Rin Sayara Linalusa Sayara

Rin Sayara Linalusa Sayara

I see you staring at the cruel sky

Crying into your hands

A single petal touches you

And the wind wipes away your tears

I’ll always be alive

In the things that you’ll see

If the world were to end

I’ll become a flower you can touch

I’ll see your innocent smile and laugh

I’ll turn this awful day into a memory

The sound of the wind you hear

Has been blowing

Forever.

If the world were to end

I’ll turn into the wind and be everywhere.

 Rinsayala Linalusa Sayala

You will see me again.

I’ll always be alive

In the things that you see

If the world were to end

I’ll become flower you can touch

The things that you see

Will shine with our memories

If the world were to end

I’ll walk towards my future

—Fuga, Flowers on the Trail. 

 

It came from beyond what we know to be

Ours

It came to laugh at our unknowing lives.

But I can’t understand that truth.

I refuse to understand that truth

So I cover my ears.

Where in my thin, frail body

Can I find the strength to fight?

UNINSTALL

UNINSTALL

It told me that our world

Is just one of countless specks of dust

But I refuse to understand that truth

UNINSTALL

UNINSTALL

I have no choice but to pretend to be brave

For a soldier can’t be afraid

UNINSTALL

The truth grows sharper in my mind

Even as I try not to think about it.

But when I open my eyes

And gaze at the nightmare beneath it all

I feel absolutely nothing in my heart

But a desire to kill everything before me

Because I cannot even choose when I’m going to die.

UNINSTALL

UNINSTALL

If no one can take my place

Then I’ll have no choice but to take my life and–

UNINSTALL

UNINSTALL

The pain makes me want to end it all 

With my bare hands

Is it such a sin to want to– 

UNINSTALL

It told me that our world

Is just one of countless specks of dust

But I refuse to understand that truth

UNINSTALL

UNINSTALL

I have no choice but to pretend to be brave

For a soldier can’t be afraid

UNINSTALL

—Bokurano. Uninstall

I did the translation, because I couldn’t find an English translation of Flowers on the Trail and I didn’t like the translations of Uninstall, too clunky and literal. Hope I did a good job. You think I could hire a sad Japanese choir to sing the soundtrack for the match?

Otto, What Even Is The–

War machines powered by children. As in the kids kill themselves to make them work.

Otto, This Is Pretty Damn Weird…

Oh, you don’t know the half of it.

Zearth

Bokurano starts out similar to other mecha shows. A group of children playing at the beach find a cave with a weird scientist man inside. Weird scientist man says he’s working on a VR game where you pilot a 500 meter tall robot against alien invaders. He asks the kids if they want to try it out. They say yes and surprise, it’s not a game! They actually do have to pilot a giant robot against alien invaders.

Then it gets worse. It gets worse to a comedic, Kafkaesque level.

You thought the game being real was the twist? Oh no no no.

It gets worse.

It turns out the robot, which the kids name Zearth (as in “The Earth,” what they’re fighting to protect. It also doubles as a reference to uber-obscure pre-Mazinger Z mecha manga The Moon. The Earth, The Moon) runs on the life force of the pilot. One kid gets randomly picked to pilot Zearth against each enemy and then at the end of the fight the kid dies in minutes, if not seconds.

It gets worse.

The “alien mechs” are actually piloted by other groups of kids. The Zearth kids are told to destroy the “core” of each enemy. This core is actually the cockpit of the enemy mech. Each time they destroy the core, they’re splattering a group of kids just like them.

It gets worse.

The enemy robot kids are from alternate Earths. And when they lose, their Earth gets destroyed.

It gets worse.

Not only do the enemy robot kids lose their lives and their Earths, but their entire universe gets deleted. The stars literally go out.

I think the writer was dealing with some deep seated WW2 baby issues. It’s either that or someone told him they liked the first twist and he decided to keep introducing depressing twists until they got silly.

Let me give you a little more context, because what I’ve just written is probably a lot to take in.

Okay, get this. The Bokurano multiverse needs pruning. There are too many universes, and if they keep spawning out of control, the whole thing will short out and go kaput. The multiverse has finite energy or something. But the multiverse has elder gods. They are never seen in the manga, but the anime depicts them as some rando people standing in front of an old timey vineyard (I’m serious here) dressed all in white. They look like mafia meets Heaven’s Gate. So these elder gods with their elder god powers decide they got to do something before the multiverse dies. Universes need to go.

So what do you think they decided to do?

A. Move all inhabited planets to one universe.

B. Kill the least populated universes first, that way you keep the death toll down.

C. Get the best and brightest from each universe to argue for why their universe shouldn’t die.

D. Cast lots and quietly delete universes to cause the least amount of suffering.

E. Send random robots to random groups of kids and force them to fight other kids from other universes to the death in a fighting tournament.

Yeah, they picked E, which makes their multiverse killer plan dumber than the Beyonders, and their plan was “Moleculeman go brrrrrr.”

Specifically, they sent giant robots to several nigh-identical version of Earth (Earth seems to be the only inhabitable world in the Bokurano multiverse, as no one even bothers to mention the possibility of aliens, and the kids figure their kill count by the population of several Earths). They did this because what they want to preserve is multiversal diversity, so Earths that are similar to each other have to kill off each other. There’s no point to the elder gods in having an “Earth-like Earth” fight some sort of fantasy world, or a world full of steampunk furries.

How exactly random groups of kids piloting random robots against each other is supposed to decide which universes are more or less diverse, I don’t know. Even from an evil scumbag alien perspective it doesn’t make sense. Why not just measure their diversity, if that’s what’s important? Why giant robots? Why?

The whole thing reads as less “cosmic horror” and more “What if the Zenos from Dragon Ball Super got heavily into the concept of giant robots?”

I suppose the polite way of putting it would be that Bokurano is less concerned with logic than it is with emotion.

But what exactly are the rules of the tournament?

–15 kids from each Earth is granted a random robot and a “dung beetle,” a floating helper bot that answers their questions and teleports them into and out of the cockpit when its match time. The robots are assigned at random, and man, did the Elder gods not balance the fighter selection at all. There’s a mech in this show called Drum. It’s just a giant rolling crusher. No shit it got curbstomped by Zearth, it’s the Dan Hibiki of the tournament. How is this tournament even fair?

–One kid is chosen by the mech each round to fight. They die piloting it, so no piloting twice. Only the chosen pilot can pilot, no substitutions. If the pilot dies before its their turn, another kid can be added to the group. If one of the kids is pregnant (what the fuck even is this show?) then their child counts as part of the roster and dies with the mother. Good thing the roulette didn’t pick the embryo before the mother.

–Some of the fights take place on the “home” Earth, but others see the kids teleported away to fight in an entirely different Earth. Conveniently, they didn’t start jumping to other Earths until like, round 5, so the writer could hold off on revealing dark twist number 4. Why they don’t ‘just teleport both mechs to a neutral plane to fight, I don’t know.

–Fights last up to 48 hours. If there’s not a winner by then, the Elder gods destroy both universes, because they’re just pricks.

–Fights aren’t actually decided by killing the robot, but by killing the pilot. So long as the pilot lives, the fight goes on, even if their mech is shredded.

–Conventional military forces are totally allowed to fight alongside their Earth’s mech.

–The enemy pilot doesn’t have to be killed by the other mech. They can technically be killed by anyone from the other Earth and it’ll still count.

