Hardcore Mecha

"Love doesn't bloom on the battlefield, and neither do 'justice' or 'evil.' You watch too much anime, Edgar."

Hardcore Mecha is a 2020 game produced by RocketPunch Studios, also known as Code:Hardcore. A robust love letter to the robot genre as a whole and Super Robot Wars in specific, it follows the members of the Hardcore Defense Company, a PMC assisting the Earth government against Steel Dawn, a terrorist organization trying to liberate a colonized Mars. This was one of our choices for Post-Hoc Integration, since it was released entirely after most of the main timeline work was done.

Hardcore Mecha

Tarethur O'Connell, the test pilot of the MFX-02T Thunderbolt and a member of the Hardcore Defense Company, embarks on a job that stinks from the start. Tasked with the rescue of an intelligence officer, he finds himself fighting a well-equipped and cruel Martian insurgency.

Integration Notes

Hardcore Mecha is such a genre love letter that, in terms of its units, aesthetics, and overall vibe, very little adjustment was actually needed. The biggest problem Hardcore has is its setting; Mars has been colonized a lot longer in Hardcore, and has not yet been blasted to hell and back by the Jovians.

Fortunately, very little of what it demands of Mars is dreadfully specific; likewise, being an indie game, the characters and world are a tiny bit on the thin side (in part because they're more than a little reliant on you already having some buy-in for the genre). Steel Dawn slots in very neatly as part of the Sleeves and Mars Zeon; likewise, the Earth forces depicted in the game are pretty bog standard 'vaguely oppressors but not the bad guys as far as the narrative is concerned' Earth Federation folks as have been the standard since the 1970s.

This is a pretty easy post-hoc integration that doesn't cause too many problems and fills a lot of gaps in the mass production list, since its units -- overwhelmingly Size S -- help fill in a substantial size hole in our spacenoid insurgencies' MPlists.