Wander Vehicles - Doggybone Daisakusen (Playstation)

 So, this is a game that I instantly knew I had to play as soon as I saw screenshots of it, though, seeing it was a strategy game, I was worried about potential language barrier problems (which I'll address later). It's about small-scale tank battles between the armed forces of two countries: The Doggy Bone Republic (your guys, who are all anthropomorphic dogs) and the Banana Slip Kingdom (the enemy, who are all anthropomorphic monkeys). A third country, the Cat's Eye Confederation (anthropomorphic cats, of course), seem content to play profiteers, selling supplies to both sides. At least, that's how it looks to me, without being able to actually understand any of the dialogue.

 

Luckily, the game at its most basic isn't hard to figure out without being able to read Japanese! You have a few squads made up of three tanks each, and so does the enemy. You pick a squad and tell them where on the batle field you want them to go, by stretching a line out from their current location. When they encounter an enemy squadron, they'll ask if you want them to attack or carry on moving. Every squad is also marked with a rock, paper, or scissors hand sign, which obviously tells you who'll come out on top in a straight 3v3 fight.

 

So, your task in most of the stages is to figure out which of your squads to move to which locations, and at which times, to ensure they don't end up in battles they can't win. Some stages just want you to wipeout the opposition, others want you to get all your tanks to a certain location on the map, and it's one of these stages, the fourth in the game, where I came up against a (literal) barrier. In this stage, you make your way across a jungle swamp, with a few enemy squads lurking about. The battle part is pretty complicated, as attacking one squad will summon a nearby squad of a different element to back it up, so you've got to try and occupy different enemy squads at the same time. On my third attempt at this, I managed to wipe them all out and cross the swamp.

 

Unfortunately, this was a "reach the location" stage, and the location was behind some electric forcefields, and I couldn't figure out how to pass them at all. I'd been really enjoying the game up until this point, so I sought a solution online, only to encounter the big disadvantage inherent to writing about obscure games: if no-one's played it, no-one can help you. There's one attempted let's play on Youtube, which ends when the player dies near the start of this very stage. I found a series of videos on niconicodouga that appeared to be a complete playthrough, and got excited. Then I clicked the link to the video for stage four, and found that the videos only contained the cutscenes, and no actual gameplay footage.

 

Hopefully, someday, I'll be able to pass this stage, either because someone with better Japanese literacy than me will play the game and make a guide, or maybe someone will even make a translation patch, someday, since the Playstation seems to be growing in popularity among that scene. But until then, I can unfortunately only recommend Wander Vehicles (sometimes mistransliterated as "Wonder B-Cruise") to those who can read Japanese, or who have the perseverence to figure out this kind of thing through trial and error. However, I was thoroughly enjoying it until I got stuck, so if the language barrier isn't a problem for you, or if someone does reveal the solution for all to see at some point in the future, it's definitely worth playing.