Closer Look: Battle Tech (Part 2)

The second episode of Battle Tech (files two and three) has very little connection to the first episode. For once, our recap is brief. You are a young and nameless mech pilot serving as a soldier for the Jade Falcon clan. Previously, during your first time in combat, you were forced to eject and launched deep into the southern isles. From there, your task was to get back home safely, a process that involved plenty of detours into enemy installations to defeat guardians and collect stars necessary to activate a portal which could warp you home. You fought a guy named Malthus, leader of the Wolf clan, putting a serious dent in their southern stronghold, possibly saving an underground city of robots in the process.

But now, you are home. Finally able to relax until you receive a phone call from those eggheads at NASA...

A meteorite that struck near New York City was discovered holding an alien life form. You've been invited to check it out.

NASA Says Hello

Previously, the player was very much the runt of Jade Falcon. Young, inexperienced, and sent into an unwinnable battle. It's not stated exactly how much time has passed between episodes. What is clear is that your character is now a person of some importance. Perhaps single-handedly taking down the Wolf Clan was rewarded.

One that that has changed significantly between episodes is the structure. The first episode of Battle Tech relied on a world map to get players from location to location. The route was dotted with buildings to serve as individual levels where you were pretty much always shooting at something, save for a handful of puzzle boards that offered a welcome break. This, along with a rather unusual art style really helped make Battle Tech stand out from the aesthetics and structure most commonplace in ZZT adventures of the era.

Shaded line walls featuring a lack of details in the foreground provided strong contrast from decorative backgrounds whose contents ranged from straightforward color gradients to depictions of a mech assembly line. The first episode, was full of boards to astound players with what they'd see. Here in the second episode, that's unfortunately lost. The replacement is far more traditional. We get normal ZZT houses, with normal ZZT interiors. There's a dark laboratory consisting of nothing but gray walls and stark empty backgrounds. The caves are a reddish-brown with twisting winding walls and open cavernous spaces. In many ways, episode two is a "normal" ZZT game, one that's a lot less surprising. Battle Tech's second half pick up its design rules from other ZZT worlds, seeing what others have done that was well received and deeming it correct. While this doesn't spoil the experience, the game loses something here opting to follow rather than lead.

However, there are still plenty of improvements. The most obvious is in the game's new focus on its story. The first episode required a lot of mind reading if you wanted to tell who the characters were and what they were up to.

It's one thing for ZZT fan games to expect players to have familiarity with the source material. You'll get more out of TymeUltima's Shining Force games if you know the characters are, but you can still figure out enough from just what's provided in game. For Battle Tech, having the background knowledge isn't the problem. It's applying it to the ZZT game. When a green smiley face that says HA HA REMEMBER ME like some sort of early 2000s meme, there's no amount of background that can give you the insight that you're talking to Malthus.

Episode two has some plot beats to it. The overview of the adventure is no longer a series of going to here, to there, to there again. Now it's a journey is that can be told by the events that happen. An unexpected phone call that marks the start of a new adventure. The player's trip by helicopter to the lab is depicted in a transitional board whisking them across the ocean. The lab turns out to have been destroyed by aliens have grown and overtaken the facility. A search for survivors ensues, with a professor guiding the player to a far off moon in another galaxy where the aliens are thought to have come from, and be planning an attack on humanity. He begs you to find and destroy them. Straightforward, though perfectly valid sci-fi action. Fight the aliens, take the fight to them, save the planet.

That could have been enough to put the story up there with other fun action titles along the lines of say, Infestation. Alex has greater ambition than the bare minimum this time. Upon arriving on the moon, it turns out you've got the wrong guys. The aliens here are also under attack from the "flesh aliens" as they call them as well as dealing with the same space pirates that sparked the wars on Earth which lead to the creation of the mech warrior, and still a third threat in the form of bounty hunters! Listen. This game ain't about to win a Pulitzer.

It's enough though to present a cliffhanger for the end of the file! The answer to all your problems, and the problems of the friendly aliens who are being lumped in with the flesh eating ones is to be found upstairs, with the game cutting out just before players get to see what it is. The result is a very effective breaking point for the world. I wanted to know what wild thing would somehow solve all my problems, and hurriedly opened up the final file to put in my password.

Just like that, the second file's contents are covered without having to discuss the lions you shoot, the alien enemies, and the few puzzles that still endure. They're more than worth a look of their own, but just breezing through the plot, things are happening. Your short term goals change repeatedly, and it makes for a more memorable tale. If it seems like an entire file was covered quickly, well, that's the case. Unlike the other two gameplay worlds, it's significantly shorter, and the vast majority of it the laboratory level where story-wise, there's no information to acquire between discovering the lab has been overrun by aliens and finally finding the professor that invited the player there in the first place. It's much more in the style of the first episode, saving its surprises instead for the next.

