Video Game / Wolfstride

See you, people trash!

Get wrecked in this immature grown-up RPG about a trio of troublemakers stumbling their way through a giant mecha tournament.

—Description on the official website

Mecha-battles are all the rage in the future. After all, is there anything cooler than giant robots beating the crap out of each other for money?

Enter Dominique Shade, Knife Leopard and Duque, three old partners in crime who have just inherited a junkyard mecha by the name of Cowboy. Can they trounce every opponent in the legendary Ultimate Golden God Tournament? And more importantly: Will they be able to sort out their own personal and emotional baggage while doing so?

Wolfstride is an indie-strategy role play game, developed by OTA IMON Studios and published by Raw Fury. It was released on Steam on December 7th, 2021, with a free demo having been made available beforehand.

Zet Zillions, a card-based roguelike featuring Foam Gun taking place in the same universe is to be released on May 24, 2024.

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Wolfstride contains examples of:

• Alternate Universe: The world is fairly similar to our own, right down to having several real life movie, video game, and book titles dropped. However, it's also populated by Funny Animals, there is a "United States of North America" and "United States of South America" and as opposed to just a "U.S.A." and "South America", and the Soviet Union still exists in 2017. And that's not even getting into the fact that giant mecha were used in war and later repurposed for sport.
• Ambiguous Situation: It is never explained if Wormgod is actually a resurrected Godworm or where he got an army of apparent clones from. It is also left unknown if GW was actually alive when Shade encountered him on the night of the battle with Wormgod, or if Shade had engaged in a Dead Person Conversation.
• Animesque: The character and mecha designs take some very obvious design cues from anime of the late 90's and early 2000's, with Shade in particular looking like Spike Spiegel with Kamina's shades.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The Final Fortnight takes place on a secluded island. However, it isn't a point of no return, as Animal shows up on the second day to transport Shade back to Rain City in case the player didn't complete all the underground battles or needs to grind for pineapples and money.
• Apologetic Attacker: Amonde claims to be from a tribe that are total pacifists... outside sport, so she's very sorry about having to attack during your fight with her... and enjoying it so much.
• Armored Coffins: The mechas seemingly have no ejection seats or emergency exits in case something goes terribly wrong. The best a pilot can do when their mecha's head gets attacked is buckle in tighter and hope for the best.
• Beast Man: The setting features anthropomorphic animals coexisting alongside humans. A line by Fancy Jack later on indicates that they evolved from their non-anthropomorphic counterparts similar to how humans evolved from apes.
• BFG: Every gun used by a mecha is automatically this, but Cowboy stands out as his assault rifle can fire machine gun rounds, sniper rounds, shotgun shells, AND flamethrower blasts all in one.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the Black Door ending, Shade manages to overcome his inner demons and make peace with his past mistakes. The group also gets a massive paycheck from the fallout of the Soviet invasion, ensuring that they can live happier lives. However, Cowboy gets confiscated by the government, Knife decides to retire from being a mecha pilot, the group go their separate ways to pursue their own interests, Shade still finds himself content with drifting around, and the world itself is on the verge of a third World War.
• Blood Knight: Knife seems to be this to a degree, and is exaggerated when you access his masochist stance.
• Cassandra Truth: Joutaro, a kid who shows up a the Midnite Rider, claims to everyone that he's waiting for his master to find him. Everyone else assumes that he's living in denial that his mentor had abandoned him. At the end of his story arc, it turns out that his master actually was looking for him, every bit the strong mysterious man Joutaro claimed he was. Needless to say, Shade is shocked when he finds out.
• Crapsack World: Downplayed, but it's 2017, and the Yakuza are still a major force to be reckoned with, loan sharks, mafia, and various scumbags seem to thrive just out of sight of society, Mecha fighting, while awesome, is highly lethal to most pilots and Soviet Russia and China don't seem too keen on the whole "freedom" thing.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Shade may or may not be doing this.
• Friendly Rivalry: Fancy Jack outright requests one between Knife Leopard and himself after their first match.
• Gainax Ending: Cowboy wins the tournament, only for a communist mecha to hijack the broadcast and talk about the USNA oil monopoly. It completely totals Cowboy with an EMP blast, and Shade is shot in the chaos. A talk with Foam Gun (who is revealed to the Devil) has Shade be offered oblivion or the choice to face his past, leading to him having a spiritual duel with Oyabun over his inability to move on from the guilt and fear caused by him murdering Neb's father and falling for his wife. Shade wakes up in the hospital surrounded by the entire cast, and then the story flash forwards for a Where Are They Now ending.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Knife is unable to build morale during his battle with Wormgod, which is contextualized in-universe by the confusion and desperation of the situation.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: You deliver the finishing strike to Engelbrecht...only for a Russian extremist to hijack the airwaves, revealing himself to be the secret investor behind the Final Fortnight and unleashing his own experimental mecha that completely totals Cowboy.
