I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode.

Programming Note: This episode's subject was suggested by user @heyitsdale. If you have any suggestions for Game OVA topics, feel free to drop them in the comments. Be sure to check out the rules laid out in the first episode of Game OVA to see what qualifies.

The Property

Macross: Do You Remember Love?, or Chojiku Yosai Makurosu: Ai Oboete Imasu ka, will be the first mecha anime covered on Game OVA and my first personal foray into the Super Dimension Fortress Macross universe. Started in 1982 as an animated TV show, SDF Macross builds on the success of fellow sci-fi icon Mobile Suit Gundam by tinkering with its formula of thrilling mech battles in space tempered by realistic human drama fomented by living through a devastating interplanetary war. Besides the cool name, the only thing I knew about Macross going in is that it had something to do with jumpstarting the concept of the virtual idol: that is, a fictional musician from an animated TV show or movie that nonetheless becomes as popular as the real thing in the pop charts. Given the modern day preponderance of vocaloids and vtuber idols, it's perhaps a little ahead of its time in that regard; we'll have to wait and see if the whole "fighting aliens in transforming mechs" aspect will be just as prophetic.

For us older weebs, Macross is perhaps best known as being one of the anime shows that became the basis of Robotech: an attempt, like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, to localize a very Japanese staple by modifying extant footage around original stories and characters. Robotech uses animation taken from the original Macross series, one of its follow-ups Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and the unrelated Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and combines them to spin a semi-coherent narrative all of its own.

Things get even stranger when we factor in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, a spin-off that re-imagines and condenses the story of the TV show into a two-hour movie. Since parts of DYRL? are non-canonical with the show, it's treated in-universe as a dramatic re-enactment of the events of the original canon: a fiction within a fiction, so to speak. The popularity of this movie - second only to Studio Ghibli's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind in its premiere year of 1984 - spawned video game adaptations well into the 2000s, along with a bunch of sequel OVAs and movies.

The Macross universe is, in short, a future in which Earth is suddenly attacked by an overpowered alien race called the Zentradi who have an unexplained grudge against us. As humanity makes its final stand against the Zentradi fighters and their orbital bombings, their last hope - the titular SDF-1 Macross, a city-sized spaceship - is able to warp away with a few thousand refugees, along with a significant chunk of the planet's remaining military forces. Since then, the SDF-1 Macross has been waiting on the edge of the Solar system to come back to Earth to rebuild. Pop idols like Lynn Minmay have been instrumental in keeping everyone's spirits up in the meantime.

The Major Characters:

• Lynn Minmay: A famous pop idol singer whose concert is interrupted by an assault from the Zentradi. She becomes a person of interest to the aliens for reasons unknown to her.
• Hikaru Ichijyo: A cocky Valkyrie mecha pilot and a fan of Lynn's, who ends up rescuing her during the Zentradi attack. A bit... well, a lot of a dummy. His skill as a pilot is tested by the technologically advanced forces of the Zentradi.
• Misa Hayase: A lieutenant in Hikaru's unit and his superior officer, who eventually begins to develop feelings for him despite a rocky start to their relationship. This creates a love triangle, given Hikaru's own fondness for Lynn.
• Roy Föcker: Another of Hikaru's superior officers and something of a rogueish role model. I just like this dude's name.

The Anime

As for the movie itself, Macross: Do You Remember Love? was created by Tatsunoko Production who took over from the TV show's creators, Studio Nue. Tatsunoko is another of those studios that have been around forever: video game fans might recognize them from Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, which pitted the usual Capcom fighters against masked anime superheroes from multiple decades of animated television. We'll probably bump into Tatsunoko again if Game OVA lasts long enough: I've at least three of their other franchises on my master list. The movie was co-directed by the show's director Noboru Ishiguro and the show's creator Shoji Kawamori. Kawamori is known outside of Macross for conceiving the Diaclone toyline along with Macross's visual designer Kazutaka Miyatake, which would later become the basis of Hasbro's enormous toy and multimedia franchise Transformers. This movie makes the connection between Macross and Transformers apparent pretty quickly: not only do the Valkyrie ships like the one Hikaru pilots transform between jet and humanoid forms, but the colossal Macross space fortress itself does too (hence the "super dimension" in the title, I'm guessing).

