Games I Played in 2025 - Damascus Gear: Operation Tokyo - HD Edition
Console: PSVita, PS4, Steam, Switch
Damascus Gear: Operation Tokyo is an isometric action RPG with a focus on combat and a mission-based structure. Developed by Arc System Works, most well-known for their fighting games, Damascus Gear is one of the many non-fighting games the company has made, a couple of years before the final Blazblue game or their first 3D Guilty Gear game. At this point, people only really knew them for their fighting games and a few other projects, like the Contra spin-off Hard Corps: Uprising or the Xblaze visual novels. And I'm being generous. It's worth noting that this game is technically made by APLUS which, from what I can tell, is a subsidiary of Arcsys and has also developed Kill la Kill: if.
Though originally released for the Playstation Vita, I played the HD Edition port that came to PS4 (and then Steam and Switch), which includes all the DLC plus an extra campaign. This is a random game I played back in 2019, enjoyed for the most part, and then dropped when I got to a notoriously difficult mission, and it's lingered in the back of my mind whenever I'd look at my PS4 library. I've come back and not only beat that mission, but finished the whole game. I have exorcised this demon of mine.
RETAKE TOKYO FROM THE RAGE
Operation Tokyo takes place after World War IV, the result of a war between humanity in Gears (which are just mechs) and the Rage, which are a sentient Gear hivemind that won the war, driving humanity to the brink of extinction and forced them to hide in underground shelters. The story places you in the shoes of a faceless, voiceless Gear pilot, starting as a beginner and rising the ranks of the 4th Division of Freya, an Anti-Rage organisation. Missions are short, lasting from 5 to 30 minutes usually depending on skill, and range from delivery missions, to escort missions, to extermination missions, or just boss fights. It's pretty typical handheld game design, meant to accommodate short play sessions during commutes for example. Upon defeating Rage, you sometimes get parts as rewards, and missions will also reward you with special parts for clearing them. It's all pretty standard stuff, including having randomised modifiers on the parts with different rarities.
The Gear designs fall in the nondescript category of mecha design to me: they're all serviceable, but there's nothing noteworthy about them. All the parts visually feel samey and nonconsequential, and mecha customisation is more or less nonexistant: colors are flatly applied to an entire body part and chosen from a predetermined list of 19, and no decals can be applied, making them all feel flat. Operation Tokyo's gameplay is designed in a way that doesn't really lend itself to customisation anyway, as the parts' stats are far more important than their looks. And either way, it makes sense for customisation to be limited considering the isometric camera perspective and originally being designed for a small screen. It's just a little sad that the designs are so bland across the board. Character Gears and Rage enemies don't really get to stand out much visually in a way that facilitates storytelling either.
The basic story mode, eponymously called Operation Tokyo, is alright for the most part, but suffers from being too light on worldbuilding. While there's enough to get a good sense of what's going on, a lot of things are brought up, but never expanded upon, and some story sequences simply happen off-screen. Missions start in E rank and gradually go up to A rank, where the final boss is. Following this, S rank missions serve as a sort of epilogue that leads directly into the SS rank missions, which were originally DLC in the Vita version. The SS missions don't add that much, but offer a fun little 'where are they now' follow-up story 2 years after the main game, and even introduce new characters and the game's first human antagonist. The characters in Operation Tokyo are simple, but well-established with their own traits and portrait art. It's nothing revolutionary and there's not enough there to truly get attached to them, but it gives some emotion to the story. The script is just as simple, but with some very welcome moments of levity, even if sometimes it feels out of place. Overall, the characters, though simple, are likable and most of them go through a surprising amount of growth as people.
The new story added with HD Edition, called Hero Creation, is a sequel story that takes place 10 years after the DLC missions. This time, you control a new character (that you name) and actually get to see her thoughts, and talk to NPCs during briefings. Unfortunately, outside of 4 missions (one being just story), the entirety of this sequel story is literally the same missions as Operation Tokyo in the same order. There is in-game reasoning for this, thankfully, but it doesn't change the fact that instead of being a New Game+ situation, this is literally just replaying the same game again (sans the DLC missions) from scratch with the only difference being about 15 minutes of new content and a lot of new dialogue. The story itself is more intriguing than Operation Tokyo, but also more contained, and ends in an extremely disappointing and anticlimactic manner, where a mysterious antagonist that was teased at the end of Operation Tokyo finally makes an appearance... and is dispatched off-screen as the game ends when the battle begins. It feels like a bug, or like a mission that leads into a huge boss fight, but it's the intended end.