The final file picks up exactly where you left off, revealing the reward. It's a freakin' ion cannon!

A lot of problems could be solved with such a thing.

A transmission tower nearby allows the player to establish contact with Earth and deliver the news. This planet- well, it was a moon before, but now it's a planet. The details are still hard to pin down.

The planet isn't hostile. The plan to the blow the whole thing up can be aborted. This wasn't exactly communicated. Old habits die hard. Still, you at least get to hear about the plan now, and it suggest that events are transpiring even in places where the player isn't present.

Then the game has a genuine unexpected twist! Nobody cares that this is the wrong planet. They're blowing it up, and they're not going to waste time getting the player out of there first. There was nothing like this in the first episode. We even get a glimpse out our previously near-silent protagonist's personality, reacting to the betrayal with violence against an inanimate object.

Next you'll tell me that this kid's father wasn't killed in action and he was raised by people who were actually the bad guys the entire time...

Stumbling aimlessly to the nearest village, that unlike Maradea in the previous episode is only partially on fire. (Yes, the teleporter just dropped you off in the wilderness. I mean, beats dying on an exploding planet I guess.)

Barging into a burning building because you can. The story continues with the reveal that your father wasn't killed in action and that our protagonist was in fact raised by people who were actually the bad guys the entire time.

Father and son reuniting for the first time in ages and learning how they feel about that is brushed aside in favor of planning to blow things up. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

See, dad's got a cave where he's been working with a few others to bring down Jade Falcon. It would be easy to gloss over these fellow rebels, Cyrus, Tenjina, and the currently absent Namakeru as all you really get from the them are hellos and words of praise for how cool your dad is. While hardly riveting conversation, it is conversation with named characters, such that players may actually remember them later. Certainly better than that one guy who showed up a few times in the first episode yet never felt recognizable.

The rebellion has some parallels to Star Wars, except it feels rather small. Alex doesn't really bother with extras in his scenes, making the group really appear to be a single digit number of participants. There's no hint at other cells, or discussion of civilian life (or its closest approximate after a thousand years of war on Earth). Luke, Leia, and Han are going to bring down an empire all by themselves once they're ready.

Dad offers an amusing explanation for all the wild events of the previous game's story. Despite playing as a child soldier, the Jade Falcon clan was never really presented as anything other than the good guys, with no thought as to how horrific or at least desperate things must be for someone so young to become an active participant in a war. That kind of glorification is hardly a surprise when ZZTers were themselves young kids excited by high-tech guns and machinery. Would 12 year old me want to fight in a war? No. Would 12 year old me want to fire a bazooka and blow up a giant robot? Uh, yeah? Obviously?

Yet in one of the few connections to the first episode, Dad reveals that Jade Falcon sending an untrained child to pilot a mech wasn't the sign of a crumbling military structure. They just really didn't like the protagonist. Dad explains that an oracle said his son was destined to destroy the Jade Falcon clan, and so they've been trying to kill both father and son for awhile now. You're the chosen one! Congrats!

Now you have a new goal, to fulfill your destiny, which is only ever going to happen if the aliens, space pirates, and bounty hunters unite as one to overthrow their common enemy of Jade Falcon. Perhaps the "flesh-eating" part of the aliens was just propaganda. Although they certainly did bite back in the lab...

The world map is more zoomed in, spanning multiple boards. In this way the game can surprise players with what they'll discover from screen to screen. This advantage over the previous game isn't really taken advantage of, sticking to assorted forests to navigate around, bridges to cross, and mountains with caves to enter. The geography itself doesn't get played around with enough to make one region feel any different from the rest. It's grass and trees with a hint of water no matter where you venture.

Negotiation in Battle Tech is a quick process. A simple "I'm trying to ally these groups. Please join us." is all it takes to sell the leader of the pirates on the idea, provided you can prove that you're trustworthy. A classic adventurer's quest ensues: deeper in the caves, a mutant has been causing problems for the pirates that mine them. Stop the mutant to prove your worthiness.

This was not what I expected when I was told there was going to be a mutant! I think it's a giant frog? After a fairly nondescript cave whose only defining feature is an underground river, there's some spectacle when entering a room once more.

One fight later and there aren't any miners to be found. A wounded man, loyal to Jade Falcon is all that remains. Our hero demands he disavow them and join the rebels with some passionate words.

