Mecha Ace is a text adventure from Choice of Games written by Paul Wang.
Contains examples of:
- Ace Custom: You and Hawkins both start with customized versions of standard-issue mecha before possibly upgrading to Super Prototypes.
- Ace Pilot: You. You start the game with 60 confirmed kills, and go up to 63 before you need to make any choices.
- Anti-Frustration Feature: Unlike other titles from the company, this one has various Checkpoint saves to allow players to more easily explore the branching storylines.
- Always Female: The player can either randomize the genders of any love interests or choose each major character's gender, but Captain Baelyn is always female.
- Always Male: Star Marshal Nicholas Steele and Doctor William Chatham are always male. If you're captured by the enemy near the end, the interrogator seeking information from you is also always male.
- Audience Surrogate: Watanabe if you choose to spend time with them when not in battle, as your player character can explain basics to them such as when it's necessary to follow rules and what is done with casual clothing while in military service.
- Birds of a Feather: The love interests generally prefer player characters who have similar dispositions and alignments to their own—Weaver will only accept your advances if you're more Disciplined than Passionate, Hawkins will only show interest in a Warrior instead of a Diplomat, and so on.
- Blood Knight: Commandant Hawkins definitely, with a side order of Spirited Competitor. Ensign Asadi also fits at least at first glance. And of course, you can be one yourself—in fact, you have to, to romance Hawkins or Asadi.
- Blue Blood: The Imperial military is neatly divided into two categories—those who have this, and those who don't. Usually those of noble birth are higher ranking, simply due to their status and wealth. Commandant Hawkins is of noble birth, but unlike most, they earned their way to their position.
- The Chains of Commanding: You can definitely play it this way. Ensign Asadi gets hit by this pretty hard after they nearly get their squad killed during their first command.
- Char Clone: Commandant Hawkins is the mysterious blond masked rival, though their color scheme is blue instead of red.
- Close-Range Combatant: With a high Piloting stat, which makes you faster and improves your melee skills, you'll be better at winning melee skirmishes up close.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: The Player Character is subjected to this after their capture by the Imperial military. They can crack at any point, or resist it to the end, with potentially permanent damage to their piloting hand.
- Dirty Coward:
- Commandant Hawkins will accuse you of being this, although not in exact words, if you flee from your first encounter with them and/or if in your second encounter you have your lances fight them instead of you.
- If you play with a more warrior mentality, this will be your opinion on enemies who retreat or flee—playing with a diplomatic mentality means you simply see them as being pragmatic.
- You can flee from the final battle for Crown Station, but doing this gets you a bad ending, as you've left your fellows to die and left the rebellion to fall, and your character ends up spending his/her days drinking in a bar, filled with regrets.
- Downer Ending: No matter what choices you make, no matter how many people die, most of the endings are at least bittersweet. However, if you side with Hawkins and self-destruct the Lightbringer, you and your love interest end up as hard, joyless pirates with no real future, and the protagonist bitterly reflects that the philosophy they followed was deeply wrong. If you choose to flee the battle for Crown Station, the game ends prematurely, with your character Drowning Their Sorrows in a bar on a backwater planet, full of regrets.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: It takes a lot of work and a very specific character build, but if you make the right choices it is possible for your entire squad, the millions of civilians aboard Crown Station, and every other named character to survive. Hawkins is the hardest Love Interest to keep with you and have a happy ending, but if you do, it pays off big time, especially in the "ceasefire" ending.
- Energy Weapon: Both sides have access to Plasma Cutters, but CoDEC has a monopoly on long-range particle rifles. They're also developing the particle storm rifle, which allows for Beam Spam from a single mech. Unusually, The Empire's monomolecular hand weapons are considered superior to ordinary beam weapons in single combat, mostly due to the extremely fine control and rapid cutting power they bring to the table.
- Escort Mission: One of the backstory options has you rising to fame after pulling off the escort mission from Hell: single-handedly defending around a dozen fleeing civilian transports from over twenty enemy units.
- Everyone Has Standards: Commandant Hawkins expresses disgust at the Lightbearer, especially for its use on Crown Station, stating there's no honor in targeting unarmed civilians.
- Excited Title! Two-Part Episode Name!: Chapters are titled in this matter, much like mecha anime episodes.
- A Father to His Men: The veteran player character can help guide both Asadi and Watanabe through difficult moments.
- Flawed Prototype: The Lionheart has some very buggy piloting software that chokes when the Lionheart goes to full speed, and fixing that means installing limiters that make it move as slowly as a mook mech.
- Foreshadowing: In your first battle with them, Hawkins makes a point of mentioning your 'lion's heart'. Now take guess of what the codename for that shiny new prototype you've liberated is...
- Fun with Acronyms: The Federation is properly known as the Coalition of Democratic Extrasolar Colonies, or CoDEC for short.
