Shogo: Mobile Armor Division

About Shogo: Mobile Armor Division

Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (1998) is Monolith's anime-inspired first-person shooter, mixing on-foot gunfights with battles in giant mechs, and the first game built on the LithTech engine.

Shogo: Mobile Armor Division in Depth

In a war over the planet Cronus and its supply of kato, the liquid reactant that makes interstellar travel possible, the player is Sanjuro Makabe, a Mobile Combat Armor pilot and commander in the army of the United Corporate Authority. Founded as a joint venture of three organisations, the UCA is now independent and the dominant military power. Sanjuro's mission is to find and assassinate Gabriel, leader of the rebel group The Fallen. Before the game begins he has lost his brother Toshiro, his best friend Baku and his girlfriend Kura in the war, and he is driven by revenge and by his relationship with Kura's sister Kathryn; in his words, "It's kinda complicated." Most of the action takes place on Cronus or the spaceship Leviathan.

The game alternates standard on-foot shooting with combat in anime-style bipedal mechs, which, unlike in simulators such as MechWarrior, are controlled just like a first-person shooter. Its combat system includes critical hits: an attack will occasionally deal extra damage and give the player a health bonus, though enemies can score critical hits too. At two pivotal points the player makes a decision; the first is almost purely narrative, but the second determines who the player fights for the rest of the game and how it ends. The design draws heavily on Japanese animation, particularly Patlabor and Appleseed, and the real robot mecha genre.

Making Shogo: Mobile Armor Division

Lead designer Craig Hubbard later said that Shogo, "although critically successful", fell embarrassingly short of its goals, "a grim reminder of the perils of wild optimism and unchecked ambition" for a small team that struggled with planning, scope, staffing and inexperience. About six months before shipping they realised they could not make it great, "so we just focused on making it fun", putting their energy into making the weapons fun to use. Reviews were favourable, just short of universal acclaim on Metacritic, and Next Generation called it "an excellent game" able to stand up to Half-Life and SiN. CNET Gamecenter's Mark Asher called its sales disappointing, and with SiN and Blood II also failing he suggested the shooter market was smaller than believed.