So I ordered Assault, Battle Legends, and Legacy...

[chris514]

And now I am wondering if there are any other Zoids games I should take a look at. Any recommendations? I am going to go out on a limb here and assume none will be in english.

[Hanyoutai]

Zoids Tactics can be fun, even if you can't understand the story. You can figure it out if you just sit down and tinker with the controls. It is a strategy based game where you have to position/move your Zoids across a field, kind of like fire emblem. Vaguely. Turn based battle as well.

Full Metal Crash / Struggle are also great button mashers. Arena style fighting where your goal is to just brutally dismember your enemy. Requires very little knowledge of Japanese, and has fun graphics and armor breaking stuff.

[chris514]

Hmm... I wonder if there might be any translation patches out there for the game roms.

I have all the necessary hardware to dump/rip roms from games like these (which is legal to do in my country as long as it is for personal back up and not for redistribution) and I know I have used a few fan made translation patches (patches are legal to distribute as they contain no copywritten material until they are applied to a rom) on roms in the past like my Pokemon Trading Card Game 2 for Game Boy Color.

Are any of these games largely text oriented? By that I mean do they have text based menues to navigate vs. a narrator? I ask because I know translating text in a game is much easier than trying to replace narration audio so they would be more likely to have patches out there that I could find.

[Falcarius]

I haven't been able to find a completed translation patch for any of the Zoids games, although there's one for Shirogane no Juukishin that translates some of the menus and combat text. On the other hand, pretty much all of the Zoids games have text-based menus and story, if that helps. Oh, and there is one more officially-released "English" game: The Battle Begins for Commodore 64 (and a couple of other ancient computers)

What genres are you most interested in? Most of the Zoids games are either turn-based strategy (Mokushiroku, Empire vs Republic/Helic vs Guylos, Battle Card Game, Tactics, Alternative/Assault), Pokemon-esque RPG (Battle of the Central Continent/Counterattack of Zenebas, Jashin Fukkatsu, Shirogane no Juukishin, the Saga series) or 3D action (the VS and Infinity series), although there's also a couple of scrolling shooters (Densetsu and Material Hunters), fighting games (Struggle and Full Metal Crash), a sort of RPG-strategy hybrid (Cyberdrive), a platformer (Dash), and even one that's basically rock-paper-scissors (Battle Colosseum).

I'd definitely recommend Struggle/FMC, VS3 and Infinity as far as action games go, but be prepared to wade through a lot of text if you play the Struggle and FMC story modes. RPG-wise, the Saga series and Shirogane are good fun and fairly easy to figure out, but I really wouldn't recommend Cyberdrive if you don't know Japanese. I'm not a big fan of strategy games so I haven't played many of those, but Tactics is pretty decent, and it's based on the Empire vs Republic games, so those should be similar. Densetsu, Dash and Battle Colosseum are also good for some casual fun and don't really require any knowledge of Japanese.

Oh, and if you're looking for stuff you can play quickly without needing to buy the game and console, you can play Java emulations of Densetsu and the NES games (Battle of the Central Continent, Counterattack of Zenebas and Mokushiroku) online. (You can also download Mokushiroku and Densetsu for the Wii and 3DS Virtual Consoles, if region issues don't get in the way.) There's also the new Android/iOS game Zoids Material Hunters, which can be legally emulated through Bluestacks (there's a thread about it here), and a handful of cool fangames like Shield Liger Assault/Rise of Digard and Zoids Rush.

[Vig]

Zoids VS III is my ultimate favourite, it's very much like battle legends but a newer version, better gameplay and many more zoids. But is as you would expect, only in Japanese, Still worth it imo I had a lot of fun and hours spent with that one.

Second for me is Full metal crash if you like arcade style fighting games, The zoids simply look so awesome in it, and yes, lose armour when they sustain damage.

Infinity is ok though I felt a bit limited with movement and view, I like being able to rotate the camera angle around the zoid itself when following a target.

[chris514]

Yea Battle Legends looks a lot more like what I was looking for, but I was kind of hoping for something a bit better. Zoids VS III should fit the bill, but not in english.

[chris514]

Been playing Zoids Assault a bit since it arrived the other day. The mechanics seem kind of interesting, but it is kind of a let down from what I was hoping for. Feels kind of like the only thing really linking the game to the Zoids franchise is the visuals of the Zoids themselves. Really kind of feels like you could swap out the Zoids with tanks or just about anything else and it wouldn't really change much about the game. In fact frankly If you swapped the Zoids for tanks then at least I wouldn't be left to wonder why mechanized units with claws and teeth don't appear to have any melee attacks.

It really just feels like a game that was made to be about tanks and had Zoids added instead as an afterthought.

[lordofdragons]

Actually majority of zoids games (except RPG or button-mashers) are broken like this. The RPG variants have at least a large selection of zoids and you can actually modify them (and the controls don't suck so hard). Notable exception is the button-mashers. Only down-side is the very limited choice of zoids but otherwise they still count for the better zoid games available. Otherwise it's nearly as crappy with zoids games as gojira games

[Hanyoutai]

The Zoids Games in general aren't 5 stars, but to be fair, none of my Zoidy friends that have Assault actually liked it. Battle Legends may be more along the lines of what you were hoping for~