–If your mech survives to the end, congrats! Your Earth is spared by the Elder gods! Of course, there’s no guarantee the Elder gods, in their infinite wisdom and mercy, won’t involve your Earth in a “cause the most pain and suffering to the enemy planet to win” tournament next time.

According to my feeble English teacher brain, 120 universes got toe tagged in Zearth’s tournament, which may or may not be the entire Elder god game (in the anime, Zearth falls apart after its last fight implying that the game is over, but in the manga, Zearth goes to another Earth, implying that, much like in Saw, THE GAME IS NEVER OVER). That adds up to about 960 billion human deaths, which is only about 8 human hive worlds in Warhammer 40k, meaning that 40k is still the grimdark winner.

Goddamn, you can kill 120 universes and still not kill as many humans as 40k…

I’m going to be real with you, just from a plot perspective Bokurano is pretty ass. I know that’s going to piss some people off, but its true. I can hear the otaku now.

The elder race doesn’t need a reason, you dumb, fat, skinny fuck! It’s pure cosmic horror. Look, crocodile brain, like Otto brain! Don’t watch the anime, UNINSTALL UNINSTALL it, you boring twat! Don’t don’t about stories you don’t like. Do you know lessons of life? Talk about stuff you do like. Twat.

I hear you, otakus, I hear you, but man, you kind of sabotage your own story when the characters you’re supposed to feel for die once an episode with the most interesting kids going first, and you didn’t have to bring in a convoluted multiverse fighting tournament idea to make a story where kids have to make hard war decisions and then die. There are other, less stupid scenarios, and taken as a whole, the show doesn’t actually have the guts to commit to its philosophy. If doing the bidding of the dark gods and killing the others universes’ kids is supposed to be the correct solution, then the pathos around the characters is simply affectation. We’re not feeling for the kids over their opponents because they’re making the morally correct choice or because their pain is unique, we’re feeling for the kids because the camera is forced to follow them. If the writer had guts, he would have made it like that one Aeon Flux episode where the “hero” of the story lasts until they’re killed off, then their killer becomes the “hero.” If the writer had the guts, he would have had the kids lose, and then followed their killers as if nothing changed, then follower their killers, and their killers, and so on and so on. That way, the whole game would be revealed to be what it actually is when dramatized affection is removed–not a war, not a problem, but cosmic slaughter committed by faceless entities that use children as their hatchetmen.

There have been other stories with the “Aliens are forcing us to fight each other gladiator style or they’ll nuke both our worlds” setup. Hickman’s Avengers did that with the Incursions (and actually sucked more than Bokurano, if we’re being honest). And better versions of Bokurano were done before it was even an idea. If you want a better version of the story that gives the deontological answer to the question (Screw you aliens, we’re not going to pretend you guys aren’t the responsible ones here. Kill us all if you want, but we won’t be your proxies to absolve you of moral guilt), Star Trek’s Arena is better than Bokurano. If you want a better version of the story that gives the utilitarian answer to the question (It sucks, but we’ve got to kill the other side because we want to live), Outer Limits’ Fun and Games is better than Bokurano because it features a more fully realized character arc.

But with that all said, I still have to recommend Bokurano, slightly. It’s just so damned weird. It may not be good, but it’s interesting.

Weird Robot Rules

You know, a lot can be said about how mannered and contrived Bokurano’s plot is, but the robot is pretty damn cool. It’s just so weird and artificial looking, like some sort of postmodern art statue. And there’s a lot to talk about Zearth before even getting into the weapons and armor.

First of all, the pilot is critical for Zearth’s functioning. That’s because Zearth runs on the pilot’s life energy. It can’t so much as move unless the pilot is being vampirized. Presumably, the 48 hour battle rule is because after 48 hours the pilots of both mechs start to die. Because yeah, you only get to pilot Zearth once and only once. Pilots typically kill over within minutes of getting out of Zearth.

That begs the question of who exactly gets to be used for this match up. The fairest answer would have to be the last kid, Jun. While he doesn’t have any experience piloting Zearth (by its very nature, no pilot CAN have experience piloting Zearth), he’s seen 14 other fights, which makes him the closest Zearth has to a “veteran” pilot. Plus, he was the one Super Robot Wars used as the pilot.

Oh yeah, Bokurano was in Super Robot Wars. Everyone got in the crappy mobile game.

It was wild. The cast of Ideon and Char’s Counterattack find themselves on the kids’ Earth and the elder gods pause the games. You might think that Ideon uses its space magic to fix things so that Jun can pilot Zearth without dying and to put an end to the games, but you’d be wrong–it’s Amuro’s psychoframe that does that.

Yes. Newtype ghosts fixed the Bokurano multiverse.

NOOOO YOU HAVE TO HAVE MULTIVERSAL GLADIATOR FIGHTS BECAUSE…BECAUSE YOU JUST HAVE TO, OKAY?

Bokurano’s soul is weighed down by gravity.

But lets return to the lamer, more depressing timeline without Tomino space magic.

Zearth’s cockpit is essentially a giant version of the Nu Gundam’s…oh never mind, I guess there is some Tomino space magic here. It’s a big sphere that Dung Beetle teleports the kids into and out of. Through unknown means, it grants a 360 degree view of the battlefield. It also has its own gravity, so if Zearth is knocked over the kids remain upright.

Zearth is controlled telepathically. The pilot thinks of what he and she wants Zearth to do and it does it. No control panel needed. The cockpit also produces individualized chairs for each kid to sit in. Each chair has some personal meaning to each kid and they’re mostly used for wide shots where most of the chairs are empty to show the cost of the game.

Oh, who is the writer kidding? They’re Japanese kids. They’re all going to think of a school chair. They’ll turn the cockpit into a classroom.

You know I’m right.

Dung Beetle, the creepy little support robot (who contains the soul of a surviving pilot from another universe) that comes with Zearth has vast teleportation powers, but these powers are limited by the rules of the game. He can teleport Zearth to any point on the planet and even to other universes for “away games,” but while a fight is in progress he’s not allowed to teleport Zearth or the pilot (unless the cockpit is opened first by an enemy robot). He is allowed to teleport in little trinkets, mostly food and water.

In theory, Dung Beetle is a source of tactical knowledge for the kids given that he’s been through all this before, but in practice he’s an unhelpful dick. Think that cat from Madoka Magica. He doesn’t really give a damn about the kids or the Earth.

Zearth fully recovers all damage between fights, but it does not regenerate during a fight.

Between fights, Zearth’s plates cannot be breached. And that sounds weird, I know, so let me give some context. Japanese engineers tried to take samples from Zearth’s plates to find out what the hell it was made out of. They couldn’t cut it. They were telepathically prevented.

One last weird Zearth fact before we get to the crunch and bang of the robot–pilots can see souls.

Yeah.

They just can.

Ah, human souls are radiant because they can’t be duplicated. That’s such a touching detail for a setting where universes are pruned for being too similar.

Detachable Armor

Every robot in the twisted multiverse gladiator tournament has a gimmick, some better than others. (How the hell were the kids that got Drum, who is just a giant rolling drum, supposed to win? If you’re just going to lottery the universes, why make it a traumatic robot tournament?)

Zearth’s gimmick is a variation on the most common super robot power: the ROCKETO PUNCHEEEEE.