I guess it's not a total loss. We found a coward who changes his allegiance when he realizes what will happen to him if he doesn't. Plus "Join Satan in his fiery inferno" is some real metal shit that I certainly wasn't expecting. I'll call it a successful mission for that alone.

Once again wanting to move as quickly as possible, exiting the caves jump cuts to back at dad's cave, with the pirates agreeing to ally happening off screen. The upcoming raid is immediately revealed to be happening right now, with this mystery man having tricked our boy here into leading him directly into their base of operations.

It happens far too fast to have any weight to it. You can't even call the unnamed man a double agent as he never actually did anything. Instead, everyone else that was involved just looks like a moron for immediately trusting the guy who only showed sympathy to the rebellion when he had a gun pointed at him.

A confrontation ensues as a larger force greets the rebels when they emerge from their cave. Two of the minor characters opt to go down fighting so that the player, his father, and the pirate leader can flee to the forest. They promise to meet them there, though it's clear they don't expect to.

As far as ZZT dramas go, well, Alex is trying. We're meeting characters and likely seeing them for the last time. The problem is, players have no real connection to them. While we're certainly told that they're good friends of your father and allies to his cause we never actually see them doing anything. Even in these cut-scenes nobody ever moves. It's just smiling faces saying words. A few years later, November Eve would have its detractors thanks to its abundance of low-animation cut-scenes, though at least that game had information to convey and established characters for players to sympathize with. This is just a case of reducing compelling characters down to "good guys dying equals sad".

A typical level for this file ensues, ending with the acquisition of a Jade Flacon uniform and the arrival at one of their outposts hidden in the forest.

The guards are fooled enough to let you wander the first floor, but they recognize your lack of clearance to go anywhere else. This leads to some prison cells where the former occupants have taken their own lives. In one, you can find a dirk which grants you access to the rest of the building.

Via stabbing.

The storytelling struggles continue on the next floor where the player finds Tenjina and Cyrus critically wounded and taken prisoner. They beg him to forget about them and destroy the communication satellite dish found next to the base. The player then struggles at the idea of abandoning them, coming up with a plan to shoot open the door, which the prisoners insist he doesn't do lest they die in the process. Instead, they slip him a sealed note for his dad and pass away and say their goodbyes.

All of this is happening in front of two more guards who are completely oblivious to the conversation happening directly behind them.

Even Alex recognizes that the heartbreak he wants to portray here isn't working due to a lack of connection between these two and the player. It's kind of remarkable to see the game's own characters admit there's a lack of a connection.

As is the incredible lampshade placed on ░▒▓█║REVENGE║█▓▒░.

Taking out the dish consists of a little tightrope walk to the apparatus where smashing a single red bulb on the tip is all it takes to put communications out of commission. While still goofy, I really like the angle here. For as much as the later files scale back on the pretty views, they're not gone outright. The fact that it's also designed so that players can climb the structure makes it all the more impressive. There's a real sense of scale conveyed here with the narrow crossing and tiny person standing on the tip of the transmitter. All you're actually doing on this board is walking and touching an object, yet the presentation makes it really cool.

In what I think is a good storytelling device, the passage afterwards doesn't jump to the player safely on the ground, but to a Jade Falcon base where the enemy is eagerly awaiting to hear from the outpost the player was just at with regards to the location of the rebel base. The scene is played somewhat comically, with a big "Here goes!" before the technician presents the transmission, only for it to of course abruptly cut off just before the full coordinates can be given.

The reaction from the commander is anything but laughter, without the precise coordinates, he opts to instead have the planet? moon? destroyed. The tech asks about sacrificing all the Jade Falcon members there, with the commander yelling that if the transmission was stopped, then they're all dead already. I kind of wish we got more little moments like these. It's hard to get a feel for how large an organization Jade Falcon is.

Of course similarly, it's hard to size up the rebels. I genuinely felt like it was really just the four people in a little cave that made up the whole organization, although who can say how big a group "space pirates" encompasses? Thinking too much about it raises too many questions that will never get answered, or matter if they did. At this point I think it's less that the details are locked away in Alex's mind, unable to be effective presented to players, and more that how big or small bases, armies, rebels, and anything else is simply adjusted to be appropriate to the scene.

Father and son make camp in the woods, and take a look at the farewell letter from Cyrus and Tenjina. The letter contains plans for a new Jade Falcon weapon. With them, a weakness can be identified before the construction is complete. We really seem to just be doing Star Wars now.

Also, dad won't be joining his son on this final mission. Only one of em has an ion cannon after all. It's unclear what dad does after this. His rebellion has been broken and his hideout has been compromised. Dad quietly exits the story here, returning only for the ending after the conflict is over. I'd argue he should have also stood his ground to allow his son to escape. Then the POWs at the top of the tower would have resonated much better. The father/son connection alone would score more pathos, especially considering the emotional trauma of going from discovering your father still lives to having to leave him to die in a prison cell.