The game has a ranking system, ranking your performance from C to S, which has no real bearing on the game at all. However, getting an S ranking on every mission in a single rank will unlock a second version of these missions, marked with "(R)" that are... exactly the same, but with some enemies scaled to post-game strength that give better rewards. It's completely superfluous and feels like a missed opportunity to actually have a sort of New Game+ experience, as playing old missions with endgame gear and enemies could've been mildly interesting with the promise of better loot.
HUNK O' JUNK GALORE
So, to be blunt, Operation Tokyo is not a good game. And despite the HD Edition giving Arcsys an out for fixing many of its issues, they didn't, whether it's due to budget or something else. There's a lot wrong with the game, so let's start with the AI. Both Enemy and NPC AI are pretty terrible, patrolling by going between set points at one speed (which differs greatly for enemies, to be fair) and then lethargically attacking every few seconds. Enemies feel more active than the NPCs, who might be amongst the worst I've ever seen. They stand in the way of enemy fire without a care in the world, and it's not uncommon for them to die within seconds of a fight because they didn't move when an enemy fired a laser cannon. In general, neither enemies or NPCs act like a player would, which makes enemies predictable (but not necessarily easy) and NPCs nuisances. This is compounded in the escort missions, which are without a doubt the worst missions in the game due to how utterly incapable and frail they are.
The mission that walled me back in 2019, the A rank mission "Reinforcements?", is genuinely one of the worst missions I've ever had the mispleasure of playing, forcing the player to defend three idiotic NPCs for 5 minutes against an onslaught of Rage. This includes some that lay down mines which the NPCs will gleefully just walk right into since their AI is as rudimentary as 'go from A to B in a straight line and fight any enemy you find on the way'. It took me around 2 hours trying everything I could to eventually clear the mission. The easiest way was to physically push back the problematic NPCs to stay in a chokepoint, where defeating enemies is easier to manage. Having to do this mission a second time for the Hero Creation story is salt on the wound, especially as the mission briefing acknowledges that the mission is terrible. The self-awareness is cute, but it doesn't change the fact that it sucks to play and could've been improved in HD Edition. Which it wasn't.
Operation Tokyo's entire progression being tied to loot and parts means that enemies never get more interesting, they just start dealing more and more damage, and have more and more health. Since Rage are just sentient Gears, they have no unique weapons and are instead pre-made, mass-produced builds you could also replicate. As a result of this, enemies tend to focus on one weapon type and are recognisable by their names after a while. Eventually, larger enemies and bosses have attacks that can kill you in one hit, requiring you to stay extremely alert for the tells, as defeat means you need to restart the entire mission, though you do keep anything you picked up.
Overall, when paired with the terrible enemy AI, this makes the game's difficulty feel mostly artificially hard... or artificially easy. Quite a few missions simply don't work properly with little effort, from having a 10 minute survival mission stop spawning enemies for 9 of the 10 minutes to having a boss stop reacting to me 10 seconds into a boss fight, these issues are all over the place and easy enough to reproduce that I was able to do most of these again on the second go around for the Hero Creation story without really trying. Some mine-laying enemies will lay mines repeatedly in one spot, and when they explode the smoke VFX will completely obstruct your vision for a few seconds. The lock-on feature is automatic and cannot be controlled, which can get very frustrating when your Gear obstinately targets an enemy behind a wall or just simply the wrong enemy. And to make everything worse, there's very little feedback when getting hit, so unless you keep a close eye on your health, you might not realise that you're at about 40-50% and could get killed in one hit.
