So, I’ve been knocking out the last bits of the PS3 backlog this month.  That’s two games played to completion (Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time and Into the Nexus), four games dropped from the backlog for various sins, and one to go: the 2013 Macross 30th Anniversary game.

I’d better finish this one, because a quick look through my Amazon history reveals that I paid a ridiculous import price for it.  It helps that it’s a pretty good game, mind you.  It’s also reportedly quite lengthy – while the PSP Macross games in this series were very much action oriented affairs build around short and portable-friendly missions, this is an open-world “Flight Action RPG” and has lots of talky bits and story breaking up the flying around and shooting things.

One of the hooks of the game is that your character, a Valkyrie pilot from the Macross Frontier timeline, apparently somehow meets characters from every other Macross series.

Except II.  Technically, in the timeline it falls AFTER Frontier so theoretically they have an out for why it’s not represented, but I think the real reason is that they would rather forget it ever happened.

Anyway, I’m not sure how the whole thing is going to shake out, as I’ve just finished the first chapter/tutorial section of the game, which has me about six hours in,  but I am rather looking forward to seeing how they pull this off (time travel? holograms? alien hallucinogenics? the mind boggles at the possibilities.)

It’s not ALL about the old characters and cameos, mind you.  The main cast of the game is characters original to the game, so you have your disillusioned mercenary pilot with a traumatic past, an amnesiac artificial human trying to avoid her destiny, and an micronized Meltlandi girl/fighter pilot/genius mechanic trying to unlock the secrets of the ruins that cover the planet they’re all stuck on.

I am really looking forward to seeing said Meltlandi macronize and kick arse, by the way, though I don’t expect anything can come close to Klan Klang’s berserker rage from Frontier.  Still, I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t happen.