"Vatlva (バトルバ) is a 1996 vehicular combat game that has you traversing square battlefields, with a ton (or few) of obstacles inbetween; that is the general gist of the game, but once you deconstruct it and look at each part of the whole, you will come away quite impressed with its depth. Initially, there are six combatants to pick from and each has the usual video game tropes on display: your Mighty Glacier, your Fragile Speedster, Glass Cannon, each character is unique and has their own attributes aside from what you can customize. Once your character has been selected, there are two ways you can utilize said customization (which is limited by the amount of credits that can be used), in vehicle performance and weapons. For vehicle performance, you can raise or lower the attributes for a multitude of options, such as handling, battery power speed and more. Tweaking your vehicle is not always necessary, but it can make your battles a lot more fun and efficient. Weapon customization sees you selecting a weapon for every Saturn face button, shooting either in front or behind your vehicle; from melee weapons, to guns, bombs and lasers, there are quite a few to select from and each is useful in their correct application.

Once you have customized your vehicle to your liking, it is time to let it rip in either the scenario mode or free for all mode. The scenario plays like a typical story mode in a fighting game; fight your opponent (along with win quotes and the like), beat them, move up the chain until beating the boss and then beat the game. One good thing in scenario is that you are not locked into your customized vehicles for the entirety of the game; between each round/continue, you can modify your vehicle to better suit what you are going for, upping the variety of game play even more. In free for all, you can fight a oneonone battle or duke it out with up to five others and the game then becomes great partyfodder, especially since it keeps track of the winners and which character(s) they have chosen; simplistic, yet great depth and pick up and play variety, is all over Vatlva. The third and final mode is simply a customization area, where you can save up to twenty different vehicles, customized how you want them. Vatlva is a greatplaying game, be it in single, multiplayer or as a party game.

Story
In the year 2050, a (supposed) Big Bad named Gato Yamada, holds a vehicular combat tournament and invites six combatants to take part, along with his two right hands and Yamada himself. That is basically it, for the story; once you delve into the characters and their backgrounds, there appears to be a bit more depth (going off of the anime intro, ending and characterspecific endings) as each character has their own motivations, likes/dislikes and resolutions that they are seeking. Thankfully, the characters all look great and appear to be very wellcharacterized, which adds a ton of personality to things.

Graphics
One thing going for the game is that it runs in the Saturn’s High Resolution mode, which makes it look sharp and fast regardless of how good or bad the actual graphics are. The game begins in a verynicely welldone anime intro, drawn by Hitoshi Ariga (Rockman manga artist) and he has his hands on all of the characterrelated art in this game; it looks awesome and since the game uses the MPEG Softdec Codec (that all of the Dreamcast games used), if you insert an MPEG card into your Saturn, you get fullscreen, crisp video. The vehicles themselves look superb and highly distinct, though they lose a bit of detail on the battlefield, which also looks excellent and unique for each character and each character has their own quirks.

Sound
This is clearly the best element of the game and it is so good, it definitely makes the game even more enjoyable than it already is. I was astounded at the quality and style of the music as I was playing and it was absolutely no surprise that when I was looking for soundtrack information after beating the game, that the entirety of the game was composed and performed by Motohiro Kawashima and the videogame music guru himself, Yuzo Koshiro. Each track is pure video gameelectronica from the 90s, just a wonderful mix of tunes and greatsounding themes with a bunch of different instruments and styles thrown in. Each character has a few voice samples as well, which crop up at different points during game play. The vehicle sounds are superb and are a great representation of the visual that they correspond with."

game review: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/saturn/...

0:00 Intro / Menus
3:00 Story Mode w/Pek Sisters
28:15 All Endings
34:05 Machine Settings
36:45 Battle Mode
1:11:10 NoPlays
1:50:20 BGM
2:05:05 Sound Effects
2:09:15 Voice Effects

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#SegaSaturn #バトルバ #VehicleCombat