Of course, this way dad gets to live which makes for a happier ending. Even then, just keeping him alive and stuck in a cell would improve the scene, though I don't think I'd trust the game to come up with a satisfying explanation for how he'd get out.

Story-wise, there's little that happens beyond this point. The walk to the base features no opposition. Guards are gotten past through comedic bribery, or rely on that old standby of the first episode, of just always being asleep.

Even the ascent is not what you'd expect. It's less of a final level and more like the Jade Falcon building from the first episode back when you were working with them. Bars, bunks, and a hospital all suck the tension out of the atmosphere. Some combat follows with a few mutant animals born of mad science, though the mood is incredibly relaxed for what should be this game's equivalent of bringing down the Death Star. It picks up a little as players enter the floors housing the generator, with some object enemies that shoot the player and each other equally while our hero makes a dash for the rooftop.

Where he's immediately caught by the unnamed leader of Jade Falcon. Oops.

But what follows isn't another RPG battle. It's a return to the classics, with a small arena where a run and gun fight unfolds, while the background is again used to give us a better look at whatever it is we're fighting. Maybe it's a final form or something, but the game fails to elaborate on the specifics. You're just here, fighting whatever it is.

Though to Alex's credit, the final boss does take a stab at addressing the issues with these bosses from before. The creature has a reasonable health pool, moves at cycle one speeds, and has enough randomness in its pattern that the fight plays much better than any before. The player, still far too well equipped to actually be in danger, at least will take a few licks in the process.

The ending is what you'd expect by now. Quiet. Abrupt. Not particularity satisfying. A race against a countdown until the base explodes, then meeting your dad in the woods and hopping into some some of craft to zoom away. The impact of what just happened is presumably massive, though that's more the expectation. We never are told what would happen if Jade Falcon was able to utilize this weapon. They're capable of blowing up celestial objects already after all.

For an epilogue, everything has to quickly be wrapped up. Fortunately, there's little developed in such a way that players would wonder about. The war is over. Jade Falcon is over. No multi-planetary alliance was really needed, just the player and their ion cannon. Plans for cool domes are discovered in the wreckage which allow cities to protect themselves from outside threats, with the domes becoming commonplace. Peace breaks out as the domes solve all of life's problems.

No really, that's the end of it.

When it comes to the story, Battle Tech does improve from being almost entirely absent in the first episode, to providing context to your running around everywhere in file two, and then haphazardly pulling in Star Wars for the third. By ZZT standards of teenagers trying to capture imaginations the way a blockbuster film or professionally made JRPG might, you get something pretty commonplace. Battle Tech has a checklist of things found in good stories that it doesn't know how to string together. Over the course of the game players save a city from destruction, butt heads with the skilled mech pilot of an enemy clan, blast their way through a lab overrun with aliens, warp to another world that's they then have to escape before it explodes, discover their father is alive, learn their own clan is an oppressor who hid the truth and has been trying to kill them, and then finds a way to bring peace through an impenetrable defense bringing a millennia of warfare to an end. All of that sounds like one hell of adventure, clichés aside.

It's the execution that leaves a lot to be desired. Conflicting details as to whether things are planets or moons or what their names are make trying to figure out exactly what's going on. During play, most of this can be brushed aside. You're teleporting to a place in space. The specifics don't actually matter until you're me looking at screenshots and seeing names of planets and moons and trying to keep track of what is what. What's far more obvious is the way the story never gives you a chance to soak it in. By the end of it, I had no idea what I saved the world from exactly. Wolf Clan and now Jade Falcon are presumably done. How many more clans are there and what's their deal? Some of those aliens were very much eating human flesh. Are they actually a threat or was it just a fluke of a meteorite that brought them to Earth once? Who were those aliens that gave the player the ion cannon? They're gone now I suppose.

Like most ZZT games, the story is fine when it comes to launching players into action. There are conflicts, first with the aliens and then with Jade Falcon, and there are goals that guide you through them. Find the professor. Identify the source of the alien threat. Convince the pirates to join your cause. Blow up the big weapon. All of this is a definite improvement over the first episode. Alex wants more than that though, setting up a prophecy about the player, adding supporting characters who give their lives for the cause. These are the moments where the still limited communication with the player at the keyboard prevents them from ever hitting.

It's fortunate then, that the gameplay, while not as sharp as the first episode, is capable of leaning against the story, with the two supporting each other enough that the game doesn't fall down.