Made by Artdink, the team behind cult classic mech programming game Carnage Heart as well as the Japanese release of Psygnosis' Colony Wars, The SEED seems well within their wheelhouse and also nothing like the others.
It's a mission-based not-quite RTS with a ship design system similar to Industries of Titan, but far more complex as you'd expect of a core mechanic. It also has a brooding storyline where stock mecha anime characters face off against an enemy awfully similar to The Beast from Homeworld: Cataclysm.
Sadly, I cannot speak to how good the writing is as I've never been further than the 5th mission in the game, for one simple reason:
The SEED fucking sucks, apparently by design.
Let's beat it anyway.
One of my gaming white whales is to not only beat this game but utterly crush it. There are no recordings on the internet of its credits or later missions. The best I've been able to find is a Let's Play by Japanese user Rishi Channel that reaches the 7th mission.
Being an unfun game is not an excuse for nobody finishing it, especially given the scale of its ambitions. As far as I can tell, The SEED is not buggy or impossible. Its biggest problem is that nobody knows about it; apart from that, there a couple of issues that may or may not be a turn off to potential players.
The easiest problem to solve is that it doesn't respect your time. Your ships wander slowly across the battlefield in real time, but enemy detections blast you with loud notifications and often leave mere seconds to respond. Fine, whatever; just use savestates and speed control to wrangle it into a modern RTS experience.
The other thing it has a resource economy that's impossible to grasp without capturing mission knowledge in an Excel spreadsheet.
Why?
Because that's how you manage hundreds of individual SKUs in real life.
Remember that cool ship design system?
What resources do you think you'll expend to build them? Cash? Metal?
No; every part in a ship's design needs to be drawn individually from the base's inventory. If memory serves me there's less than a hundred SKUs, but you have to redesign the ship if even one of them is in shortfall.
You do have currency, but it's mostly used to research new SKUs. You can use it to buy parts, but you have to ship them in mid battle, on transports that can be attacked en route, which takes ages. A smart playthrough would entail plugging every friendly base's part inventory into a spreadsheet for budgeting before you even start the mission.
You can also salvage parts from destroyed enemies, which adds an unpleasant randomness to the proceedings. But the most perverse result is this:
You are actively encouraged to rob your own bases at the end of each mission, bringing all the parts home to sell for money.
Oh, and there's only one battle track, which happens to be "Mars" by Gustav Holst. According to two ratings on GameFAQs the full game is over 80 hours long, so should you decide to tackle this beast, that breakcore playlist is definitely gonna come in handy.
There's a part of me that wants to do an Accursed Farms or Warlockracy-style digest video of this, but sadly I have reasons for never wanting to narrate a video and I don't have the following to justify a 1hr video essay anyway.
So the next best thing, I thought, is to somehow make cohost aware of this incredible kusoge and maybe rope other people into beating it before or after me.
Diiis-missed!