It’s been 40 years since a new cartoon about transforming robotic weapons and interstellar war hit the airwaves. No, I’m not talking about Transformers; I’m talking about Robotech! With its distinct visuals and storytelling, Robotech made an indelible impression on many of us back in the day. For many, it was their introduction to anime, which, for some like myself, has become a lifelong interest since!
One of the more recent attempts to revive interest in this now-nostalgic (man I feel old) property was a tabletop wargame financed by Kickstarter in 2014. Unforntunately, the “Robotech RPG Tactics” game that was produced was… not very successful.
However, the game set that was released DID contain a lot of miniatures of Valkyries, Regults and other neat Robotech/Macross mecha. Having recently acquired one, I thought it might be fun to look at it not from a gaming perspective, but from a modelling perspective! You can check out what all the quickly-forgotten hoopla was about below!
A lot of people were disappointed and have spent a lot of time trying to come up with alternate rules. I don’t play games, so I don’t know why this is as difficult as it seems to be. There must be another battle system into which you can just drop in the Robotech mecha, no?
Damn right there is, and massively successful one at that; “Robotech” may have faded, but “BattleTech” has kept the machinery alive and well in an entirely different universe, and added so much more. There are novels, TV series, video games, the works… Despite the property being passed around between companies, it’s never gone away since it’s inception in 1984 and is still going strong; particularly the “MechWarrior” RPG which is a staple of RPG clubs I drop in on occasion (confusingly, this name is used for the videogame variant). Due to licensing/I.P. issues some of the original Robotech mechs disappeared (“The Unseen” to aficionados) but many more were spawned. As well as the 1:285th/1:300th minis and the purely display models in their various scales, mechs became available as toys (some rather large) and even plastic brick models. There are even cheap anonymised versions around: Mechs - 5 Plastic Miniatures – em4miniatures
There were a lot of designs that were ‘adopted’ by FASA; I recall that in the original box for the “Battledroids” game (before LucasArts sued them over the use of the term ‘droid’), there were two bagged but boxless models of mecha from the anime series “Fang of the Sun Dougram” (in my case, a Dougram and a Soltic, as I recall).