The localisation in general is also shockingly lackluster and borderline embarrassing, especially since none of it was fixed for HD Edition. The UI itself has multiple typos, from "remaining" being misspelled "remaing", "reward" being misspelled "reword", "durability" being misspelled "durabilty", the name "Freya" is even misspelled "Fraya" on it, and in Hero Creation is instead spelled "Freyja" most of the time, with Gear and Rage being stylised in all-caps in Hero Creation as well. It makes the game feel really amateur in a bad way. In dialogue, there's the occasional typo or nonsensical sentence as well as missing symbols like %, and there were at least two cases of a character being referred to as the wrong gender. Even the Credits aren't spared, lacking spaces between words and names. Bafflingly, the controls follow the Japanese standard of O being confirm and X being back, which leads to a lot of confusion and misinputs early on in the menus, and might lead to accidentally starting a mission or buying an item.
This lackluster localisation also affects the skills randomly given to parts. They are usually color coded, with orange being bad, green being good, and blue being great... but the wording is confusing and made me doubt what was actually happening. For example, seeing "Poor Shock Absorption +40%" in blue text is extremely confusing, as negative effects usually are written out like "Poor Critical Evasion -X%". Another example is having a part with "Laser Vulnerability -15%" in orange and another with "Electrical Vuln. +40%" also in orange. Is the first one a typo where the - is meant to be a +, or is the color wrong? Due to all the mistakes in the game, it feels impossible to tell. Some skills are also difficult to understand without hands-on experience, like a satellite laser-type weapon having the "Cont. Irradiation +2" skill. What exactly does this do or mean? This could be remedied with an Explanation button that lets you see what each skill does, but there's no such thing.
This also affects the ability to parse what your Gear's stats actually mean. What's the difference between Armor and Defense? What does CritGuard do, exactly? What about Evade and Accuracy+? What do the values actually mean for Accuracy and Crit? While some experimentation allows you to guess your way through this, some are just far too hard to guess without an explanation button or rigorous testing. Operation Tokyo really needed both an explanation button and a training room.
In gameplay, character dialogue is very intrusive, completely pausing gameplay to show the dialogue being said, even when it's something as simple as telling you how much time is left in the mission or how many enemies are left. These would've been better as pop-ups at the bottom of the screen, but I'm guessing the lack of screen real estate made Arcsys feel like this would just hide crucial visual information at the wrong time. This is a big reason why voice acting would've been really helpful too, as text lacks sound and it feels like there's something mission; a big thing for me in mech games is being able to get attached to characters despite never seeing them for real through their voice alone, and just text isn't enough to communicate the emotion present.
It also must be noted that the game's maps are very unimpressive. There are six maps in the game: the Marunouchi, Akihabara and Shiba Park Districts, and the Ueno, Roppongi and Nogizaka Underground Shelters. They are bland visually: the first three are pretty standard "destroyed city" maps, while the Underground Shelters are more sci-fi tech inspired, with lots of blues for the first two and reds for Nogizaka. Every map is interconnected, and they are unlocked slowly as the story progresses, eventually forcing you to go between all of them within a single mission. Luckily, they are all very linear and lack any confusing layouts, but Roppongi in particular stands out as bad due to the "Reinforcements?" mission. Still, while the feeling of getting used to the game's maps is nice, it doesn't make them interesting to navigate, and a lot of the time missions asking you to go to one place will begin at the very end of the furthest area from it.
Balance is also very slapdash. Melee weapons are really risky to use and slow yet their damage doesn't feel high enough in practice to warrant the risk despite the huge Attack stat they give. Ranged weapons feel like pea shooters most of the time, also usually drowning out the audio with repetitive metallic sounds and firing sounds. And Back weapons are disproportionately powerful, to the point that, at least for my builds, there was no reason to even use my two other weapons in most cases. Using the Laser Cannon or especially the Flamethrower will melt most enemies immediately, and my arm weapons only felt useful if I dedicated my Back weapon to an Overdrive, which more or less tripled the damage output of each and making them feel actually useful.
So on top of shoddy localisation, bad game design, terrible enemy AI, and artificial difficulty, the final DLC boss in the SS rank missions borderline feels like it wasn't thoroughly playtested (much like the rest of the game, to be honest). Overly tanky enemies, an extremely aggressive boss, getting assaulted by laser cannons from off-screen, and to top it all off, the boss itself has a satellite cannon that will kill you in a single hit. There's so much going on that it's easy to miss the audio tell (when it decides to play appropriately, at least) for the attack, and the arena floor is a similar shade of blue as the visual tell, making it even harder to react to.