- Gender-Blender Name: For most of the characters whose gender can be chosen or randomized, while their surnames remain the same, their "given names" change depending on whether they're male or female. But in Commandant Hawkins' case, whether they're a man or a woman, their given name will always be Camille.
- Genre Deconstruction: The game isn't shy about taking potshots at tropes that the author doesn't like (such as No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, or the idea that aces are some kind of superhuman Newtype), and it does its best to justify the existence of combat armatures in the vein of the original Gundam.
- Grand Theft Prototype: Multiple cases, starting with stealing one of your side's prototypes back from the Empire. Oh, and the achievement for hijacking said prototype mid-fight is actually called Grand Theft Prototype.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: While The Empire is a corrupt, stagnant monolith kept in line with fear, secret police, and brute force, and The Federation are the scrappy underdog fighting for democracy and progress, the Imperial Navy has a strong tradition of "honorable" conduct that CoDEC doesn't always share, and a Warrior player can repeatedly commit what essentially amount to war crimes without even a slap on the wrist from his or her superiors.
- Heroic BSoD: Early on, you're required to select one of four weaknesses to make your character imperfect (which, in stat terms, will reduce one of your stats to 1). One of the choices is "Combat shakes", which causes your character's teeth to grind and hands to freeze at the controls due to the stress of constant war, and to demonstrate the weakness right away, you have a heroic BSOD as an enemy mech is about to fight you, requiring Asadi to shoot it down to rescue you.
- Honor Before Reason: A fatal flaw of the Imperials, as "dishonorable" tactics such as flanking and ambushes are considered beneath them.
- Hot-Blooded: You, if you have a high Passion score. This also fits Asadi to a T. In Asadi's case, it's deconstructed, as their recklessness nearly gets their lance killed in their first command, leaving them shaken.
- Jack of All Stats: Of the three starting mechs, the aging-but-reliable Pictus is the most versatile and performs well for characters whose builds haven't focused on either Piloting, the close combat stat, or Perception, the most important ranged combat stat. However, it is thoroughly outclassed when up against Commandant Hawkins's Ace Custom duelist mech.
- Lethal Joke Character: With a high Presence stat, you're better able to lead the members of your lance, but your combat skills won't be ideal...however, having a high Presence also increases your persuasive skills, allowing you to outright skip some battles. It's also required to have high Presence in order to save every named character and Crown Station.
- Long-Range Fighter: With a high Perception stat, which makes it easier to detect enemies and improves your ranged skills, you'll be better at ranged combat, sniping enemies from afar.
- Love Across Battlelines: You and Hawkins are the best armature pilot each side has to offer. The two of you can also fall in love.
- Love Redeems: If you romance Hawkins. Though this is a downplayed example; while love caused them to turn their back on The Empire, they haven't abandoned their Blood Knight philosophy which drove them to villiany in the first place. Even in what is arguably the Golden Ending, it's implied that the only thing stopping them from trying to start another war is because the uphill battle to maintain the fragile peace is currently sating their desire for combat.
- A Mech by Any Other Name: They're called "Armatures".
- My Country, Right or Wrong: One of the possible motivations the protagonist might have for fighting is because their home planet sided with The Federation.
- Necessary Drawback: Early on, during a battle, you're required to select from one of four weaknesses that causes you to falter, requiring your team to bail you out. This is a gameplay element to reduce one of your stats to make up for an earlier choice that increased one of them. The weaknesses you can choose are being outmaneuvered by a superior pilot (reduces your Piloting), being blindsided by an enemy you didn't detect (reduces your Perception), losing the ability to command the others (reduces your Presence), or the "combat shakes" (reduces your Willpower).
- New Meat: Watanabe, an Ordinary High-School Student who's suddenly gets thrust into a post on a Rebellion warship thanks to war and meddling parents. Though they do grow out of this over the course of the game.
- Reconstruction: The Char Clone of the game, Camille Hawkins, reconstructs the Masked Warrior. The mask isn't there to hide their identity from anyone, it's something they wear to display who they are, like a knight's helm.
- Rescue Romance: The relationship between you and Hawkins blossoms after Hawkins breaks you out of Imperial captivity following the Battle of Crown Station.
- Sadistic Choice: During the Battle of Crown Station, once the Lightbringer comes online. The Lieutenant Commander must choose between saving ten million innocent people aboard Crown Station, or the retreating battlefleet, including, potentially, his or her love interest. And the best third option available, offering oneself as a hostage to the enemy admiral in exchange for breaking off the assault on the retreat and not firing the Lightbringer, requires high Presence to pull off. Alternatively, you can sacrifice your squadron to save the other objective, which still fits this trope.
- Shout-Out: The game is absolutely studded with shout-outs.