I other words, Zearth can detach parts of itself. That might not sound too useful, but read on…

Zearth’s plates are nuke proof. In the anime, they explicitly resisted a 3 megaton nuke and fought inside the fireball. Bokurano may be a sap fest but it’s got some metal scenes. When fighting the robot Javelin, who could snipe with missiles from across the planet, Zearth tore off and rearranged its plates to better endure the impacts. Though Javelin was able to destroy the plates with each impact (Javelin’s missiles go from orbit to target in 8 minutes, so they were hitting with considerable force)

Zearth was able to repeat this shield tactic, again and again, chewing through its armor to stay standing. Over 30 hours, it took 72 of Javelin’s missiles, and while it ended up looking like Swiss cheese, it was still functional, and was able to pull off the strongest attack in the series–the “aloha,” but more on that later.

The Javelin fight is, by the way, the best fight in the series. If you want to check out just 1 fight from the manga, check it out.

Zearth may look humanoid, but this is only because the kids find it intuitive to pilot Zearth as it is. It really has no definitive form, and it’s implied that its creators may not have intended for it to walk on its super-slender legs given how well it does in “crab mode” which it achieves by reconfiguring the arrangement of its plates.

Zearth can detach it’s giant scarab beetle looking arms and assume a “boxer mode,” and you may wonder why it wants to do this, but if an enemy gets inside Zearth’s guard, the long reach of its arms suddenly becomes a disadvantage. A spearman will typically beat a swordsman, but if the swordsman is inside the spearman’s guard, the swordsman has the advantage.

Zearth can also detach its entire spine and throw it. It’s usefulness is circumstantial, to be sure (especially since it exposes the cockpit), but it can do it.

In theory, Zearth can increase it’s running speed by dropping some of its armor, but it’s pretty fast without it. It can do 1000 kilometers an hour on land, though only 100 by sea, likely because it’s huge side creates a lot of drag in the water.

But Zearth’s best application of its gimmick is in something you might not realize is actually part of the gimmick…

“Lasers”

Though the kids call the white Ideon-esque beams Zearth shoots “lasers,” they’re actually nothing of the sort. They’re kinetic weapons, actually little bits of Zearth itself fired off at great speed. You can see this most clearly in the anime OP.

And believe it or not, Zearth’s beams are sub-sonic. They don’t break the sound barrier when fired, so they travel through the air without a sound until they fit something. Spooky!

Specifically, Zearth’s lasers can travel at a max speed of 1000 kilometers an hour, making them 0.8 the speed of sound. That’s actually kind of slow for a projectile. But of course, if you can’t be fast, you can still be strong, and Zearth’s lasers are strong.

Typically, Zearth’s beams aren’t fired at full power, but even at a standard level of power a barrage is capable of blowing chunks out of a small mountain.

But at full power, and with the pilot giving his all (remember, Zearth gets stronger off the willpower of the pilot), Zearth’s barrage is capable of much more. How much more? Zearth is the only character I know of with a “crust skimming” feat.

Okay, some context. The kid of the day is up against the enemy of the day, a mech named Javelin who is, essentially, a gigantic cannon. Javelin has parked itself in Hawaii. Zearth is in Japan. There’s about 6,475 kilometers between the two, a distance so great the Earth’s curvature comes into play. When Zearth finally gets a precise lock on Javelin (by a military relative of the kid sacrificing himself to be used as a target via soul vision), the kid unleashes a max power blast that hits Javelin through the Earth.

It’s not that Zearth’s barrage went through the entire Earth, but it “skimmed” the crust. Pick up a globe and look at Japan and Hawaii and you’ll get what I mean.

And a small caveat here–this was the result of continuous fire. It’s not a single barrage but more like digging with a continual series of barrages.

So this “Hawaii Barrage” attack, or as I like to call it, the “Aloha,” is what Zearth can do at max power in terms of damage. Well, in terms of single target damage. Because now we got to talk about the genocide fire mode.

Yes, the genocide fire mode.

(Goddamn, what even is this story?)

Eh, Ideon did the “fire missiles from every surface” move better.

You see, Zearth needed a target for Javelin because otherwise he would have been firing relatively blind and that could result in casualties and that would be bad.

You see where this going?

Okay, some context.

Last fight of the series and the kid wants to see the pilot he has to kill before killing him, you know, to be respectful. Big mistake. The dung beetles can’t teleport out pilots during a fight…unless the cockpit gets opened. Then they can. So the enemy pilot takes the opportunity to peace out to parts unknown.

Remember, fights don’t end with the destruction of the robot, they end with the death of the pilot. So the clock is ticking. After 48 hours, the elder gods destroy both universes because they’re pricks. So how do you kill one guy hiding out somewhere in on Counter-Earth?

You just kill everyone. I mean, why not? They were going to die anyway.

And that’s exactly what the kid does.

60,000 people per second.

You know, maybe the enemy pilot had the right idea to pull the Kirk vs Gorn solution and tell the elder gods to do their own killing. I mean, I give only a 50% chance based on their insane logic of them appearing and going YOU HAVE DEMONSTRATED A CAPACITY FOR MERCY AND VIRTUE AND THINKING BEYOND THE SURVIVAL OF YOUR OWN RACE AND THUS HAVE ENSURED YOUR SURVIVAL, but on the coin flip chance they do just dumpster both universes, is that not still the correct solution? The elder gods are insane, what’s your guarantee they aren’t going to make a second tournament even worse than Super Robot Wars: D? (The D is for depression). Next tournament has good odds for being “which universe can inflict the most pain on the other universe” and you bet your ass in that case the survivors will envy the dead. At some point you got to swallow the deontology pill.

But uh, yeah. Zearth can depopulate Earth in 40 hours by entering a state of constant firing. The caveat here is that once Zearth enters this state, there’s no going back, its locked in, and that close targets are prioritized over distant targets. It starts with the city around it and then spreads out.

By the way, the enemy dude must have been hiding in like Antarctica or something because the poor kid had to use up most of those 40 hours trying to find him.

…You know something? Super Buu did this thing first and he only needed 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

2,400 minutes vs 2 minutes, 20 seconds. Zearth is slow with the genocide. Genocide? Genoslow!

Exo-Tarranis

Okay.

There’s a lot to cover here a lot of deepest lore and weird twists.

Let’s start with a real-world perspective.

The year is 1998. CyberConnect, the .hack people, release a game that can be best described as Mega Man Legends but even more twee and comfy. You have ancient technology, islands, comedic relief sky pirates whose face character has a crush on the hero, funny pint-sized minions that run around causing mischief, but Mega Man Legends has robot people and Tail Concerto has furries.

Tail Concerto was a fun little game, even as derivative as it is. The characters are fun and highly expressive, the Black Cats Gang has even less teeth than the Bonnes, and the whole thing is just overall very non-confrontational and very low-stress. It’s Mega Man Legends but it doesn’t want to kick your teeth in, either in gameplay or in story. There’s only one real bad guy in the story and he gets crushed by the ancient mecha he tries to control.

The hero is a little cop dog named Waffle Ryebread.

Waffle Ryebread. That’s so adorable!

And he’s got a little mecha like Tron Bonne, but his doesn’t shoot bullets, it shoots bubbles. Bubbles!

Tail Concerto is cute. It’s fun. You should play it.