The movie starts by jumping between Lynn Minmay performing at a concert and Hikaru Ichijo's Valkyrie unit scouting nearby space for Zentradi forces as Macross passes the moon of Titan en route to Earth. The former is interrupted when the latter engages with the Zentradi, leading to a few of the alien soldiers finding their way inside Macross and witnessing a surprising sight: humans, which they call miclones, permitting interaction between men and women (so that's where the Ferenghi got it from). A "sonic weapon" they bring back as research - actually a singing toy doll of Lynn - is evidence that the miclones present a clear and present threat to the Zentradi as a whole. Lynn and Hikaru, meanwhile, end up trapped together inside of one of Macross's engine bays after she fails to reach a shelter due to the Zentradi intruders. The two grow close in the three days they stay stuck in there but their sudden rescue arrives at an inopportune moment as Lynn teases Hikaru with a kiss, later making her the target of paparazzi and gossip.

Before I get into any more of that though, I wanted to circle back around to the pretty boss series of action scenes as the human and Zentradi fighters took to blows: you get that shot you always want to see in mecha anime of a mech shooting a hundred tiny missiles out at once (being a Final Fantasy nerd, I'm more aware of this trope due to the Alexander summon). When Macross itself transforms into its bipedal form and uses a rifle the size of the Golden Gate Bridge to shoot a laser strong enough to part the atmosphere of Titan as it zooms across and takes out the Zentradi capital ship on the other side, it's a really striking image.

Back to the dumb humans and their dumb problems, we're better introduced to Hikaru's teammates of Misa Hayase, with whom Hikaru shares a certain romantic friction, the impish Roy Focker, and the stylish Claudia LaSalle, who kinda resembles Nakia from Black Panther with her short hair. Roy advises Hikaru that if he likes someone he should pursue her aggressively, almost to the point of sexual assault, and it was then when I recalled what decade this movie was made in. I'm starting to be less sure about that dude, despite the cool name; he might actually be a Focker after all. We get more cute date stuff between Hikaru and Lynn as the movie spins its wheels for a while to establish the stakes for when this fragile peace is eventually shattered by that whole overpowering alien forces thing; I guess it worked for Titanic (except the alien part, I suppose, but then are we sure that iceberg was of terrestrial origin? Just saying, this is James Cameron we're talking about).

As Hikaru and Lynn waltz through Saturn's rings while riding in a Valkyrie - and I'm sure the Macross armed forces don't just let you borrow those to impress your date - we get another scene with the Zentradi and some intriguing lore: they're currently at war with their own womenfolk, hence the surprise that the sexes of the humans/miclones seem to live in harmony. I almost neglected to mention, but we've had something like four musical montages so far: the movie is really pushing the whole virtual idol thing, but at least it makes for an interesting balance between space opera antics and, well, something akin to an actual opera. Misa and Lynn's manager (who is also called Lynn, confusingly) catch up to the lovebirds, but all four are suddenly ambushed by the Zentradi and taken to a nearby command ship (as is Roy Focker, who charged in there to rescue them all while drunk but was quickly overwhelmed).

What follows is... I'm not even sure where to start with this scene. The Zentradi commander - who happens to be something like 40 feet tall - interrogates the male and female humans as to how they're able to get along without killing each other and Focker, the budding anthropologist he is, says that he'd much rather hold and kiss a woman than fight her. The aliens demand to know what this whole "kissing" thing is and it suddenly starts to feel like the RP foreplay between two nerds on the night of their Star Trek-themed wedding. The Zentradi are so repulsed by the very idea of physical intimacy that the humans take advantage of it again later to create a diversion, only this time with Hikaru and Misa (which she did not seem into). They're able to get away due to the timely ambush of the Zentradi women, who have pink mechs to the males' green. I dunno, this is all very goofy, but I'm almost impressed with the idea that these aliens could be as repelled by cooties as The War of the Worlds Martians are to cold germs.

