This is part three of an ongoing review series (though future parts may have to be off-site, given all of the everything - should that happen, I will repost parts one through three there as well, for archival and reference purposes). You can find PART ONE here and find PART TWO here or in the tags.
I wanted to talk about more of this game, and I suppose I fell into the trap that we do in this impermanent place, of thinking that surely the platform will still be here tomorrow; surely there will be more time. [^1] And then suddenly there isn't time, and there's more that you want to say, and your designs to do an ordered and organized walkthrough of factions and pilot types and analysis falls apart because you really want to get SOMETHING up, and so you make a push to do so, and here it is. This isn't the final piece of my review, even if it ends up being the final piece on Cohost, but I'm definitely going to skip around a bit.
Over the last couple decades I've seen a heartbreaking number of mech TTRPGs come and go, and run into one wall or another. Frequently, that wall is Battletech: I can't tell you the number of Battletech heartbreakers I've seen come and go. Out of all that time, there are, I think... 5? mech tabletop games [^2] that've come out which stick with me and elevate themselves out of the broad "well, it's fine, you'll have fun" category, and Violet Core is one of those. Today, I want to talk about it again, and talk about where it's succeeding in places that other games have failed for me.
It's not hard to make a good looking mech game. Now that I've opened myself up to protest fire, let me clarify: there are no shortage of skilled mech artists for hire (often far too available for hire; artists are perpetually underemployed and should be hired and paid more and I will die on this hill even as a poor person) and for those willing and able to hire them, or those willing to work on their own skill or find public domain art assets, there is a rich visual language and lexicon for the mecha ur-genre and its component subgenres. Out of all the anime-adjacent media, there's probably a stronger visual language to "mecha" than there is for "cyberpunk" or "fantasy" genres, to say nothing of languishing offshoots like "girls with guns" or even "crime anime". If you put in the work and learn from the copious amounts of resources out there, it's not hard to make a good looking mech game!
Most of those heartbreakers I referenced above were gorgeous, or at minimum a cut above your standard low-effort layout that a lot of amateur RPG work succumbs to. The aesthetic was sometimes scattered, but usually strong despite that. It's not the style that was lacking, but the support. It's not hard to make a good looking mech game; it's much harder to develop that in tandem with what you want your game to say (or even have your game say anything in the first place - so many Battletech heartbreakers have been just "this is our BT house rules. Story? Themes? What do you mean, that's something the DM does at the table... if you even have them..." that it's not uncommon for a game to say nothing at all in this genre).
Violet Core understands that aesthetics are important, but style needs to be used in harmony with substance and structure, and proceeds to deliver all three with aplomb. Instead of simply trying to replicate the surface dynamics that make mech stories so popular (especially with marginalized audiences), the game digs down and asks how can we set these up to emerge naturally, how can we set it up to cause friction, how can we make it feel like whole characters interacting instead of just pushing action figures together and saying 'now kiss'. Then it proceeds to back that up with a game system and rhythm that inspires action and movement and, especially, interaction and change: this isn't a romance simulator where you go down a checklist of tropes, this is the whole package of personal politics, conflicting drives (within AND without characters), starborn romance and esoteric mecha dueling against a solar backdrop.
One of the problems that a lot of mecha TTRPGs [^3] run into is the question of how to replicate genre conventions. Even when it's purely visual, this isn't always easy: how do you establish the signature Itano Circus [^4] in your rules? Do you have additional rules for firing off a whole bank of missiles at once? Do you roll to hit a single time or multiples? What about dodging? What about all the moments when... well, insert your favorite mech visual theme, trope or moment here and I guarantee that someone has wrestled with how, or even whether to include it. But this goes beyond the visual into other elements as well, such as inter-character relationships and tensions. What is Amuro Ray without Bright Noa? Without Kamille Bidan? Without Ramba Ral for an enemy? Without CHAR AZNABLE?
Most mecha TTRPGs and tabletop tacticals face down a challenging scenario: do you apply metagame rules and pressures to make sure that the players both HAVE rivals and that the rivals escape, such as having a rule that any "nemesis"-class enemy will always flee the battlefield or some kind of metacurrency or even just encouraging GM Fiat? Or do you accept the mindset that several decades of D&D-descended skirmish games has instilled on the community, the one which isn't even entirely wrong, that a living enemy may be defeated today and return to cause problems tomorrow... but a dead enemy is dead? There's an urge to bloodthirst in the tabletop hobby community's DNA that is rarely reckoned with, but often emerges to surprise the DM who's prepared a tense standoff with the villain escaping, only for the players to go for the throat as quickly as possible, to not let a chase scene end if there's a theoretical chance of catching their quarry, and so on. If Amuro Ray is a player character, Char Aznable dies unless he wins, in most of the groups I've played with over the decades.
This is, obviously, an issue if you want to tell a story about personal relationships and rivalries.
Some games handle this on the tactical level: Lancer sitreps are often carefully constructed point-races, where the challenge is not "wipe the field clean of your enemies" but rather "can you afford to go chasing your enemies, instead of securing the objective? Because if you break off to melee-engage this troublemaker, you'll lose the point this round" and other exercises where incautious bloodthirst leads to bad ends (unless you're sufficiently violent enough to do both, but that's another game balance situation entirely).
