The main character is not named Max
I fell Desperate in love with Metal Max Xeno Reborn. This is my first time coming to this series, which has been running in Japan since 1991. It was a roller coaster ride for me. I immediately jumped online and placed orders for some of the first games of the series. I feel sad about Metal Max: Wild West cancel. Then I found love again in Metal Max for Famicom. Then I reminded myself that Metal Max: Wild West was canceled, and now I’m sad again.
Metal Max have mostly stayed in Japan, outside Xeno and it Easter cousin. We have Metal Saga on PS2, but that passed without much notice. Maybe we’ll have a re-release on PS5 now that Sony is doing it again. There are a lot of titles that come out with no notice to our player, and I plan to dig into as much of my nimble fingers as I can. Metal Max is one of the things I was able to communicate through Famicom Friday, so allow me to share it with you.
Get a real job
I love Metal Max. Famicom RPGs can be a struggle, no matter what they are Dragon Quest or one Mommy. It was a bad era for console RPGs. No, that’s probably not correct. It was a clumsy era for console RPGs. A great era for PC RPGs, but console RPGs fell short. Regardless, I ate Metal Max without any discomfort. Without any boredom.
It helps a lot with what I love Metal Max Xeno Reborn was correct on Famicom. It’s a tank-focused post-apocalyptic JRPG. The plot is light, instead it’s your way to hunt monsters. The main focus is on finding transportation and accumulating enough money to make them overkill. The monsters are ludicrous, and there’s this dark, insidious sense of humor that underlies it all.
It’s also pretty slick for a JRPG this classic. I have the option of playing the Famicom version or the Super Famicom remake, Metals maximize profit. I chose the original, because its art style is very classic to the system. It’s clear that, like other role-playing games of its time, it has a lot of influence from Dragon Quest. The characters are squat, the backgrounds are sparse, and the enemies are huge. If you like the aesthetic of the Famicom RPG, it fits the look and feel perfectly.
Crazy muscles
The game shows a similar shine. You can totally overpower yourself and sharpening is an option, but in terms of the game’s loop, it’s totally fixable. You travel the world and hunt down the Wanted Monster. But the Wanted Monster was only a suggestion; a great way to make a lot of money really fast. There are more aspects to the core gameplay: find better tanks, find better weapons, and solve the problems of the different towns you pass if you feel like it.
It is almost open world. The progression from town to town is largely linear, but it doesn’t have any objections to going backward or skipping forward. Wanted Monsters are not bosses. You can continue without killing them. There are a number of objectives you need to complete in order to get through the portal, but these are mostly in the early part of the game. I think it’s more accurate to say it’s an open narrative game. Character development is mostly in your head. You have humble beginnings, but you find the momentum. Wealth, money, a fearsome tank? I’m definitely in there for the tank.
Mammoth . Tank
It’s a bit strange to call a turn-based RPG “fun”. Menu-based combat is not fun. I guess I’ll say that instead Metal Max is attractive. It’s fun to find new tanks and get new gear. It’s satisfying to line up your artillery against the big bad monsters. If anything, I wish the world was more responsive. People don’t expect much from you, so they don’t really care about your successes. The towns are largely unchanged and static. Perhaps, that is the price of Metal Max’s Polish.
The soundtrack is excellent but also repetitive; not really popular for JRPGs. I mean, off the top of my head, I can hum Dragon Quest’s overworld theme, and not because I like it. However, there is a decent amount of music. Often, when it doesn’t beat you with battle music or music, it takes on something new and exciting.
Power of electricity
What makes Metal Max very interesting is the progression, but what’s more important is its weird sense of humour. Many enemies are a combination of animals and war machines. The situations you encounter are sometimes very strange, like when you need to convince a factory full of flower lovers to provide you with a car. But there are a lot of pretty weird mechanics to begin with.
You heal at the inn, you resupply your tanks at the tank supply, and when you die, you’re resurrected by a mad scientist. Seriously, whenever a character is limited, they become a corpse being dragged behind other characters. You give their “fresh bodies” to the doctor and he brings them back to life. So really, at the end of the game, all party members are just zombies that refuse the peaceful embrace of death. If all your characters are wiped out, your father reluctantly resurrects you, and then you must gather your dead teammates. It’s absolutely the sickest respawn system I’ve come across.
One of the things that really drew me to the series was its sparse story line. Not that heavy story was really common in the 8-bit days of JRPGs, but Metal Max funny to me in that you don’t really know who the central villains are until you basically skim them. Then when it’s all over, no one will realize you saved the world because they never knew that it happened in the first place. James Bond probably knows what that feels like, but the protagonist here doesn’t even get any congratulatory sex.
Save the world while you’re at it
Metal Max , without exaggeration, is the best RPG I’ve played on the Famicom. Yes, I rate it on Dragon Quest tetralogy, Final Fantasyand even Mommy. It has Of mom the strangeness and rigor of Dragon Quest. I can safely say I’ve never gotten this much enjoyment out of an 8-bit RPG.
However, we have not achieved it here. Most of the series has passed us by. To date, we have received Metal Saga on PS2 and Metal Max Xeno and its remake/remake. Why we never got the DS titles, I will never understand. Unless I can convince a few million people to climb Metal Max Xeno Reborn wagons, I doubt we’ll ever actually see them. I don’t believe we’ll see this series again after Metal Max: Wild West’s cancellation.
Luckily, there is a fan translation of Metal Max, which you will see I used here, because I have too much Japanese text. I might have gotten over it, but I don’t think I’ll enjoy it that much. As I mentioned before, Metal Max get a 1996 remake on the SNES called Metals maximize profit, and it also has a fan translation. It’s your call that you want to play. I’ll probably get to the remake sooner rather than later, but I have a whole bunch of movies that I need to dig into right now.
Check out the Famicom last Friday right here.
Zoey Handley
Zoey is a gamer. She has played video games her whole life and is a lover of both new and classic games. She loves to dig in the dirt and pick out games that are perfectly fine if you clean them up a bit.
