Die Bahnwelt is yet another Japanese franchise named after a German, or at least
German sounding word, which is a Japanese trope I never really understood. Still, despite playing the game without an English patch, cause I didn't check out to see there was one, I still say it's a pretty decent.
You walk around as a brown haired guy with a green haired woman as your partner and shoot stuff. The AI is actually not completely useless and the best part is when controlling the main male lead, the main female lead can't die. Oh she'll start flashing when her health is down but will still keep on tanking more and shooting. So you can use this to cowardly hide behind a woman and let her take the shots for you while you try and blow stuff up. Cheap yes, does it pay off in the bossfights with heat seeking missiles ? Double yes.
Of course the game is not just walking around shooting things, well it is, a lot, because the enemies constantly respawn and take a lot of dammage, depending if you found and equiped the better guns of course, and also if you have one of the four types of ammo in the game, which you collect off of enemies or from chest to power these better guns. The guns that are more then peashooters and don't consume anything come in later, and of course you have to search the levels - which are all quite maze like, to find them. Thankfully there's not too many twists and turns so you'll forget where you did and did not go, and usually there's something that gives you a map in each level.
That's not all though, as most levels have an objective. Usually to blow up things, like turrets and walls with more turrets, or sensors on a wall right next to turrets...this game is fond of turrets is all I'm saying. If you don't play the patch you cat get stuck of course. Like figuring out you have to shoot the green statue things in that one base to make the huge red door stop popping up, or that the grey things which look like ghosts and sit on fountains and stuff have nothing to do with the level objective period.
Sometimes it's just getting a gas mask to go through a smoke filled section and then in the final level you have to get back through the level to open a chest to get a pulse gun for the penultimate boss fight against a mind controlled girl. And problem is all the weapons and items and stuff you had to get to proceed before, they were new. But the pulse gun is something they give you early on in the game and it proves to be quite useless by this point in the game, and the game also WILL throw containers with outdated weapons around in levels before that, so unless you can read Japanese, you'd be stuck for an hour like I was, combing each section of the level over and over again.
The game play is pretty much the same throughout, except that at one point your green haired sidekick runs off and you get yourself a blue haired sidekick instead....but she has nothing usefull on her so you have to search the level to deck her out, and you part ways very soon after you meet. Then the game switches to the green haired girl as your main player (btw the game can get stuck here so I'd use an (a) version of the main game disk here, switch it out during the cutscene after the male hero gets fired up in a spaceship just in case) and you can't normally switch mid game otherwise. Not really sure why you can't do that but be carefull because now the girl can actually die.
You meet a robot friend while controlling her and after a heroic sacrifice makes the robot part of the space ship computer, you meet up with the male hero, after only a bit of seperate playing. After trekking through the last level you face a mech boss, who fires a bunch of missiles and are treated to an ending that officially goes on forever. Bahnwelt's only problem is the fact the cutscenes take way too long, can't be sped up or skipped. Out of the six disks, two are dedicated to cut scenes (an intro and ending disk) and a large part of the third disk is cutscenes too.
It's a good game overall, but the levels do drag on a bit so best go in armed with some patience.