But, unfortunately, we live in the kali yuga, and Tail Concerto, like Mega Man Legends, went bust-o. But hey, at least Tail Concerto was able to tell a complete story without creating a cliffhanger that’ll never be resolved…

Flash forward to 2010. The people that worked on Tail Concerto create Solatorobo, a story in the same setting as Tail Concerto, and even featuring cameos from Tail Concerto characters. The plot is a little darker, the gameplay a little more action oriented. Instead of playing as super-sweet good boy Waffle Ryebread you play as cocky Han Solo-esque merc Red Savarin. It’s still got that Tail Concerto charm, but the story has a little more grit this time. The bad guys are more bad than the Black Cats Gang, but most of them get redeemed by the end.

But, unfortunately, Solatorobo was another flop. I guess steampunk and furries just don’t mix well in peoples’ minds. So the series, now known as Little Tail Bronx, went to seed until 2021 when a prequel game called Fuga: Melodies of Steel was released.

And Fuga was…uh…extremely different.

You play as children in a giant tank fighting against dog Nazis, like literal dog Nazis with panzers and blitzkriegs and concentration camps. Your goal is to rescue their captured parents without dying, which is a possibility, because the tank has a superweapon called the soul cannon and it consumes exactly what you think to fire.

It’s a little like if Medabots got a prequel game about the machine/human war.

Talk about escalation…

The Deepest Lore

Let’s back up a little and pry open the deepest lore beneath the bizarre steampunk furry setting.

Because brother, the setting you see in the games ain’t what you think.

Sometime in the near future of an Earth similar to our own, that is to say, an Earth with humans and the United States and Japan and such, mankind discovers Junos buried around the planet, big weirdly shaped supercomputers. 

Ah look, it’s waving! So cute!

It’s waving goodbye, probably…

Who left the Junos? No one knows. Maybe Atlantis built them. Or maybe aliens left them. But the point was that humanity had them, specifically, 53 of them. Just like a deck of playing cards + joker.

It’s a deck. The aliens left a deck of super computers shaped like stick figures.

They even had power levels determined by suites. Each Juno could create titano-machina, super robots, basically, their precise form and function determined by the humans who “wished” for them. Some of them looked humanoid, some like zoids, but they had power levels, but god forbid we get a piece of Japanese media that doesn’t have a power hierarchy. “Ace” Junos could produce only 1 titano-machina, but it was an ultra-powerful titano-machina. The 16 “Arts” or “face cards” could produce two titano-machina, but both were vastly inferior to titano-machina produced by Aces. The “Numbers” or “number cards” could produce titano-machina equal to their pip value, but these were fodder titano-machina and could be brought down by conventional aircraft.

Note the power gap between number made titano-machina and the ones produced by face cards and aces is extremely considerable.

So this is how history goes after Junos are uncovered:

Mankind declares that Junos are “a property of the world” and divide the Junos up among the nations. The Aces end up in the US, Germany, Russia, and…Brazil?

Brazil?

They let Brazil have a Mechagodzilla engine?

What, not Israel? Come on now. You know the US would take two and give one to Israel, that’s totally what would happen.

Australia ends up with the “Joker” Juno, which doesn’t seem to do anything, so people don’t mind them having it, but you know how dramatic irony works…

From the Junos, mankind figures out how to make energy crystals. You know the kind. But this makes the Mid-east pissy because oil prices plummet so they decide to ALLAHU ACKBAR, because really, don’t they always ALLAHU ACKBAR when they get upset? After several terrorist attacks, the US and the EU launch a retaliatory invasion without UN approval and decimate the region with their combined titano-machina army, but don’t worry, it’s not a war crime, because the US politicians say it’s not a war crime, so its all good. Think Obama getting his Nobel peace prize but the drones sending all the brown kids to meet Azrael look much cooler in this timeline.

Ah, in this timeline Americans died for energy crystals instead of Israel…

The Mid-east, which is bizarrely treated like a singular entity when it couldn’t be further from that in real life, pretends to surrender after an army of Mechagodzillas curbstomp it, but they capture a British titano-machina (wait to go, Bongs) and reserve engineer it to up their tech. Then, a year after the war, they slaughter a group of Spanish (?) soldiers and restart the conflict. But plot twist! It comes to light that America was lying about the number of titano-machina she owned and this causes Russia, China, and both Koreas to flip and side with the Mid-east.

Well no shit. America can’t even be honest to her own people about the reasons for wars and elections, why wouldn’t she lie to some Europoors and Asians?

That kicks off World War 3, as every country goes apeshit. It’s global thermonuclear war but the nukes have faces and everyone just wants to get a kick in before they get vaporized off the face of the planet. Here we stand, here we fall, history won’t care at all, we’ll meet again, Thor Arthur 66ZZD, you know the drill.

When the war ends, humanity is wiped out, the surface is gone, and portions of the continents hover above the clouds. Someone’s zoid must have had a gravity weapon equipped.

You know how Little Tail Bronx games take place in a picturesque cloudscape of floating islands where the technology looks vaguely pre-WW2? You know how it looks like a Ghibli film? Well, below those clouds, the crust is gone. It probably looks like Hell down there.

But all is not lost! Remember that “joker” Juno Australia had? Turns out, it came equipped with a “reset” function. Nice for the aliens or Atlanteans or whatever to include a “we fucked up” button in their technology treasure trove. The Australian Juno deactivates the titano-machina, digitizes the last remains of animal and vegetable life, and uses accelerated evolution space magic to create cat and dog people to populate the floating remains of the continents.

Yeah, the Little Trail Bronx setting is like anime Kamandi without the Kamandi.

God, now I’m wondering if Kamandi vs Waffle Ryebread is a viable fight…

Now, during WW3, France and Germany got into conflict, because damn if the Eternal Hun isn’t going down without taking one last swipe at France. The entirety of Franco-German relations is just Frogger, isn’t it?

The odds were against France from the beginning, because Germany had an Ace Juno and used it to make the Death Saurer from Zoids but on roids.

And of course, they had to name it something after Norse mythology. They named it the Vanargand.

If you thought Zearth was big, check out this guy. The Vanargand was sealed beneath the ruins of Paris after WW3, and when France became a floating island, the cat and dog people rebuilt Paris as “Paresia.” When the Vanargand wakes up in the “present,” it carries the entirety of Paresia on its back.

Paris is roughly an oval with an area of about 87,000 square meters. From North to South it is about 10 kilometers and from East to West 11 kilometers. That means you could lay down about 22 Zearths across the Vanargand’s back.

The Vanargand wasn’t just big. It could fire Godzilla beams from his mouth so powerful that, when it was revived in the “present,” it was used to blow “Gascoe” (France) into an archipelago of floating islands. It was made of nanometal which allowed it near-instantly recover from wounds, provided it can even be damaged in the first place. It’s got energy shields, and it’s said that nothing mankind can make can harm a titano-machina Numbers class and up, only another titano-machina.

During WW3, Germany told France to give up its two “Arts” class titano-machina, Lares and Lemures, who both feature in Solatorobo, but France tells Germany to kick rocks, so Germany sics the Vanargand on them.

Sorry, Frogs, Mamma Merkel found your ESG was too low, so you have to die to the love child of the Devil Gundam and Death Saurer!

France deployed Lares and Lemures to defend herself, but they get BTFO because they’re “Arts” titano-machina and not “Ace” titano-machina.

