According to Mighty Internet...

The good guys in in AZ because the antagonists are implausibly retarded at every level to a point where it's suspension of disbelief breaking.

Actually, if we go like Aldnaoh Zero and make the BBEG specifically play by the rules of high fantasy HEROES, his morality becomes even easier to exploit as he's essentially bound to act like a paladin while the heroes get to play dirty as much as they like.

That's the point, they're a parody of super robot show protagonists. All romance, bluster and spirit, not an ounce of logic or common sense between all of them.

>they're a parody of super robot show protagonists
No they aren't. Exactly one character is remotely remotely like what you described and he's a generic honorable samurai type, not a super robot protagonist. Every other one of them is just a generic japanese villain archetype. Every antagonist being a total idiot for no reason because "hurr dumb baddies" is atrocious storytelling.

It's been a very long time since I watched the show, but the main villain boy (the blonde one?), the guy who used to whip him, and the evil aristocrat guy who shoots the princess are all explicitly meant to be parodies of super robot heroes, i.e. melodramatic, romantic, emotional and retarded.

I choose to believe the show ended after season 1 and everyone is dead.

They completely fail because they're not remotely like mecha protagonists and are just generic aristocratic Japanese villains and their associated lackeys.

Which is embarrassing since Martian Successor: Nadesico pulled off super robot pilots as antagonists successfully decades ago.

Get ready for a lot of discussion about Aldnoah.Zero and no discussion of your OP.

>heroes plays by the rules of real robot
>villains play by the rules normally reserved for super robot heroes
Why the fuck would anybody play the heroes, then?

I choose to believe the show ended after episode 3 when the only decent writer on the team jumped ship.

The show is a deconstruction/subversion. The heroes end up winning because (in the show, at least) it turns out that tactics, common sense and ingenuity trump crazy gimmick superweapons and blind "guts".

3.5ed based villain
OSR based PCs
do it

That sounds very boring.

This shit right here is a deconstruction of shit.

Which is why it did so poorly despite its all star staff, aggressive marketing campaign and comparatively astronomical budget.

Dumping their best writer around the middle sure didn't help.

Urobuchi has a bit of a bad case of One Trick Pony syndrome. He made Fate/Zero, which is universally hailed as fantastic, and he made Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which has a tremendous fandom (seriously, go to Akihabara even nowadays, the amount of PMMM merch and imaginary you'll see is absolutely insane, easily overshadowing almost every more recent anime and most older ones except Love Live!)

Since then, he's been a lot less good, but since he's recognized as a genius he keeps getting jobs on the logic that people will watch anything with his name on it.

Also, magic eye powers.

>Inaho being a realistic protagonist
Oh, that's cute that you think this stupid thing.

uh, did you actually read the post? This isn't even remotely implied.

AZ was neither the first nor even a decent example of this concept. Gundam did it way before they did. Also god I fucking hate the garbage that show turned into after the end of season 1.
>Hey let's just turn a hero whose entire point is that he only wins because he has a decent understanding of basic physics and tactics into an omniscient wizard who never makes mistakes and also focus the entire show on a character that's not only irredeemably evil and has terminal chronic backstabbing syndrome but also displays Starscream levels of stupidity in his betrayals

>Bad guy is literally the only person who can use magic, reason not really important
>Good guys can't
Of course caster mains, people who don't want to use strategy, and weeaboo warriors would cry too hard for this to ever be a thing.

Sounds like Black Company. Lot of regular people with regular abilities doing regular realistic things, then you get high power wizards who are practically demigods.

Crossbows would be better. It can take years to get competent with combat archery (that is, long range arching shots) but with a plumb line and a protractor anybody can use a crossbow.

People hate A/Z for the weirdest reasons. I don't mind that but they always tend to lie about it to themselves.

Full Metal Panic is a pretty decent inversion of the concept, in which a super robot is handed to what is essentially a high functioning autist of a pilot because the rest of the setting is real robot and he's a savant at piloting mechs.

But if the BBEG followed high fantasy he would have a "heroic" counter.

>BBEG wields an 8 foot sword with a blade 6 inches wide and 3 inches thick in the middle
>PCs just walk into a stone corridor and stab him in the kidney when his sword smacks against a wall
BBEG has perfect maneuverability anyway. This is his heroic weapon, after all!