The female Zentradi pilots seem a lot more competent than the men, as one effortlessly destroys the group of male soldiers chasing the humans, but unfortunately your hero and mine Roy Focker bites it in the middle of the battle after a surprise attack from above. He takes out his killer with one brutal close-range burst and then leaves the movie in fiery style. Man, just when I was about to turn around on Captain Roofie. Hikaru and Misa track Lynn's signal tracker (which I guess all idols have in case they go missing? "If found return to Sony Music Entertainment") but are unable to save her before the Zentradi ship warps away, depositing Hikaru and Misa on some lifeless alien planet God knows how far away from Macross. Spirits are naturally on the low side at this point, and get lower still when they find the remnants of a US aircraft carrier and realize this barren world is actually Earth: the status of which has been unknown for months due to radio interference. Hey, at least we were spared the shot of a molten Statue of Liberty with Zentradi graffiti next to it that reads "They even make statues of their females?! Gross!".

Lynn and Manager Lynn are on the Zentradi ship as it teleports back to its mothership, a colossal green spherical structure with red veins that resembles a giant watermelon. Intimidating stuff. For their sake, I hope Macross doesn't have a summer beach episode. The boss of the Zentradi, an ancient biomechanical intelligence the size of a city, recognizes Lynn's singing as "culture": a concept verboten to the Zentradi, since it does not aid in military strength. He summons forth the oldest form of "culture" known to the Zentradi for these humans to study, which is an etched plate that almost resembles the plaques from the Pioneer probes. Hikaru and Misa aren't having a great time either as they pick through the ruins of human civilization, the former still pissy about taking the latter's orders that he cracks wise at her before she breaks down in tears due to, oh I dunno, perhaps the loss of ten billion human lives? Read the room Hikaru, sheesh. The plan is to wait it out until the Macross makes its scheduled arrival in a few weeks, and though Misa is close to giving up she's inspired by Hikaru's resilience (I'd call it bratty insouciance myself, but what do I know) in the face of the apocalypse to hold on until the Macross shows up.

In the meantime, they come across an odd-looking tower and discover that it's the remains of an ancient city-sized spaceship once hidden by the oceans. Its extra-terrestrial owners, known as the Protoculture, were responsible for intelligent life on planet Earth and installing the innovative rule to have sexual reproduction happen between men and women to create offspring. (We also get a slight clarification here: the Zentradi are the male version of that species, while the female half are called the Meltrandi. Since they don't need each other to breed, they've been at each others' throats since time immemorial.) While Hikaru and Misa explore the city that just emerged from the depths, they split up so Misa can take a sip from an ancient version of a sink with drinking utensils (I am 99% sure it's going to taste like seawater, since the whole place was submerged under an ocean for 20,000 years, but you do you Misa. Chug that salty H2O with all its ancient microbes). When Hikaru gets back from looking around, Misa has the whole table set for him. I'm left wondering if the goal of this scene is to suggest Misa would make for a good housewife given the circumstances, which seems condescending for a military officer, or if she's completely lost her marbles, which is probably equally disdainful. Either way, they get to kissin'. Love the one you're with, and all that.

Hours later - or five minutes, or however long jet boy needs - they emerge from a (pre-)destroyed bedroom to see Macross looming over the horizon. Dunno what it says about this movie that a kilometer-tall mech floating over the skyline of a ruined city is one of its most hopeful shots. Exhausted, they report back that in technical military terms the Earth got its ass kicked, and answer Claudia's single query by stating in the affirmative that, yes, Roy Focker died in the manliest way possible. "That's all I need to know," she responds, and I absolutely cannot tell if she's being sarcastic. The Meltrandi show up shortly after, curious about the Protoculture city on Earth, and Hikaru's unit is sent out to engage them. The two jock pilots from earlier in the movie are salivating at the idea of alien chicks flying these jets, at least until one of them is brutally shot down. Probably distracted by visions of three-boobéd green ladies, the poor schmuck. The same Meltrandi ace that took down a whole Zentradi squad earlier in the movie, Milia, engages with Hikaru's other friend, the one with glasses, and there's a cool duel where they fly into a corridor inside the Meltrandi ship and have a gunfight in the pitch dark that has some nice visual effects as each bullet momentarily lights up the claustrophobic space. While the two vehicles are about equal size, their pilots aren't: after shooting each other full of holes, the human emerges unscathed from his busted craft and watches a very tall, green-haired Meltrandi in her exosuit breathe what might be her last, remarking at her beauty as Lynn's melodic humming echoes throughout the battlefield*. Turns out the Zentradi have figured out how to weaponize human music against the Meltrandi, which saps their will to fight, and they retreat in the face of this new threat.

