VG Thought

I wanted to name him something else this time, no matter how lame, and came up with "Anihair", for "anime hair", then I realized the limit was 6 letters and had to go with Anihai.
Which sounds better than my original idea. I guess the letter limit has its uses!

Beat the chapter.

Also--not necessarily related to Akira, but something I've been thinking about in general--I like how there are different overworld mechanics and story ideas, but I wish there was a chapter that had a different win condition for fighting. Like, I dunno, you could have a soccer chapter where your goal is to get a soccer ball into the enemy's net. Okay, that's kind of a lame idea, but you get my point; you win every fight in the entire game by killing all of your enemies. In a game where each chapter has such distinct overworld mechanics, it's weird that the battles are so static.

Actually, the wrestling chapter kind of addressed that, didn't it? You used combat to learn moves. So yeah, I appreciate that, but more could've been done.

Have you played Captain Square in the robot chapter yet? Basically every battle is a puzzle.

Also battles occasionally have puzzle elements, like a guy in the Anime chapter who can be one hit KO'd if you hit him from behind. A recurring "puzzle" is that if you kill an important enemy, the rest die instantly, but this might be overused. I suppose I consider this a game mechanic, you can kill the leader to end the battle quickly, but you'll get more loot if you kill everybody.

Yeah, I definitely defaulted to just ousting the leader in the later Mecha battles because the enemy line up changes as you level and sometimes it would be a bunch of jerks I didn't wanna bother with/teetered on mercing my guy and I didn't know about the rad move-giving items for Taro, so he wasn't as amazing as he was supposed to be.
Despite the increasingly annoying overworld map battles, Mecha ended up tying as my favorite chapter so far.

Oh yeah, I guess there are a few different rules for clearing battles. Like the ones where you can win by killing the leader, and then there's that boss in Oboro's chapter that gives you an item if you make sure to kill all the cronies.

I definitely tried to get out of Akira battles ASAP, so I hope the lack of experience doesn't come back to bite me.

Who's the guy you can kill in one hit if you hit him from behind?