>BBEG has an army of orcs all wielding greatswords and great axes with no shields or armour
>PCs just get a bunch of shitty peasant archers to mow them down
BBEG makes an inspiring speech, the army presses on regardless of casualties and butchers the peasants because heroic.

>BBEG starts raising the dead to make an army
>PCs start burning bodies
He goes on a personal quest and finds a cemetery of ancient heroes, who possess a spark of resistance that they had in life.

>BBEG flies around on a dragon
>PCs get a few ballistas and shoot it down
BBEG can dodge like it's a jetfighter. It's an artform the way he flies.

How were the bad guys from Aldnoah Zero like paladins, they pretty much nuked the fuck out of cities when they first landed.

Lawful good != Lawful nice. Their people feel the cities are valid targets. if you disagree, then you're just imposing your worldview on them.

Except you aren't actually having him win via fantastic elements, you are just defining him as winning because he is high fantasy.
>BBEG has perfect maneuverability anyway. This is his heroic weapon, after all!
The issue isn't agility, the issue is if he is in a cave with tunnels 6x6 feet he will smack his sword into a wall when he swings it. Even if his sword can cleave through stone it would need to cleave through multiple feet of stone and still be lethal to be useful in that area.
>BBEG makes an inspiring speech, the army presses on regardless of casualties and butchers the peasants because heroic.
Except they were all killed by arrows so it doesn't matter how motivated they are.

>He goes on a personal quest and finds a cemetery of ancient heroes, who possess a spark of resistance that they had in life.
And PCs try to beat him there and destroy or move the bodies. Alternatively the heroes have such strong spirits that they manage to resist his control and his plan backfires.

>BBEG can dodge like it's a jetfighter. It's an artform the way he flies.
Get enough ballistas, get a trebuchet and load it with hundreds of small but still large enough to hurt a dragon sized rocks, like bird hunting or skeet shooting.

>Lawful good means whatever I want
No it doesn't, actively targeting civilians isn't good. It isn't necessarily evil, but it sure as hell isn't good.

The point of heroic fantasy is that the hero wins no matter what. Place an army in front of the hero, and the hero will always win. Otherwise it's not heroic fantasy, it's an "inversion".

Yes, the BBEG would cleave through stone like it was water. That's heroic. The army would just resist the arrows, and not die. That's heroic. The PCs would try to find the bodies, but they'd be too late - the hero would have found them just in time. The number of ballistas, cannons, or shot type is irrelevant - the hero dodges, because he's heroic!

The BBEG isn't the hero though.

If one person is following heroic rules, while the others are playing "realistically," that makes them the hero. Playing as normal mooks in a heroic fantasy is like playing fighters in 3.5 - despite your best efforts, you will never be able to compete unless the DM gives you a heroic ability to basically nullify the wizard's skills.

Or you use tactics and ruthlessness, which is the point, just because the "hero" can easily tear you apart in a fight doesn't mean he can't be defeated, if that was the case there would be no reason to ever fight basic enemies in an RPG.

Basic enemies are there to tell a story of the heroes' heroicness. There is never a real threat from them. They exist to die. They have no real ability to permanently harm the players. The risky fights are the plot-important enemies, who have heroic powers themselvesz.

Oh. You're a narrative gamer. Thanks for letting me know your opinion is invalid.

>Fantastic BBEG is secretly a lich and keeps regenerating after being slain in a variety of pragmatic ways
>Gritty Hero spends months slaying the lich in a variety of pragmatic ways and triangulating his first strikes after each regeneration
>lich's undead horde is steadily winning, grinding down the kingdom's defences
>soon all that's left are a handful of frontier forts and the capital city
>a last-ditch assault on the supposed phylactery location wins the day as the lich crumbles to ash storming the capital city
>BBEG lich reaches out towards the princess' body double, realizing his moment of victory would've been lost either way, cursing the heavens with one last death rattling cry of rage
>princess hefts the holy hammer that broke the phylactery as the hero dispatches the lich's vampiric lieutenant who was responsible for dogging the hero's efforts and second-guessing his tactics the whole way
>VampLt casts one last curse as she crumbles to dust, tearing out the princess' life force
>segue to season 2 where the VampLt claws her way out of hell with the help of some demonic artefacts and the princess' soul trapped in a faerie lantern

>It can take years to get competent with combat archery
That is wrong by the way. A crossbow just does the work better, firing a crossbow is less tiring, aiming is easier (no archer paradox involved etc).
Source: I used to practice archery and learned a few related things.