At this point the human forces are in trouble: Macross took a hit to its main cannons during the fight with the Meltrandi freighter, imaginatively called the Meltran, and now the entire Zentradi empire has shown up along with their watermelon HQ. Despite their overwhelming strength and the defenseless Macross, however, the Zentradi offer an armistice. On September 11th, a day that will be forever known for bringing peace, a treaty is formally signed with humanity's former enemies. The general giving the speech also chooses this time to fill in the population of Macross about the Protoculture and their ancient city-ship, and that all human life as well as the Zentradi and Meltrandi originate from them. ("Also everyone on Earth is dead, so if you had family here you can probably stop trying to get into contact with them.") To confirm their intentions, the Zentradi send three delegates that they used genetic engineering to shrink down to our size, and also handed back Lynn Minmay who seems no worse for wear and sings at the treaty conference. The song she performs, and the one she was humming during the Meltrandi fight, is one she deciphered from the "culture" piece given to her by the Zentradi leader: she has professional songwriters on Macross put lyrics to it, since the originals were lost. Coincidentally, the tune lines up perfectly one-to-one with the lyrics of Limp Bizkit's "Nookie," so that's what they go with in the subsequent musical number.

Nah, just kidding, they're working on it. Turns out Misa found the same "culture fragment" in the ruined city, though hers still has the lyrics, and so she sends it off to the brass to verify her translation. Awkwardness sets in when Lynn decides she wants to be with Hikaru, even though he's already moved on with Misa - they were on Earth for a whole month, after all, and you can squeeze in many games of "House" in that timeframe - and when faced with making a choice between the two of them Hikaru opts for the woman with whom he survived a broken Earth together. Nothing activates the ol' neurons like strolling through the corpse-ridden remains of Tokyo, picking through the rubble for non-perishable goods with your best gal by your side. At least Lynn still has her manager, Lynn. Maybe if they get married she can even take his name? Misa's tearful joy at Hikaru's decision is cut short by the return of the Meltrandi, who I'm guessing have spent the time away painstakingly researching the fantastical science-fiction technology of "noise-cancelling headphones," and the Zentradi boss decides to just blow everything to shit rather than wait patiently for this miracle song to end all the bloodshed. I guess when you're piloting a Death Watermelon you can afford to let peace treaties go to seed. Macross's only hope of survival is to get the translated lyrics to Lynn in time to calm everyone's tits like before.

Unfortunately, she ran off in a huff after getting rejected, and Hikaru's the only one that can convince her to perform. The ancient Protoculture city gets annihilated in the first wave of orbital fire, only barely missing Macross itself, before both the Meltrandi and Zentradi fleets start pummelling each other with space lasers for ten minutes straight. It's certainly visually arresting, exemplifying once again how good anime can be with these wide-scale spectacles. Hikaru sprints to where he suspects Lynn might be waiting - an observation deck on Macross where the two watched Saturn together - and implores her to sing the song that might save the remaining human race. Realizing he'll need to make this request with tact and grace in order to salve her wounded heart, he slaps her right across the chops until she decides to do it (I'm embellishing a little, but not by much; I feel like the immortal spirit of Roy Focker is looking down on Hikaru in this scene and smiling, "Yes, my boy," his spectre seems to say, "hit them until they agree to anything.") So... yeah, Lynn belts her lungs out and all the aliens freak out to the familiar song and unite to destroy the indiscriminate destructive power of the Death Watermelon, so that they too might enjoy this "culture" the humans venerate. And in the end, the survivors of the most devastating battle the galaxy has ever seen will say Lynn Minmay did it for the nookie.

That's the movie. I'm glad I finally managed to catch up with this paragon of mecha anime cinema at long last, and I'm thinking I might want to focus on the movies and longer OVAs for the time being because this was a lot of fun to commentate. Macross: Do You Remember Love? is a true feast for the eyes and its dopey melodrama is enjoyable to ridicule, but like in a deeply reverential way where I can respect the pathos it was aiming for with its nuanced love triangle, its theme of unifying the sexes through pop music, and the moral that even if you happen to know a guy with a cool name like Roy Focker that doesn't necessarily mean you have to take his advice on everything.