GENERIC, BUT APPROPRIATE
Operation Tokyo's soundtrack (and sound effects) was made by Makoto Suehiro, and it's a very brief soundtrack, with only 9 tracks including jingles. It's nothing special, boasting a chill lo-fi menu theme, a mid-energy EDM track for every single mission, and a more dramatic EDM track with an orchetra for a handful of fights. There's nothing that'll stick with me in the long run, but it's serviceable and fits the setting.
However, the sound effects, though also nothing special, are actually pretty annoying because of how overwhelmingly loud they are; laser cannons and explosions will regularly drown out the music, and even firing a machine gun and landing shots with it will make repeating screeches for every single hit. It gets very tiring to have your speakers blown out by gravelly explosions and screeching lasers.
PROS AND CONS
PROS
• Decent stories with likable, simple characters that actually grow in a satisfying way.
• Serviceable soundtrack.
• The overall gameplay is repetitive and simple but fun, and some weapons do feel good to use.
• Controls feel natural.
CONS
• Terrible localisation leaves the game riddled with unclear/nonsensical dialogue, typos aplenty including on the basic UI, missing symbols, and confusing stats.
• Hero Creation is 99% the exact same thing as Operation Tokyo, just with a different story, and has no gameplay changes.
• Slipshod game design in general.
• Several missions are extremely easy to break, rendering even 10 minute survival missions a joke.
• Extremely unsatisfying and anticlimactic ending at the end of Hero Creation.
• Intrusive character dialogue that interrupts the flow of gameplay constantly.
• The mission "Reinforcements?" in its entirety.
• Lack of customisation, both visual and it terms of build.
• Loud, repeating sound effects at all times make the game tiring on the ears.
• Slapdash sense of balance; everything ends up becoming a DPS race rather than being anything interesting gameplay-wise.
• Enemy AI breaks often and can make bosses a complete joke or borderline impossible.
• NPC AI is so terrible and basic that they are nothing but nuisances and meatshields rather than something that helps.
• The (R) missions unlocked from getting all S ranks on a mission tier feel superfluous and like a waste of time, rather than being a reward, due to being essentially the same mission again but with stronger enemies randomly sprinkled about.
• Back weapons are overemphasised and overtuned, resulting in unidimensional gameplay most of the time.
• No explanation button for Gear parts and stats makes it hard to tell what does what.
• A lack of extra lore content is a bit of a shame, especially with the lack of Gear part descriptions.
• Some of the endgame boss fights feel overtuned and aren't fun at all.
• Overall game feels like it wasn't playtested much.
• Despite having the chance to improve the game with this port, no changes were really made.
WORTH PLAYING?
What do you think? Take a wild guess. Absolutely not. Damascus Gear: Operation Tokyo is by far the worst game I've played since I started doing reviews at the beginning of 2024. The core gameplay loop is fine, the story is fine enough, the idea of an isometric action RPG with mechas is really appealing (and likely the reason I bought the game in the first place), but none of its elements come together properly. It comes across like it was hastily slapped together with no real care. It can't even stick the landing with its own story, coming across like they ran out of time to make an actual ending.
I won't lie, due to how much the "Reinforcements?" mission stuck with me ever since I dropped the game in 2019, I've grown attached to Operation Tokyo and see it as a personal guilty pleasure, perhaps my biggest one. I have almost nothing positive to say about it, and yet it still feels a little special to me, in a way.
But I still would really not recommend anyone to play it, unless you're specifically looking for a bad game to play, since I know some people do love playing odd, bad games. Just get it at a heavy discount if you do play it, because it's hardly worth its full price despite being cheap. I don't even think it's a bad game in an interesting way that makes it endearing, it's just a low quality product at the end of the day. And that's a shame.
...That won't stop me from playing its sequel, Damascus Gear: Operation Osaka though. Who knows, maybe that game is way better and fixes everything wrong with Operation Tokyo!
Why am I like this.
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