>How would this translate into a fantasy setting?
Isn't that just the Empire in Warhammer Fantasy vs Chaos?

Chaos is full of special heroes chosen by destiny, even their elites fill that mold of super special badass, wearing magic armour and weilding god-blessed weapons.

Empire are rank and file peasants with spears and muskets with maybe a wizard who might blow himself up rather than do anything useful backing them up.

He only wrote the first episodes. The guy who did Mirai Nikki wrote the rest. Urobuchi might have had something to do with the season one finale

Looks like standard sword & sorcery desu

Yeah. But name the last time you played a true sword and sorcery campaign. I can't.

What if they’re baby orcs?

He also wrote Kamen Rider Gaim, which was pretty great.

Imagine what could’ve been.

Which is behaving exactly like the good guys in the simplistic, black and white worlds of space opera: the enemy is nothing but faceless mooks. “Civilians” are all unquestionably supportive of the “bad guys’” “evil ways”. They can be killed with impunity.

Remember, also, that Vers see themselves (possibly even accurately) as plucky rebels standing up to the tyranny of mighty Earth. Of course they’d be “forced” to “fight smart” like that.

What happened in AZ can best be simulated by the heroes having an unlimited pool of "reroll, keep the best result."-chances.

OP clearly means the spirit of the show exemplified during its first couple of episodes. That the rest of the execution was shitty to the point of shooting itself in the foot (e.g. giving a hero whose whole shtick is winning against superpowers using plain old logic superpowers of his own) doesn’t make the core concept less interesting.

My personal theory is that nobody on the writing team could come up with a more believable way of giving him a chance against Tharsis’ precognitive matrix.

>OP clearly means the spirit of the show exemplified during its first couple of episodes.

Okay, then it's: "DM tells PCs that rocks fell on everyone they tried to keep safe. They're dead. Now the PCs have to fight his DMPC whose build is using rules from a high level freeform online game."

Yet the protagonists on that show did win using legitimate tactics. Obviously, the situation wasn’t TRULY impossible, it just requires outside the box thinking. Done correctly, this principle could make for an incredible RPG encounter that doesn’t just revolve into whoever has the biggest numbers on their character sheet.

This is one of the few thinks I personally think Aldnnoah Zero did well: over the course of the show, it's difficult to single out one side of the conflict as the "underdogs", meaning the psychological comfort zone of "rooting for the underdog" isn't easily available and helps drive home the series' message about war not being black and white.

The first couple episodes sort of fool the viewer into seeing Earth as the underdog: the Martians have overwhelming technological superiority (e.g. even their transport planes can detect F-35s before being detected themselves and demolish them in a dogfight), their mecha have seemingly physics defying abilities which are all but unbeatable, they're holding the orbitals and their initial attack is a MIND MINDBOGGLINGLY destructive, planetwide surprise strike (vaporizing a number of major cities with Castle Drops and asteroid bombardment, crippling Earth's satellite and communication networks within the first minutes to throw it into chaos, etc.). The few Martians we see all appear to be prideful aristocrats dressed in gold silk whose starship interiors look like palaces...

Then we watch a few more episodes and it turns out that this was largely an IN-SETTING ruse. The Martians had to make their initial attack that shocking because they'd hoped to mask the fact that THIS IS ALL THEY HAD. They've been cut off from Mars itself (which mostly a favela tier overpopulated shithole anyway), they're desperately short on manpower and resources (to the point of eating humanitarian aid rations), their leadership is made up of inbred buffoons who got the job by merit of their titles, most of their population is literally STARVING, their entire war effort consists of a few dozen unique mecha which can't be rebuilt if destroyed, and they've spent the past 15 years exhausting what little supplies they had FIGHTING AMONG THEMSELVES FOR THE HONOR OF LEADING THE INVASION OF EARTH rather than doing anything about this.

Oh, and they can't actually take ADVANTAGE of their control of the orbitals since they don't want to destroy humanity for its own sake, they desperately need to conquer Earth in a habitable condition because Mars can no longer sustain their population. We see in the very first episode that asteroid bombardment is a serious business last measure (which people can be executed for using frivolously), because they know that if they over-rely on it then by the time they win the war Earth would be exactly as inhospitable as Mars.