- The aforementioned Golden Ending? The achievement for it is called "Just this Once."
- Watanabe quotes Amuro Ray word for word if you give him/her a Get A Hold Of Yourself Man (or Woman) moment.
- If you save Crown Station from destruction you get the achievement "Apocalypse: Cancelled".
- An achievement for painting your mech red and gold? "The Red Comet", one of Iron Man's old monikers.
- If you romance your bridge controller, you get an achievement called "I will (not) abandon you...".
- Maxed your melee combat skill? The achievement for that is "The Sword that Cleaves Evil".
- Complete the game with a single-gender cast? (Wo)Men of Destiny.
- One of the achievements is titled "Anime Ja Nai!"
- One of the default names you can give your character is Yoshiyuki Tomino.
- Your character's ID begins with "RX-782".
- If you max out your player character's ranged combat capabilities, you'll earn an achievement called "The White Death". While the White Death is the nickname of Demar Griffe from After War Gundam X, that character actually specializes in using a "beam knife"; the achievement title is a better shout-out to Simo Häyhä, the real-life Finnish marksman also known as the "White Death".
- The achievement name for the Downer Ending is "...On a Halifax Pier
". - Another pair of default names are Alexander and Natasha Kerensky.
- Having a high reputation nets the achievement "Who the Hell..."note
- The achievement for romancing your wingman/woman? "Beach Volleyball".
- Apart from being a CharClone, Hawkins is a also a blue themed ace pilot named Camille.
- Shrinking Violet: Watanabe is very shy and stuttery when you first meet them.
- Slasher Smile: At one point, Commandant Hawkins is described as giving a "grim slash" that is "predatory, intimidating, and nothing like a smile."
- Standard Sci-Fi History: It fits the broad outline of the earliest parts of the timeline, though The Empire is actually a degraded corporate-bureaucratic entity that has degenerated into a stagnant feudal entity, and The Federation is starting to emerge as a way to derail it into something more in line with a Real Robot Genre setting.
- Starbucks Skin Scale: Asadi is described as having "skin the colour of milk tea".
- Stone Wall: With a high Willpower stat, you'll be able to take more hits and keep your cool under fire, which can later open up strategies such as charging into the middle of enemies and marking targets for the Caliburn to fire missiles at although, word of warning, a high Willpower build has no reliable way of retrieving the prototype early on without losing a member of your lance, so Willpower is more useful later than it is early.
- Subspace Ansible: Downplayed. It never gets mentioned in the main story, but if you read through the tech database it explains that ansibles are very rare and use quantum entanglement to allow instantaneous communication between planets in different solar systems.
- Super Prototype: The Lionheart and the Roland on the imperial side. However, the concept is also sporked when its designer points out that they can just make more Lionheart units if you get shot down. Also, it may not be as "super" as your own Ace Custom. You're still required to use the Lionheart anyway past a certain point. Also played with in that, like many real prototypes, it has issues that haven't been ironed out yet, as noted above under Flawed Prototype.
- Take a Third Option:
- During the attack on Crown Station, your two main options are to try to take out as many Imperial troops as possible or make a desperate run on the Lightbearer. Though there is also another avenue of action, which is to storm the Imperial command ship in order to force the commander to do your bidding. Taking the third option here leads to another instance of this trope - if you manage to get Commander at riflepoint, you can either bargain with him to spare Crown Station, spare the Rebellion fleet...or use your sliver tongue to attempt to get him to spare both.
- At the climax of the game after you wrest control of the Lightbearer from Hawkins, you can follow the original plan of using it against the Imperial fleet, turn traitor and use it to wipe out the rebels, or let both sides know that you've got control of the biggest stick in the war and that they should stand down posthaste if they know what's good for them.
- Talking the Monster to Death: Gather the right information and have the right stats, and it's possible to skip the a number of fights with Hawkins. The first involves playing on their nature, talking about how you've been on patrol for days and are so tired you won't give them the fight they want. The second involves either demonstrating that their philosophy is deeply flawed, or telling them that you love them and don't want to see them like this. The latter, obviously, is only possible if you're in a romance with them.
- Tears of Joy: Watanabe sheds them after laying eyes on the protagonist if your lance helps civilians on Vedria Prime's surface, and also when they're reunited after the latter escapes from Imperial captivity.
- Übermensch: Commandant Hawkins is a philosophical warrior who believes that humanity can only become strong through conflict and warfare. In one ending, they change their motivation to a constant struggle against war.
- Wave-Motion Gun: The Lightbearer, the super-weapon of the Imperials, which is capable of destroying over half the Co Dec military fleet in one shot. Capturing it is key ending the war, as you can either use it to destroy the Imperial fleet, intimidate them into an unconditional surrender, or threaten both sides into a ceasefire.