But France had a secret weapon!

It turns out France had a secret society devoted to developing anti-titano-machina weapons and they managed to develop something people thought was impossible–a titano-machina created not by Juno, but by men.

They created the Tarranis.

The Tarranis, which was named after the Celtic god of thunder (that may seem weird at first until you realize that Gauls were basically Celts with 35% more Roman influence), was created out of the same nanometal as the Vanargand, though it’s recovery powers were significantly less. It was given an AI in the form of a blonde woman named Jeanne, after, of course, Jeanne of Arc.

Pffff. You got to be kidding me. No way would modern France name their AI Jeanne, are you crazy? They’d name it Muhammad, and make it in the image of a little brown girl in a hijab.

The Tarranis’ most important feature, the feature it was given specifically to kill Ace level titano-machina like the Vanargand, was the soul cannon. And you can read up on the details of the super-weapon in its own section, but what you need to know now was that the soul cannon was strong enough so that when the Tarranis fought the Vanargand in Paris, one shot from the soul cannon was enough to blow through out its heart and blast it so far away it landed in the Southern Alps.

The Tarranis disabled the Vanargand, but in the process was disabled itself, and the two machines slept buried beneath the soil of France as it was lifted into the air and became known as “Gascoe” to the cat and dog people.

Okay, Now We Get To Fuga’s Story

It seems history likes to repeat itself, because the Berman Empire, which grew out of the floating remains of Germany, went full Nazi, with cat people being the targets of their hatred. You see, cat people, but not dog people, have the potential to use magic in this setting, called nono (yes, that’s what magic is called. Nono). Of course, it’s not straight-forward magic. Nothing is straight forward. You see, when the cat Jews use nono, they actually just interface with nanites that now coat the air of the planet ever since WW3 and reprogram them to do stuff like create earthquakes and giant fireballs.

God, this setting is weird…

But though their superior Jewish mysticism and genetics granted the cat people great power, it also made them an easy target for ethnic cleansing.

Yes, there’s ethnic cleansing in Fuga. Among other things.

Man, the game goes hard at times. There’s a little Hitler youth boy named Britz Strudel, and he’s torn between loyalty to his newfound friends and the threat of his family being shot if he doesn’t turn them over to the Nazis.

The incongruity between everyone being a little animal person with funny food pun names and WW2 gives the game such a weirdo feeling. It’s an acquired taste. You’re either going to really like it or really hate it.

But okay. The Berman Empire isn’t content with curbstomping all cat Jews, they want to invade France (Dear God, humanity is wiped out, and the Eternal Hun still wants to invade France), and because Nazis always have wunderwaffen whenever they show up in fiction, they open up a can of whoop ass with a fleet of dog eared panzers and gyrocopters.

Man…were the Nazis onto something? I mean, totalitarian socialism aside, they keep making superweapons. What’s Imperial Japan got in comparison? Tetsujin 28? Atragon? You can’t hope a universe without the Nazis having a secret fleet of flying saucers or Hitler having a suit of power armor.

The Berman Empire conquers a little village near not-Paris called Petit Mona, home to 11 year old farm dog Malt Marzipan, his adorable little sister Mei, his rival friend Kyle, his childhood friend Hanna, his nerd friend Socks, and Boron, who is by far the most likely to be fed to the soul cannon, because his entire personality is that he’s fat and likes to eat.

He got a little better in the sequel.

The Bermans round up the adults and haul them away to the camps, but the kids sneak away and discover the Tarranis in a cave, and after aeons of sitting around, Jeanne has kind of cracked. It’s like how in Halo if you leave the AI running too long it turns psycho. Jeanne considers her fight with the Vanargand a draw, since she blew its heart out but didn’t destroy it, and she wants to finish the job in the here and now, even if she has to sucker a bunch of kids into being her disposable soldiers to do so by pretending to be a maternal and caring voice on the radio.

Yeah, Fuga is a dark story, man. I mean, it’s not Harlan Ellison, but you don’t expect the comforting voice guiding the kids on the radio to turn out to be a psycho exploiting them for one final stab at glory…though there are tells if you pay attention. See what happens if you sacrifice Mei for a big red flag.

Malt, being slightly older than the rest, becomes the leader, and leads the kids in the Tarranis in a one-tank war against the entire Berman army in an effort to save everyone’s parents. Along the way, thy recruit Chick and Hack, who are basically the Thunderkittens, if the Thunderkittens were Thunderpuppies, and were war orphans, Jin, a little mechanic boy who wants to avenge his father who was killed by the Nazi dogs for not turning over his factory to them (socialists don’t like it when people that don’t share their fashion sense own the means of production), Sheena, a little Jewess cat whose parents were sent to the camps for being magic cat Jews, Wappa, Pippi Longstocking but a dog and a war orphan (quite a few of the kids are along more for vengence than to save their parents), and Britz, the Hitler youth I mentioned earlier.

The story in Fuga is actually pretty darn engaging…early on. The story loses a lot of momentum after you rescue the parents. Then things start to get really anime. The Bermans wheel out their own Tarranis called the Tarasque and dog Hitler revives the Vanargand and splits Gascoe into a bunch of islands and there’s a lot of beam clashing and friendship powerups and the late game just doesn’t have the feel of the early game. I think the game would have been better if they grounded it a little more and just made the whole thing about the kids using a pre-apocalypse tank to rescue their parents from the dog Nazis. The Vanargand does a lot for the kids’ power level, but it does nothing for their story.

But in the end, the kids put down the Vanargand, kill dog Hitler, and go home to their parents, because the golden ending where everyone survived and you didn’t sacrifice anyone to the soul cannon is the canon ending. Hurray!

…But in a first for the Little Tail Bronx series, Fuga seems to have done pretty well, because we got a Fuga 2 early this year and what’s more, there’s going to be a Fuga 3.

I was hoping for Fuga 2 be a 5 years later deal where the older kids are dealing with being teenagers, but no, it happens literally a year after the first game. And to make a review short, the gameplay is sharper, but the story is worse. It’s gotten even more anime with Nazi bosses from the first game turning into comedy relief, sort of like how Yazan in Zeta Gundam was a psychopathic soldier best known for screaming I WILL VIOLATE YOU to Kamille but in ZZ Gundam was a funny slapstick man, even more friendship powerup moments, a final boss who comes out of nowhere, and a convoluted plot that involves Hanna being digitized and the Tarranis getting an upgrade through friendship magic and a pre-apocalypse cyborg boy trying to power up his own pre-apocalypse tank so he can revive the dead, because that’s something the tanks can do now, they can revive the dead.

It’s just so nonsense. I can tolerate nonsense, I mean the very premise of Fuga is Richard Scarry presents Schindler’s List, but you got to temper the nonsense.

Worst part of 2’s story is that the enemies are all drones now. In the first game, there were people inside the tanks you blew up. You were playing child soldiers. Mei could have a killcount at age 3. But in 2, they’re all stupid drones called geists, and the kids end up killing a total of 1 bad guy at the very end. And it hurts the potential development of drama. There’s this new character Vanilla, who’s dad gets killed by the geists, and other characters are worried about her getting carried away in her vengeance, and that would be really meaningful if you know, they weren’t fighting robots but people.

I do recommend Fuga, and other Little Tail Bronx games, but uh, play Fuga 1 before Fuga 2. Playing 2 before 1 is just going to make the games feel wrong.