As the war goes on, their supplies dwindle, and their one-of-a-kind supermecha are destroyed, we get to see just how unclear it is which side actually has the "clear advantage" over the other here.

Protagonist is basically the autist dude who postes Tuhus and D&D builds. He knows all the rulebooks. All of them.

I’d say it’s more like encyclopedic knowledge of GURPS.

Also, the player is the GM's girlfriend and gets away with every kind of bullshit.

Part of the paradigm of high fantasy heroes is that they always win. No point playing the game, the villain will win.

That sounds like a worse version of Heavy Object and Heavy Object already wasn't the best show out there.

The issue with a lot of such deconstructions (Like, say, Goblin Slayer) is that the guys playing by the non-realistic rules tends to be utterly stupid. Or more accurately, unaware of the world somehow. Goblin Slayer is a realy bad example of it where the entire world seems to work on JRPG rules...unless Goblin Slayer is within 10 miles of the situation, where it suddenly becomes Dickstabbing Song of Swords Central or some Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction.

Also: Isn't this the Clan Invasion in Battletech? Where the clanners were fantastic warriors but terrible soldiers?

So WHY is the BBEG doing these things, if the counters to them are so very obvious? Is it cultural for all non-PCs to be dropped on their head as children?

Go watch the Gouf fight from 08th MS Team.

Isn't that what Isekai shows are all about?

That's... Not all that uncommon, to be honest. Villains getting to do their stuff due to powers, specialness and so while heroes must use their common sense? Par for the course.

Take FMA, and think for a moment the role Mustang and co had in the story. That's pretty much what you are asking, and even if you count the 2 elric brothers the villains still had them out-uniquenessed for almost all the story.

Cleave and Smite, user, Cleave and Smite.

>Basic enemies are there to tell a story of the heroes' heroicness. There is never a real threat from them.
Boromir.

By the definition given, 'real robot' would include machines such as Bolos and ACUs.

>How would this translate into a fantasy setting?
Every boss is a puzzle boss. Find the weakpoint and exploit it.

I did an AdEva campaign like that a few years ago, it works but you have to ease the players into it so they don't try to brute force everything. Pic related was the first boss, it got the idea across pretty well.

As for how to deal with the wizard? Just remember that like killbots, wizards come with a preset spell limit. You merely have to send in wave after wave of their own men until they reach that limit and become mere old men.

>sword smacks against a wall
>sword goes through wall like butter
death assist

But Full Metal Panic is at its best when its being a slice of life romcom starring a nutjob.

>Boromir
LotR isn't heroic fantasy.

Most "deconstructions" have a nasty tendency of just presenting whatever it's deconstructing as painfully stupid without stepping back and thinking about why those stories present the story the way they do and why people in a different kind of story would make those kinds of decisions.

The way describes Aldnnoah Zero make it come off pretty good. Why would an enemy use giant impracticable superweapons to fight a war? Because they don't have the resources to fight a conventional war and are looking to end the war before it even starts by giving the impression that they're an overwhelming force that can't be challenged. Everything is geared toward that, from the design of their super robots to the way their commanders dress. Their attack is geared toward beating the idea that they're invincible into the collective consciousness of humanity in one fell swoop. The downside is that once its proven that they're not invincible their situation turns desperate and they have to fight like the heroes they're pretending to be just to hold on.

I'd watch this show if it didn't apparently go to shit.

The one thing I'm not so sure you got right is their reasoning for putting on the whole noble appearance. As far as I'm aware, they actually DO buy into the whole charade due to a quirk of their civilization.

TL;DR the Mars civilization originated as a research colony from Earth. One day, a scientist accidentally reactivated an enormous cache of ancient alien technology. It recognized him as its new master and locked on his genes, meaning only he or his genetic relatives, OR those they permitted it to (a permission which can be revoked at any time) may use ancient Martian supertechnology. It's inert in the hands of anyone else.