* (It took a moment but I finally remembered where I've seen these two before. It's this meme.)

With the fun part out of the way, let's check out a few games directly influenced by the movie. Might surprise you to learn that these are all going to be shoot 'em ups.

The Game(s)

The challenge here was narrowing down the vast number of Macross tie-ins to the handful that were explicitly based on Do You Remember Love?. What complicates matters a little further is that there were multiple games based on the movie's new canon, which splits from the original show, including Macross II which is an OVA series set eighty years after DYRL?. The reason why this happened is, unsurprisingly, due to money: Studio Nue, the original TV show's creators, wanted to work on other projects while Big West Advertising, their financiers for the show and the movie, wanted to keep raking in the cash from this unexpected juggernaut - Big West instead worked with other animation studios to create Macross off-shoots that built on the movie's continuity, while Studio Nue eventually came back and made more Macross anime based on the TV show's continuity. Kinda like the whole Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons kerfuffle, only without the legally obligated rebrand.

Anyway, I found three games that were either expressly based on DYRL? or were closer to it than its sequels in the same timeline. The first was the arcade game Super Spacefortress Macross from NMK and Banpresto, and I was in no mood to try and remember how MAME works. It's a vertical shoot 'em up, and it was produced quickly along with games based on Macross II and Macross Plus (Nue's own follow-up to the series). Didn't seem all that noteworthy.

The second is Chou Jikuu Yousai Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie (released on Super Famicom in 1993) which actually takes place a few years after the movie, but still has the same cast of characters (Macross II, being eighty years removed, wipes the slate clean). As well as show/movie protagonist Hikaru Ichijyo, the player can also choose to play as Maximilian Jenius and Millia Fallyna Jenius - the human and Meltrandi pilots who met during the conflict and fell in love, with Millia later defecting to Macross and the humans after being "micloned" (shrunk). No bonus stages where you're tossing a baby around like it's a football, but I'll admit to not getting too far in.

Scrambled Valkyrie was developed by the marvellously named Winkysoft and published by Zamuse. Winkysoft were frequent collaborators with Banpresto on the Super Robot Taisen (Wars) series of mecha crossovers from 1991 onwards, so they were already well-versed in this thematic genre by 1993. I have no idea who Zamuse are, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn it was another Bandai subsidiary: of their few other credits, one is an Astro Boy tie-in. Last thing I'll say before we get started with screenshots is that this game is real tough. Part of that is only having the one life - there are continues, but it means starting over from the beginning of the level each time - and how foes spawn in from all directions at rapid speeds to an illogical extent that it behoves the player to memorize the enemy patterns. It reminds me why I never had the patience for shoot 'em ups: they're built for replays and incremental improvement, because a successful run is probably going to take you less than 30 minutes and that's no bueno for something you just paid 5,000 yen for earlier that same day.

Does it do right by the anime? I mean, what else can you do with this license? Go full Idolm@aster with Minmay's performances? It's evident the creative minds behind DYRL? had left for greener pastures and it was cash-grab time for its license owners, but even so I think Scrambled Valkyrie has enough ideas going for it that it doesn't feel completely thrown together. It has some strong visuals, the three protagonists is essentially nine with their three separate forms (made more versatile by the fact you can switch between them instantaneously), and while I'm not going to have the patience to truck with its challenge level that might well be a draw for others. The SNES didn't quite rank as well as Mega Drive when it came to shoot 'em ups - beyond visual showcases like Axelay or Star Fox, I can't think of too many stand-outs - so this might be one of its few secret gems in that genre. I just wish I had more of an affinity for shoot 'em ups to properly judge one way or the other.

The third and our last game is Chou Jikuu Yousai Macross: Ai Oboete Imasu ka, a 1997 Sega Saturn (later PlayStation) horizontal shoot 'em up that offers a mostly faithful retelling of the movie with a few additional embellishments. It uses animated cutscenes taken from the movie (in a slightly compromised state due to hardware limitations) to bookend its action stages, and in an attempt to make levels more "cinematic" will have characters converse with one another over the radio (usually during quiet parts so you don't get distracted) and utilizes multiple dimensional planes to make it seem like more action is going on in the foreground and background.