Other games handle it explicitly on the meta level: Armour Astir is textually about recreating the beats of a treasured mecha series and so the structure represents that, Spectres of Brocken does the same, various characters and elements are off limits until and unless certain flags are set and certain decisions are made, very deliberately, in order to avoid happenstance outside the authorial position, in order to assist the scripting. Because that IS one advantage that most audience-focused mech media has over the TTRPG: the author gets to determine the outcome, whether it ends up feeling contrived or not. And a lot of the time, I've seen players who aren't 100% on board with the premise of narrative-directing games bristle and rebel that someone is telling them no, you can't indulge in the conditioned bloodlust, you can't take the "strategically optimal" move of denying your enemy the chance to field that ace again, you must let them escape.
Sometimes, I've been that player.
Violet Core threads a tricky needle here, and in my opinion does it very skillfully. Ultimately, player buy-in to the core conceit is important. With any game, if you're just not having it, the game can only do so much: you cannot bad-faith proof your game with any amount of design work or artistry. If someone is determined not to engage with your intent, you cannot rules-construct them back in line. However, when you have that good faith, however much of it, you can do some amazing things with design work and scaffolding so that you don't require strict narrative rules-structure in order to deliver the promised tension.
So, come with me on this journey. You're a pilot, for an advanced mech. Only a few of these X-10s exist, and you're flying one of them. You fly on behalf of your faction - of your community. Your people. You're all spaceborne now: surviving on asteroid bases, on space habitats, on mobile carriers and smaller spacecraft. Maybe there's a few facilities down on planets and planetoids outside the main life-supporting world in your solar system, on the moons of one of the gas giants, but the bulk of your people live in space. The longer time rolls on, the more likely it is that space is all you've ever known: some years ago, your people were barred from ever going back to the home world, the place life was born. They blocked it off, and you can't go home again.
You're not alone out here: there are two rival factions to yours (maybe more, maybe there are minor factions which hassle you as well) with their own ships, with their own X-10's. One of them designed the first X-10, unless that's your own faction. It gets bristly up here sometimes, because there's a limited amount of resource reach to go around, even if space is big, even if there are more resources further out - you have to GET there to collect them. You bump shoulders a lot. You want different things.
But at the same time, you're all there is, the three of you. There are no more people out here. Every loss diminishes us.
Take that a step further. Piloting the X-10 puts you in a tiny, tiny subculture. There aren't many of these beauties.
When you've seen the world out here from the cockpit of an X-10, when you've clashed with other pilots, when you've danced among the stars with equals, you learn something: even though you're representing your home people and their interests, they won't understand you like this. Not like your fellow pilots. Not even like your rivals.
Every pilot death is like a wound to this tiny, tiny, intimate subculture. It's not just the resources to repair a damaged X-10, or replace a destroyed one, although those are scarce too. It's the loss of that experience. Even without going into the surreal intimacy that happens when two X-10's engage and the energy put out by their cores intermingles during the dance, where pilots connect on a visceral, emotional, direct level, even if that bond didn't exist, wouldn't you mourn a friend that you only saw down the barrel of a gun just as strongly? Wouldn't you let them go, so you could meet someone who understands you again later?
That understanding is also key in another way - sometimes, alliances form. Temporary, long-term, official or unofficial, sometimes you end up working alongside pilots you were previously scrapping with. Knowing that, how could you destroy someone who will probably be a (tense, temporary) ally in the future (but an ally is still an ally)? Do you hate them so much? Do you hate so fiercely that love can't overcome it? And even if you do hate them so much, is it worth carrying the badge of pilot-killer and ostracizing yourself from your potential peers, who'll know you by that reputation?
Damage to one pilot is damage to them all, in a way. Every loss diminishes us.
And yes, also, you can't get those emotionally charged, tense moments where you and your rival have to work together to get off the moon you find yourselves stranded on (and will they kiss, or won't they?) if you go out of your way to shoot them down, but here there isn't a need for a separate rule to point it out. That's what the Cerulean homeworld does, after all: they're the ones who destroy with impunity. And we are not like them. We can't be.
The world constructed here is elegantly, excellently done. This is a game with stories upon stories to tell. There's even more which I've read, including some stuff which I'm forbidden from talking about, which deepens the experience even more. It's very, very good and I'm excited, both to share more of my thoughts, and to see this game take shape for an official release. Did I mention that part? Because I am.
Violet Core is going to be Kickstarting soon. Keep your eyes out for it. I know I will be.
(Footnotes seem broken right now so here are the footnotes listed, it's 5:30 AM and I am going to try to sleep and I'll fix this tomorrow if it gets fixed, or not if it doesn't)
1: Also, disability sucks, y'all. Brain fog and big depression and pain is hard. This isn't an excuse, more of an exorcism, because if I didn't say it in text I would certainly be saying it in my head the whole time. I truly hate the myth of the writer who bloomed during depression or disability and pain, because it's done so much harm. Anyhow, some days/weeks/months you just can't write, no matter how much you want to.
2: Maybe more than 5. It's more of a convenient reference number than a hard-and-fast top 5, even if it's also a top-5, and... eh. For the record, in no particular order, the other games in that category are Celestial Bodies, Lancer, Heavy Gear, and Salvage Union, with Apocalypse Frame and Armour Astir and Kernel bubbling just beneath them for more-than-honorable mention. And a host of other games that have mechs IN them but aren't MECH games per se, and the as-yet-unreleased Eldritch Automata, but I can't really review that past my faith in the team that Gehenna Gaming put together for their second launch. Perchance.
3: a lot of TTRPGs in general, honestly, but that's a subject for another essay that I'm only just touching on here.
4: Or Macross Missile Massacre if you MUST
I told you it was soon.
Here is a link.
Go.
You’re welcome.
