Robo-Pit 2 [ロボピット2] Game Sample - Playstation
0The Japanese Robo-Pit 2 is a relatively fun, simple battle game developed in 1997 by Altron where you fight with robots and gain experience points and parts to customize your robos. Fast forward some time in 2003 where the Playstation was just about "dead", many developers and publishers were moving on to newer platforms, and a whole slew of games were getting the "green light" for localization, usually as budget titles. Robo-Pit 2 was one of the games amongst the slew, released in the U.S. and PAL terroritories. Someone (I don't know who) made the reaaaaaaally stupid decision to remove the music from the U.S. game and, even worse, remove the music AND cutscenes from the PAL game (as well as other things from my understanding).
Long story short, you don't want those versions, but you'll probably pick them up anyway if you don't know Japanese. Play the game in all its glory but you can't understand it or play a butchered version that's in English (translated pretty literally from what I've noticed too)... that's the crappy decision you have to make if you're a gamer who likes to import but doesn't know Japanese. I've had the U.S. game for a while now, but after doing some research, I found it really dumb that anyone would do that to this game. It's also strange because the music is actually pretty good, a step up from the original Robo-Pit released on both Playstation and Sega Saturn.
In the game, you're out to stop the host computer, "Muse", and fight your way to the top and become a Robo-Champion. There's an actual attempt at a story at several points in the game, but it's nothing to take seriously I assure you. The game has quite a few parts to customize robots with that alter their sub-abilities, stats, range, and special attacks. Robots can attack with each hand as well as shoot, attack enemies on the ground, throw, etc. The robot designs are much more serious than in the original, which some may or may not like. The game featured... adequate visuals when it was originally made, but that's about all I can say in that department. The game is largely easy; many early opponents can be attacked with fast single hits and be stunned almost completely, leading to perfect victories. It's pretty fun though and if I could merge the soundtrack with my NTSC-U copy, I certainly would.
This is a video of some stuff in the game (my first video over 15:30 minutes too). A demo for Robo-Pit 2 was also released in Japan (Robo-Pit 2 Taikenban or "ロボピット2 体験版"). Enjoy.