 

Standard Weapons

The Exo-Tarranis is made out of nanometal, similar to the stuff that gives the Vanargand has but vastly weaker. While the Exo-Tarranis is capable of healing itself, it can only do so in the middle of a battel through skills or by consuming repair kit items. Otherwise, it heals very slowly, though very comprehensively. The Tarascus was able to recover from scrap to fully functional in the span of a year on its own. The Exo-Tarranis’ engines function as its mp gauge, and while it can do standard things with its engines at 0 like move, fire, teleport people into the soul cannon to be sacrificed, skills are locked out. The engines recharge either by consuming batteries, Sheena’s support skill which represents her charging the engines with her nono, or by one of Malt’s judgement skills which charges the engines by giving the kids a pep talk. Because the Exo-Tarranis can convert emotions into power.

That’s a thing it can do.

The Exo-Tarranis, as with…pretty much every single Japanese super mecha ever, gets more powerful in tandem with the willpower of its operators, and when the kids get really worked up, golden lights start appearing everywhere and miracles happen.

The Exo-Tarranis is armed with three shapeshifting guns that match the combat style of whichever kid happens to be operating it at the time transforming from large cannon, to grenade launcher to machine gun. This presumably works through the same “powered by your thoughts and emotions” thing. Standard fire for all weapons appears to be kinetic, but special fire modes come in the form of energy blasts.

Skills are performed by the kids tapping into the Ex-Tarranis’ engines to perform various functions. In Sheena’s case, she combines the power of the engines with magic to straight-up cast magic spells. Though they aren’t actually magic, remember, the nono is just cat people using their superior Jewish genes that dog goys just don’t have to interface with nanites in the atmosphere and reprogram them.

Though the power of friendship and emotions, the kids are able to use two kinds of powers that completely bypass engines, they just pull extra power from out nothing miraculously. When the kids are in sync with each other and max out a “link gauge” (guns are operated by two kids, one who operates and one who supports), they’re able to fire a link attack, which takes the form of a big burst of energy bullets that hits all enemies and does a little extra effect depending on who is involved in the link. Kids also have a mood gauge, and when the mood gauge is maxed out, the kid enters “hero mode” and temporarily gains an extra ability.

This is all very technical sounding, but what does it all mean, really? How much boom can the Tarranis bring?

Well, it’s standard guns were able to destroy parts of the Vanargand during the final boss fight of the second game, but with three caveats: 1, it took a considerable concentration of fire. 2, it was the second time the Vanargand was revived and it wasn’t being powered by it’s heart but an alternate power source so it was weakened. And 3, the Vanargand instantly recovered and undid the damage.

Still I would say that the Tarranis’ guns are capable of making a…nuke-ish boom? Small nuke level boom? Davy Crocket boom? More if you take the cumulative effect of their bottomless magazines of ammo into account, but I wouldn’t say the guns could blow up a mountain.

Unless you’re talking about the gun, in which case it can blow up way more than a mountain.

The Soul Cannon

The big gun. That giant folded tower attached to the back of the tank? That’s the soul cannon.

How much energy is contained within a 12 year old’s soul? Quite a lot, apparently. In game, the soul cannon destroys anything in one shot. It doesn’t matter how many enemies are in front of the Exo-Tarranis. It doesn’t matter how strong they are. It doesn’t matter if they’re bosses. One shot, they die. In terms of lore, the soul cannon was the whole reason the Tarranis was created. It was the Tarranis’ silver bullet against the regenerating super werewolf that is the Vanargand. One shot of the soul cannon punched through the Vanargand’s regenerating nanometal plates, hit its heart, pulled the heart out through its protective energy shields, punched through the back nanometal plates, and buried the heart in the alps where it would be excavated a bazillion years later by dog Nazis who put it inside the Tarascu. It fought the Vanargand in Paris, meaning it shot it’s heart a distance of about 622 kilometers. The Vanargand was hit so damn hard that even though it’s capable of instantly healing itself Devil Gundam style, it couldn’t heal the hole the Tarranis put in it, and the kids use that hole to attack its heart a bazillion years later.

That was one shot.

Of course, it comes with a big cost. 1 shot=1 soul. Due to internal teleportation systems (more on that later), it doesn’t take long to uh, load up the gun, provided the ammo is willing. In the first game, the twisted AI Jeanne would urge the kids to use the soul cannon whenever the Tarranis’ HP got too low, and as soon as any kid agreed, that was that. Instant load, instant fire, instant results, instant sadness. But the second game takes the “golden ending” of the first as cannon, where the kids never sacrifice themselves to the soul cannon, and so you don’t get the option of sacrificing the kids in the second. You don’t even start the game with a tank that has a soul cannon, as you start in the Tarascus and then fuse with the Tarranis to make the Exo-Tarranis. What happens in the second game is that Hax, who in some ways is a more brutal AI by virtue of being literally Hitler, will just randomly load up a kid whenever the HP dips below a certain amount and start a countdown. The soul cannon in the second game is less a sealed super weapon and more an extra losing condition.

But there are a few ways to fire the soul cannon without paying the cost. The first is through the “dummy.” What’s the “dummy?” We aren’t sure, exactly. You don’t even get one unless you preordered, and if its anything like the dummy plugs from Evangelion, the kids are probably better off never knowing. But whatever the disturbingly vague thing is, it lets you sacrifice it instead of a kid, so you got one “free” soul cannon shot.

The second way is through…hope and friendship. I’m serious. The kids get so worked up at the golden ending of the first game that they’re able to fire the soul cannon without sticking anyone in the chamber. It’s not even like a “they all sacrifice a little of their soul” thing. They just use hope and friendship to BS out a soul cannon activation.

I told you the games get very anime towards the end.

The third way (yes, there are three ways to firing the thing without using a kid) is by using an AI. I think that’s less BS than the second. I mean, who is to say that AI don’t have souls? Johnny 5 was very charming dude. You going to tell me Johnny 5 didn’t have a soul? Get out of here.

In the golden ending of the second game, AI dog Hitler gets so moved by the kids’ dedication and endurance that he sacrifices himself to fire the soul cannon, an act which also, somehow, turns the Exo-Tarranis back into the regular Tarranis. Plus, dog Germany was also threatened by the final boss. No way dog Hitler would let some literal French fat cat literally curbstomp the Rhineland with his zoid.

So there are four ways to fire the soul cannon. Sacrifice a kid, use a dummy, sacrifice the AI, or anime friendship powers.

The Managarm

The managarm is the Tarascus’ version of the soul cannon, and because the Exo-Tarranis is a fusion of the Tarranis and the Tarascus, it can use the managarm as well as the soul cannon.

Remember that the Tarascus is technically not a titano-machina like the Tarranis. Though it uses the heart of a titano-machina, it itself is simply a copy of a titano-machina made with post-apocalypse Nazi dog technology. As such, the Tarascus is weaker than the Tarranis across the board, and that goes for its soul cannon knock-off as well, but that being said, a weaker soul cannon has advantages over a true soul cannon. Unlike the soul cannon, the managarm technically doesn’t use a soul for ammo but life energy, meaning that whoever uses it doesn’t die at the cost of firing a weaker beam. When the kids get to use the managarm in the second game, they knock themselves out to fire it, but they don’t die. You should still never fire the mangarm in game, because you forfeit your exp for the fight if you do, and this is the kind of game where if you neglect powering up early game, you will suffer late game. Hax was able to fire the managarm several times without knocking himself out because, being a grown dog-man with LEBENSCRAUM WILLPOWER, he has considerably more life energy than a 12 year old.

