's about Japan as a divided country and all the problems that come with it. Remember East and West Germany? In Ring of Red, Japan never surrendered in WW2 so it was invaded and split in a very similar way. We have North Japan and South Japan and you'd better believe that things are messy. It's the 1960s and everything is bad, which makes it a perfect setting for a war game. Let's take a look.

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated.

Whew, when insane difficulty disappeared I thought I'd never find the fallback website. Hi all, I was first brought here by Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3 but since then have played around with lots of other fun mods around here. Tactics games are my thing to be sure, though I'd be happy to talk about other kinds as well.

Also I'd like to start an LP about Ring of Red (PS2 tactics game) on the Let's Play subforum. Would it be okay for me to start a thread there even though I just signed up? Thanks in advance for your answers.

For a series with difficulty curve problems, I'd like to bring up the Fire Emblem series. This is mostly about the standard difficulty settings. I find that the games tend to be challenging towards the beginning and then slope downwards steadily until they are absurdly easy. My best guess is that the developers want it to be beatable regardless of how well or how badly you did in early maps. This means that if you were diligent about collecting optional treasures and leveling a strong core party, you will easily overpower the later parts of the game. It's a shame, because in early maps the devs have a very good idea of how strong you will be and can design the maps with tight control over what you can and can't get away with.