While you have a standard laser gun that shoots in the direction the Valkyrie is pointed at - sometimes this might be backwards, or even facing towards the background - it's also stocked with infinite homing missiles that are capable of hitting anything on any plane, though most background enemies tend to vanish before the missiles can track them in time. They're useful when fighting bosses when they're moving around the screen in such a way that makes hitting them with your standard cannon impractical. On the whole, it's a relatively no-frills shoot 'em up that offers a few customization options in the interstitial screens before levels, but it's more about reliving the events of the movie one action scene at a time.

The Saturn game was developed by Scarab and published by Bandai. At this point I'd be surprised if an anime tie-in game wasn't published by Bandai, but seeing Scarab here is unexpected. In the '90s, Scarab was best known for weird also-ran Saturn and PS1 fighting games like Battle Monsters, Killing Zone, and Fighting Vipers 2. They had a few other PS1 games but otherwise focused on the arcades, the Saturn and, later, the Dreamcast. Their fortunes changed in 2002 when they were acquired by Cavia, the "B-Game" studio that hired a little weirdo called Yoko Taro to make Drakengard and Nier, and was renamed to feelplus. As feelplus, they're perhaps best known for 360/PS3 bangers MindJack and N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights 2, as well as pitching in as contractors on a few 360 RPGs like Lost Odyssey, Star Ocean 4, and Infinite Undiscovery. As a JRPG fan during that dark time I got very used to seeing their unusual name show up. Far as I can tell, Ai Oboete Imasu ka was Scarab's first (and perhaps only?) attempt at a shoot 'em up, making them a weird choice over someone like Compile or Toaplan whom I'm sure would've appreciated the work.

One positive I'll give this game is that, for as chaotic as it can be, it's perhaps on the more gentle side with its durable health bar and fewer enemies to worry about; perhaps the idea being to appeal to casual fans of the movie that wouldn't be down for a super-hard quarter-muncher. A stark difference from the sheer masochism offered by Scrambled Valkyrie, though less compelling to all those danmaku freaks out there I'm sure.

Here's what it looks like, or at least the best approximation this jank-ass system can render:

Does it do right by the anime? Maybe not as much as Scrambled Valkyrie, ironically since this one is way more beholden to the movie's events and original animation. It feels more meekly fanservice-y than Scrambled Valkyrie, which was happy enough doing its own thing within that universe and canon, and though I like the whole lock-on missiles mechanic in the shoot 'em ups coming out around this time it tends to work better with the Z-axis perspective. When something just whizzed by in the background and your missile had to fly off-screen to catch up to it, it becomes a moot point by then. I'm also not sure the pre-rendered models have aged as well as the SNES's crisp pixels, but maybe that's more of a subjective eye of the beholder take. Doesn't seem bad, but I'm sure there were more impressive shoot 'em ups around at this time; Star Fox 64, for one.

Beyond the above, most of the Macross tie-in games were based on either the show, the sequel OVAs, or are so obscure I can't make out their source material one way or the other. I know there were a number of turn-based strategy games in the mid-90s that may or may not featured the specific DYRL? versions of those mecha designs, but unless I broaden this episode's purview to cover every Macross continuity - it feels maybe long enough already? - I'm going to leave it here with the two games featured above. (Incidentally, we have 27 games connected to the Macross franchise on the Giant Bomb wiki, and Wikipedia has at least 40 in their loose list.)

Beyond Macross, there's also the more recent Robotech games like Robotech: Battlecry and Robotech: The Macross Saga and a few crossovers like Super Robot Taisen Alpha and its sequel as well as, and this was a surprise to me, FromSoftware's own Another Century's Episode 3: The Final. Almost seems like if you can design just one cool mech suit you could live off the royalties forever.

That's going to be all from my super dimensional self this week. Thanks for reading what turned out to be an even beefier entry than usual, and I'll almost certainly be going back to a much smaller and more manageable franchise for next time. Like One Piece. Oy, gerwalk...