And the resultant life energy beam isn’t vastly weaker than the soul cannon beam. When the beams clashed in the second game, the managarm was able to block the soul cannon for a few seconds before folding. Make no mistake, the managarm is weaker than the soul cannon. In game, the managarm deals a large amount of damage to all targets. and was nearly a one-hit kill against the Tarranis in the first game if you didn’t have all the kids raise shields against the blast, but the soul cannon always destroys whatever its fired against. But in terms of tactics, the managarm is kind of superior to the soul cannon. Not killing your own crew is a pretty big advantage when the only downside is “fires galic gun instead of kamehameha.”

Miscellaneous Powers and Abilities

Befitting a pre-apocalypse alien-derived superweapon disguised as a giant version of the tank from Metal Slug, the Ex-Tarranis has a lot of weirdo abilities you normally wouldn’t associate with tanks.

First of all, it’s got an AI. In the first game, this AI was Jeanne, an AI copy of a human woman who worked on the Tarranis. Jeanne was insane, and wanted to destroy the Tarascus and Vanargand at all costs, so she had to go, and go she did. This left the Tarranis without an AI, but the Tarranis’ mean German clone, the Tarascus, had an AI that became the AI of Exo-Tarranis when the Tarranis and Tarrasque fused.

Yeah. Let’s just get that one out of the way real quick for the list–the Tarranis can fuse itself without other machines. It just can. If the kids get excited enough, it can just Borg other machines. The context for the feat is that, after finding his own pre-war tank, the Belenos, Jihl ditches the Tarranis and heavily damages the Tarascus, but the kids get real emotional and their emotions just…make the two tanks fuse.

It just works.

But yeah, moving on, the Tarascus ended up having the final boss of the last game as its AI–Shvein Hax, who is essentially dog Hitler.

And it’s not a copy of Hax like Jeanne. It’s Hax’s digitized soul. The Tarascus Tron’ed Hax in an effort to save its pilot’s life. The tanks in this series like their pilots about as much as Zearth hates its pilots.

So the tanks can not only absorb machines but do AI transfers–both versions. It can do the crappy Soma version where you just end up feeling like a tool while your AI clone lives in a space station heaven and the awesome Tron version where you’re actually inside the computer.

Despite being literally Hitler, literally, Hax kind of just rolled with being the kids’ AI slave–with one notable exception. Hax places the preservation of the Exo-Tarranis above all else. Defeat is not an option, and unlike Jeanne who was willing to let the kids decide whether or not to use the soul cannon even though she was insane, Hax doesn’t give the kids a choice. If the tanks’ HP drops below a certain amount (how much depends on whether or not you pray to the soul of the soul cannon chamber before the boss fight, but it starts at 1/2) Hax will automatically teleport a kid at random into the soul cannon chamber and start a countdown.

You think Hax has any residual animosity towards the kids? Maybe?

But involuntarily shoving a kid in the gun barrel aside, Hax does have his uses. He has wide-range sensors, particularly with regard to tracking weird energy, like the energy of Jihl’s tank the kids chase over half the game. He can even do a little hacking, though he doesn’t get to do it much since 99.9 percent of the enemies in the game are just big steampunk tanks, but he was able to hack the teleportation systems on Jihl’s tank to teleport kids from it into the Exo-Tarranis.

But lets talk about more about teleportation, because I’ve mentioned it twice already and it needs some elaboration. The Exo-Tarranis has internal teleportation systems. That means, provided a kid is willing to forgo the countdown, there’s no time lost between engaging the soul cannon and firing it. They teleport into the chamber and boom. But does the Exo-Tarranis have external teleportation? Can it teleport itself? That’s kind of hard to say. It doesn’t do it in the games, not once, but…Jihl’s tank can teleport itself, and what’s more, at the end of Fuga 2, the kids decide that the Tarranis is too powerful a weapon to exist, so they just kick it off into the sea of clouds below. But after the credits, the tank appears, unharmed, right in front of Malt. The thing can’t fly, so it begs to reason that it teleported back, especially when that’s something other pre-Apocalypse tanks can do.

The Tarranis probably can do a warp kamehameha with the soul cannon, given everything, but since it’s never explicitly done this in game, I’m not going to give it that ability for the fight. But don’t be surprised if it starts teleporting in Fuga 3, because they sure set that up as an ability.

The Exo-Tarranis can also climb way better than a tank should. It fought the Vanargand by climbing on it twice with its little wheel claw things. What do you call those things? Do they even have a name? Wheel claws. That’s the best I got. The Exo-Tarranis also has jet boosters beneath itself (yes, just like Metal Slug), and while these can be used to control its descent during a fall, they can’t actually make the Exo-Tarranis fly. The flying platform it gets at the end of the Fuga 2 was made and piloted by the two old Nazi dogs, so I classify it as outside help for this battle. The kids don’t get the platform just like they don’t get the entire Gascoe air force which also assisted them in the final battle…though them bombing the shit out of Zearth actually would be in keeping with several Bokurano episodes…

Likely do to being made out of nanometal similar to that of the Vanargand, the Tarranis and the Tarascus can both completely self-recover. The Tarascus was blown to scrap at the ending of the first game but was completely fine by the second. Though this regeneration is impressive, its worth noting that they aren’t able to regenerate in the middle of a fight.

Finally, the Exo-Tarranis has very comfortable living quarters. You wouldn’t think something created to kill a zoid at the cost of a crew member per shot would be so hospitable, but the Exo-Tarranis is kind of cozy during downtime. It’s got a mess (and the kids gradually become pretty damn good chefs, going from making carrot salad to chicken cordon bleu and croque monsieur), sleeping quarters (they might have to make two when everyone starts going through puberty), workshop, little fishing stand for scrap fishing (which is exactly what it sounds like, they fish for battlefield scrap), a laundry room, and even a little farm and garden set up next to the soul cannon chamber and engines. How they’re able to have a thriving garden inside a giant metal monster, I’m not sure. Maybe being so close to the engines allows the plants to absorb the radiation in lieu of sunlight? That doesn’t sound very healthy, but everything is technically a child of the post-apocalypse so they probably evolved to just consume the funky space magic radiation that blankets their world. It’s probably like Xabungle. Ever seen Xabungle? You think the cast are fairly normal Mad Max people until its revealed that the blue stones they use for cash are actually highly radioactive rocks and that they represent a strain of humanity which has evolved to just not be bothered by radioactivity.

The Short List

–AI companion

–Sensors, particularly with regard to exotic energy signatures

–AI digitization

–AI copying

–Machine absorption

–Internal teleportation

–Quite likely external teleportation (it’s very likely, but they don’t actually do this on-screen, so it’s not being counted for the fight)

–Rocket boosters (allows the Exo-Tarranis to control its fall, but not to fly) and climbing claws.

–Complete off-screen regeneration

–Comfortable living quarters and facilities including a tiny farm and garden

Malt’s Multiverse Time Travel Power

Okay. This is going to be weird.

In the second game, whenever you die, or more specifically, when Malt dies, either because you lost or because the story says you got to lose, Malt is taken outside time and space to a weird reality.

