YMMV / Shogo: Mobile Armor Division

• Anti-Climax Boss: Gabriel in the story path where you fight the Fallen. Empowered by a Starfish Alien that makes him invulnerable to damage? Check. Massive, one-of-a-kind MCA with a highly lethal melee attack? Check. A strategy that consists of only melee attacks as he walks towards you slowly? Whoops. A Good Bad Bug even makes it so that as long as you don't approach him, his AI will never trigger and you can safely kick his ass with no danger at all.
  • Baku/Uziel's second fight in the same story path is this, bordering on a Zero-Effort Boss. He's only a little harder than your average elite mook, and helpfully tells you he's coming before he spawns, meaning there's no chance you'll get ambushed (which could actually make him somewhat dangerous, at least if you haven't memorized when and where he appears.)
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In the middle of your journey through the city of Meritropa, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Sanjuro is forced to make a detour to rescue an old lady's cat. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context, and apart from the cat's squeaky toy continuing to take up the #8 weapon slot when Sanjuro's on foot the event is never referred to again. (Although it makes a degree of sense from an out-of-universe standpoint, as the game is an homage to Giant Robot anime where this kind of silly thing happens.) Of course, you could also just murder the lady and her husband to continue the plot with no consequence outside of missing out on a mega health boost; the game just moves on with no comment.
  • In the path where you fight the Fallen, Uziel pops out of an elevator airduct to attack you, dies, and then the game moves on like it never happened. This in spite of the fact that Uziel is Baku, Sanjuro's childhood friend. The cast discounted the man as Ax-Crazy, albeit it was something of an Informed Flaw, but it's never referenced afterwards.
  • Every encounter with Samantha past the initial, sensible one. She appears mainly to have surprise boss fights out of nowhere as a Running Gag parody of the Unknown Rival as she keeps surviving each incident somehow. Even after you beat her for the final time when you're on-foot and she's in an MCA for an ambush, Sanjuro just opts to make a Bond One-Liner and the story moves on like it never happened.
• Catharsis Factor: Finally getting to kill Ishikawa, considering he fucks you over and kills your friend, along with committing numerous other atrocities. He seems to get away with everything... until the end.
• Complete Monster: Ryo Ishikawa is the president of Shogo Industries who desires Kato all for himself. Manipulating the UCA and the Fallen to fight each other over Kato, Ryo hopes to have both sides kill off each other so that he can monopolize Kato for his company. With Sanjuro Makabe getting in the way of his plans, he tries to kill him by sending a train of innocents and his own men out of control, and murders helpful engineer Hank Johnson in front of Sanjuro, later manipulating Admiral Nathaniel Akkaraju into launching the Kato Cannon upon the planet Cronus, with zero care for the possible innocent lives lost.
• Funny Moments:
  • At the end of the briefing, Sanjuro mutters "I'll see that myself if I have to," and when the Admiral asks if he has something to share, says, "Yes sir, you are my personal hero sir!"
  • The credits sequence, in which Sanjuro, angry about Carla not serving him because he's on duty, blows her away with a rocket launcher.
  • Attempting to go into a restricted area on the station will result in a guard refusing you entry. When you voice your displeasure he says "I have my orders sir, please be nice to me."
• Game-Breaker: The Red Riot, while normally only available at the end of the game on one route, is also peppered throughout multiplayer MCA maps (though, usually difficult to get to without the tractor beam function enabled). The weapon, which actually has a track named after it in the game, has a massive range and blast radius, and is strong enough to instantly vaporize even a Predator, the toughest and most heavily armored of the four mecha available, if it even so much as touches the edge of the blast. While each pick-up only gives one shot, they are hard enough to reach that if you're feeling brave and don't mind the other players getting right pissed at you, you can simply sit on top of the drop point and get a full stock of 10. Heck, the aforementioned tractor beam in a way is a bit of a game breaker as it lets you cling to the sky box, well out of sight or reach of enemy weapons, while you could simply pepper the ground below with red riot blasts.
• Good Bad Bugs: Changing weapons while using a scope remains in scope view but changes the weapons, allowing for much more precise shots with normally inaccurate weapons.