The scientist promptly power tripped harder than a Grey Seer in a barrel of warpstone, declared himself Emperor of Mars, and started granting supertech activation rights to whoever would swear fealty to him, creating "Dukes". Since the activation right comes with the ability to grant it to other people, or pass it on genetically, this effectively resulted in the creation of Martian noble bloodlines and feudal hierarchies based on activation rights (i.e. the dukes made counts, who made barons, who made knights, etc.). The difference is that someone higher on the "hierarchy" can revoke the activation rights of anyone below them, so if you betray your Count, they can render you instantly unable to use your mecha, for example. You can do the same to your own Knights. And the Emperor holds absolute power because he can decide at any time that any Martian noble will no longer be able to wield Martian supertech.

Fast forward a few decades, Martian society has adopted a lot of feudal trappings. The nobles actually teat themselves like a medieval aristocracy and their command of supertech allows them to acquire vast riches, so while the average Martian citizen is in constant danger of DYING FROM THIRST and will murder another for a cup of nutritious algae slop, the nobles get to own space battleships decorated like palaces.

As an amusing sidenote, one episode points out the absurdity of the Martian economic situation by showing the decadent, luxurious, royal food Martian nobles can eat, which any Martian commoner would gladly die for... Microwave heated, freeze dried chicken with a side of carrots and peas. Originally from supplies brought alongside initial Mars expeditions.

Then it dawns on you that for all of their superiority when it comes to military technology, the Martians are in such bad shape industrially and economically that most of them would think of a MICROWAVE DINNER as food fit for royalty (the commoners are said to subsist entirely on algae and plankton based foodstuffs).

The reasoning for this discrepancy is also explored in the show: because the Martians gain their best tech by unearthing more alien technology, they can't really control what they get. Most of it happens to be weapons, for some reason. Many Martian nobles PRAY EVERY NIGHT that one of their digging teams would uncover something like a device that produces water, or a hyperefficient air recycle, but all they get is more crazy physics defying mecha. In all respects other than what they've been able to essentially STUMBLE into through xenoarcheology, their technology actually lags somewhat BEHIND Earth.

^that

The Martian military is made up mostly of nobles since only they can use the tech. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of the Martian military is made up of incompetent morons whose credentials were quite literally "born to the right people" (whose own original credentials were themselves not based on any actual merit other than "willing to swear fealty to a megalomaniac"). This causes them a lot of problems, since instead of military discipline and trained soldiers, you got chivalry obsessed gloryhounds, backstabbing dicks and rich twats whose sole talent is playing the violin who are only there because they thought it'd be "quaint". Each of the 37 Martian capital ships in Earth's orbit (aptly nicknamed "Castles") is commanded by a different high ranking nobles, and once cut off from Mars they almost immediately started factionalizing and warring with each other in orbit, giving Earth all the time it needed to rebuild its forces while they wasted all of their ammo and food.

Everyone is born with low-level magic powers, like telepathy or controlling the elements. The villains were not, but they became ridiculously strong just by training their bodies.

Preferably, magic should have some kind of impact on how battles are fought which would explain why no one else does that kind of training

So the Earth is being attacked by Rogue Traders.

AZ was hot trash.

Rogue traders might be egocentric pompous bufoons on the outside, but underneath that , they need to be cunning , pragmatic bastards.

Marsians have the first part down, but they fail miserably at second one. Theese schmucks wouldnt last a week as RT

There are writers that create many works and only ever become known for one story. There is nothing wrong with that. After Fate/Zero and Madoka, Urobuchi did both Psycho Pass and Gaim, and before that he did Saya no Uta. Even if you don't think all of those stories were good there is no way he is a one trick pony.

A/Z kind of invited a villain who's idea is steal a bunch of the grunt mechs from the damn earthlings, strap the lasers and laser swords used by the prototype mechs and unleash them on the enemy because that orange mech seems to be relying on how the mechs are vulnerable physics wise.

I mean what the hell is our great hero gonna do when he is swarmed by mechs with a tech advantage against him? It is like a Tiger tank platoon vs a bunch of Armored Cars

The hell was ever wrong with princess wheelchair?

Kamen Rider Gaim was when I first started noticing that he has a formula
Still pretty cool, I'm just kinda bummed about it

Conan the Barbarian
Wizards are dicks and use their powers to turn into snakes and shit. No, you can't play a wizard.

And according to someone who's actually watched more than a handful of robot anime, that's a load of horse shit.

No, it's not. It's not a deconstruction, it's not a subversion, stop doing this. It's a very poorly done, rather generic show actually.