This is the Little Tail Bronx multiverse.

Yes, Little Tail Bronx has a multiverse. the little hexagons represent different universes/timelines. The big golden Juno in the center of it all is a mystery. Is it God? Does that mean the Junos on Earth are actually angels and the titano-machina a cyber take on Nephilim? Is Little Tail Bronx secretly the furry version of the Book of Enoch?

Is that why the cat Jews are the only ones that can use magic?

Anyway, the whole thing is presided over by the Maestro, a guy in a plague doctor mask who may or may not be the Metatron for the big God-Juno in the background.

The Maestro conducts “symphonies of hope and despair” and since Malt getting toe tagged and ending up here made a symphony of despair, he’s going to send Malt back in time to another timeline node so he can fix things and get a symphony of hope, no matter how many times it takes (Malt gets sent back twice through story deaths in Fuga 2, more if you screw up and lose).

It’s not that previous timelines get deleted, they still exist in the big tapestry as “symphonies of despair,” but the Maestro’s interference allows “songs of hope” to be created, so all and all he’s pretty decent for an Elder god.

And his multiverse isn’t falling apart at the seams, so he is just styling on the Bokurano Elder gods.

The long and short of this weird set-up is that Malt has limited precognition. When he’s “sent back,” his present self doesn’t receive all the information of what went wrong but gets a general feeling about things, like “I shouldn’t chase after Jihl, it’s going to get us killed” and “There’s an ambush coming up, we need to get ready for it.”

It’s not Malt having infinite retries, because if you can put him in checkmate beyond his ability to adapt to vague premonitions he’s screwed no matter how many times the Maestro sends him back, but his power should be good for, to use an example, knowing that the giant black robot is about to shoot a bazillion missiles at him and that he needs to activate the soul cannon ASAP.

So, Who Wins?

The Exo-Tarranis.

I know. I was surprised too. I didn’t even want to do this fight at first because I thought it would be a curbstomp, literally, in Zearth’s favor, as in all he’d have to do is stomp down. But damn, Fuga has the deepest lore, and it helped get the Exo-Tarranis over.

So the Fuga kids just inadvertently blew up a universe. But they’ll never have to know. That was actually one of the reasons they won–they could fight with no hesitation. Even though Jun is fully dedicated to winning the fight, he is still nervous as shit, which is entirely understandable. Being willing to slaughter innocents for the will of a dark, distant god puts you in the same headspace as a Lovecraft cultist or an Aztec priest, it’s not healthy. The reason Jun had to use Zearth’s genocide mode was because he got too nervous during the fight and had to see inside the enemy cockpit. He hesitated when all he had to do was squeeze to end the whole thing. Jun would assume the Tarranis is another Bokurano bot because hey, they sure came in weirder forms than a steampunk tank. But the kids would think Zearth is just another titano-machina like the Vanargand. It’s big, shoots beams, it’s the Vanargand but in humanoid form, so they wouldn’t hesitate a heart beat.

Let’s go over the other advantages.

This would be Jun’s fight by virtue of how Zearth works, and while he’d have experience watching the other kids fight, that’s not anything like the experience Malt’s gang has received wading through battlefield after battlefield. Jun has also never fought something as tiny as the Exo-Tarranis while the Malt gang has fought a being much larger than Zearth. Twice.

Malt’s weird relation to death is also a big advantage, possibly the biggest advantage, Malt’s gang has. He doesn’t remember every little detail when he goes back in time, but he remembers big, important things, like “Don’t chase after Jihl, it’s a trap” and in this case “Fire the soul cannon now, the big guy is going to nuke us.” Jun would have to play a perfect game 100% of the time to win, and I don’t think he can. I’m not sure he can even win the first fight given what he’s up against.

Could Zearth shred through the Exo-Tarranis’ nanometal and energy shields? Yes, but here’s the thing. As seen in Fuga 2, the managarm and soul cannon can both be used as offensive and defensive weapons.

What happens when both machines go for the alpha strike? What happens when we put soul cannon against Hawaii barrage?

Zearth’s full power barrage covered roughly 6,475 kilometers, a distance so great that it had to shoot through the Earth’s crust to do it. The Tarranis in the distant past shot the Vanargand so hard its heart flew from Paris to the French Southern Alps, a distance of about 622 kilometers. The distance of the Hawaii barrage is about ten times greater than the distance the Vanargand’s heart flew (and then flew into space), but that distance was after the soul cannon punched through its nanometal, regenerating armor and carried the heart out the other side of the armor. The blast was so powerful that the Vanargand couldn’t repair the hole, not even after it was reactivated twice. A blast from the soul cannon is going to eat the Hawaii barrage and hit Zearth on the other side, especially when you consider the soul cannon is a blast of energy and the Hawaii barrage is, well, a barrage. Think of a net trying to block a stream from a water hose.

And say for the sake of argument that the soul cannon doesn’t one shot. There’s no reason the kids can’t add the managarm to the blast. There’s no reason the kids can’t fire the soul cannon twice. One blast is sure going to, at the very least, knock Zearth off its pins. A second is going to finish it for sure.

But what if Malt misses the cockpit? He won’t. Hax can lock onto energy signatures and especially the energy signatures of teleportation chambers, which is what the Zearth cockpit is, even to the point of remote hacking teleporters–which, now that I think of it, would be a wincon in and of itself, albeit a really fucked up one.

Who do you think would pull the trigger on Jun? I’m betting Britz. Jin and Kyle would talk about doing it but Britz would actually do it.

The ultimate point here is that Malt would know exactly where to aim. Plus, locking on to the Vanargand’s power center heart and firing the soul cannon is exactly how the Tarranis beat the Vanargand in the distant past.

This is ultimately why the Exo-Tarranis wins–it’s a giant killer, who has put down a giant much larger and much more powerful than Zearth 3 times. Zearth vs the Vanargand isn’t even close. The Vanargand would eat Zearth literally eat it. On the other hand, Zearth has never fought something exactly like the Exo-Tarranis. I know it may seem weird that a mech twice as big as Gunbuster who once shot every single man, woman, and child on the planet Earth, loses to the little warmachine that could but remember that there’s a huge gap between the Exo-Tarranis as it’s normally used by the kids and how it was meant to be used. It’s like Metal Gear Rex in that the big important part of the mech is its main gun. The other weapon systems were just gravy. The Tarranis is a Death Star but the kids only fire its little trench lasers. The soul cannon is >>>>>>> all the other guns on the Tarranis, all the other guns in Fuga all the other guns in the wider Little Tail Bronx universe. You use the soul cannon in the game and you auto-win whatever battle you’re in because whatever is in front of you dies.

If the soul cannon and managarm weren’t allowed, Zearth would probably win. It sure has the range advantage, and while the Tarranis guns were able to harm the Vanargand under repeated fire (though it quickly regenerated), they had to get closet to the Vanargand to fire, and that’s not going to work against Zearth. If the Malt gang tries to climb Zearth like the Vanargand, they’re just going to get blasted from below, as Zearth can fire its “lasers” from every point of its body. Without those two big super weapons attached to the Exo-Tarranis, Zearth would win, but man, when the pre-reset humans made a gun to kill giant robots, they sure as hell made a gun to kill giant robots–and an entire universe in this case, but that’s beside the point.