  • When confronting Admiral Akkaraju in one of the endings, they run off ranting in a cutscene - and then they repeat the exact same line as the sound trails off due to the distance from the camera. It makes them seem less like they're absolutely pissed off and more like a grumpy lunatic who's probably continuing his rant off-camera.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ryo's status as the game's true Big Bad is firmly cemented when he kills Hank right before your eyes just because he can. He even purposefully delays the fatal shot so that he can make Sanjuro beg for Hank's life.
  • In the previous level, he also tries to kill Sanjuro by sending the train he is on—which has innocent civilians and his own men on it—out of control after revealing that he supported Ivan Isarevich and turned Kura over to the CMC.
  • If you take the path to support Gabriel rather than fight him, then good ol' Admiral Akkaraju decides the only way to claim a victory from the jaws of defeat is to kill everyone with the Kato Cannon from orbit, even if arguably Ryo is responsible for the man's Sanity Slippage. He gets court martialed for it in this ending, big time.
• Player Punch: Hank, the likable mechanic who saved your ass, is killed for his trouble.
  Sanjuro: Ryo is going to die, and it's going to be bloody.
• Obvious Beta:
  • Bits of story are missing and made up for with large exposition blocks between levels, various assets are particularly unpolished (especially with Uziel/Baku, who wields a scaled-up Juggernaut, blurry textures and all), bugs persist throughout the entire game, the balance is extremely broken and filled with Fake Difficulty, and other numerous problems. As a result, Shogo feels more like you're playing an unfinished product than it probably should. Considering this game predated Blood II by only a month during a rather tight time for Monolith and even shared the same engine, it's not hard to see why.
  • The opening video for the game itself consists of early gameplay footage and 2D artwork. While the video portions seem to be at a uniform level of polish, some sequences don't appear in the game: one video shows a school-aged boy (young Sanjuro) running towards a basketball hoop; there is no sequence like this in the finished product. The 2D artwork varies in quality, including lovingly-rendered pencil drawings, profiles that are obviously character design sheets, and hastily inked and colored portraits of characters who didn't seem to make the cut (it can be inferred that one of them is Ivan Isarevich, but the others are a mystery).
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Critical Hit system. On paper it's a good idea, in practice, having enemies randomly critical hit you and killing you with just two hits is considered the thing that almost made the game unbeatable without Save Scumming.
• That One Level:
  • The mission where you choose which endgame path you will go down is a bit of a nightmare. On foot, you have to fight through hordes of enemies who have powerful weapons and can kill you rather quickly. And to make matters worse, enemies will spawn in behind you as you progress and attempt to sneak up on you to kill you. And regardless of whether you side or fight the Fallen, the enemy layout remains exactly the same. If you plan to fight the fallen, it's best to simply not go to the meeting place and just shoot the guards around the building while still in your MCA so you can skip the entire area.
  • Choosing the story path where you fight the Fallen has this trope rife throughout the last levels. The MCA levels aren't too bad in the game up until this fiendishly absurd section where enemies lie in wait, can see you from half a mile away, and basically have every weapon in the game to make you miserable. The most infamous is the Fallen base itself, which happens to contain enemies wielding the GameBreaker Red Riot above. They'll see you before you see them, fire with a weapon that works akin to hitscan, and instant kill you because your entrance into the area has you surrounded by rocks the explosions will spread from even if the shots miss you. Your only bet is to essentially bumrush the enemy position and lay the fire down rather than dare risk peeking and sniping away them.
  • On the flip side, siding with the Fallen has the final area basically requiring that you stop the Kato Cannon from firing in under two minutes. When Kathryn says you're up against the clock, she means it even though you only have audio cues to work off of, as you'll get a Non-Standard Game Over if you fail. Naturally, the control consoles are rather confusingly placed around a space that has no real consistency, and the area is brimming with Elite Mooks that take a surprising amount of damage and can kill you in no time flat thanks to this being an on-foot section. Shogo doesn't work well as a run-and-gun shooter in the on-foot parts thanks to the way damage works, and being pressured into a situation where you can die near-instantly for so much as turning a corner while having to memorize where the consoles are is a right terror due to the strict as hell time constraints.
• Underused Game Mechanic: There are only two points in the game in which you have the option to make dialogue choices- when you decide whether to tell Kura about seeing Katherine, and whether you join the Fallen.

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