• Good All Along: Trinket and Killer. Initially appearing to be nothing more than a pair of mafia enforcers, they quickly become more and more threatening, showing up to talk to Shade, killing Godworm, and even kidnapping Knife... All because they're investigating the Soviets' activities, which turns out to be completely warranted when a War Mecha shows up in the story's finale and starts to wreak havoc.
  • Also Coltrane, who first appears to be responsible for kidnapping Duque's mother... but it turns out it was a fake kidnapping arranged by Shade in order to keep her safe from the other debt collectors.
• Graceful Loser: If her chest HP is lowered to around its last third, Queen will admit that she is likely to lose the battle. However, she sees her defeat as an opportunity to challenge Knife again in the future, which she's looking forward to.
• Henshin Hero: Canyon Bolt has this as part of his idol singer backstory, visually being a fairly obvious sendup to Toku heroes. However, we only see him outside of his costume during his Final Fortnight introduction, and he otherwise remains in costume.
• Hero of Another Story: The Bounty hunters, Lionel and Moonshine, a classic team up between a grizzled old man and spunky young lady, along with at least 6 other independent bounty hunters, and an entire mafia gang are hunting down another Bounty Hunter by the name of "Lullaby".
• Humongous Mecha: The mechas used in the Tournament are all enormous. Cowboy itself towers over its owners' home and has to be accessed via scaffolding.
• Hollywood Exorcism: Played with. A bit into the game, you find out that ZZ's niece is possessed by a demon. Shade offers to take care of it, and asks for equipment that ZZ says she's all seen before, but Shade vehemently insists that he's the real deal, though he'll never put up as good of an act as the scammers... and then proceeds to exorcise Mary over the course of several days, using a katana to defend from the spirit ramming into him with Mary's bed, Yelling "The power of Christ compels you motherfucker" and ends it all with a homage to the mafu-ba from Dragon Ball, though this time with a soy sauce bottle. It still works perfectly.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Cowboy's damage output even with the best combination stands no chance against Komarov's mecha. After you disable its shield, it'll initiate an attack that will completely wipe out Cowboy's HP.
• Laser Blade: Queen's mecha is equipped with one, making it the only mecha in the game equipped with a melee weapon. It's also the most overtly "sci-fi" weapon in the game.
• Left Hanging: What exactly happens between Kromanov showing up and Shade waking up in the hospital is never shown, leaving it ambiguous as to what the hell happened to the Soviet invasion, how the cast survived and got off the island, or what happened to the other mech fighters.
• Let's Meet the Meat: During the breakfast on the way over to the Final Fortnight, Fancy Jack, an anthropomorphic pig, is enthused about the spread containing sausage, bacon and ham. When Peepoo comments that Jack is engaging in cannibalism, Jack responds that his species is different from the pigs used for meat, equating it to a human eating a monkey. It's then awkwardly pointed out that people don't usually eat monkeys.
• Lethal Chef: The Dragon, Duque's Mother, appears to be this. The only good thing she can apparently make is popcorn.
• Non-Indicative Name: Mad Margouxx isn't short tempered or particularly unstable despite her title. She talks rather plainly about crushing Cowboy, but that's fairly standard trash talk among mecha pilots.
• Noodle Incident:
  • It's never revealed what Shade did to convince Colonel SBD's ex to go on another date with the Colonel. Shade just returns after a few days, battered and bloody.
  • The actual heist Knife, Duque, GW and Shade pull off is one both In-Universe and without. None of the three seem to remember much, especially Knife; Duque even speculates that GW drugged them. It involved a tank, and them getting very, very lucky.
• Permanently Missable Content: If you don't max out your Relationship Values with Joy and Calla before the Final Fortnight, you won't have another opportunity to get their exclusive items.
• Properly Paranoid: Trinket and Killer seem to be incredibly on edge about Soviet activity. At first, their paranoia is framed as a villainous quality, but then a Soviet war mech barges into the story's finale and sends the plot off the rails.
• Rags to Riches: Several cases of this:
  • Mad Margouxx was born and raised in the ghetto. It was only because of her physics teacher realizing her aptitude for mecha engineering that she managed to work her way towards being a successful mecha pilot. She now wealthy enough to donate a majority of what she earns to her community and technological advancements.
  • Queen took part in races both legal and illegal in order to keep her family afloat, and most of that money ended up getting drained away on her recovery after she got into a serious accident. After she became a prodigy mecha pilot and quickly rocketed up the ranks, her family became incredibly wealthy by establishing their own mecha brand.
  • Zee becomes this during the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, as Cowboy's publicity during the Final Fortnight brings her a number of business opportunities.
• The Reveal: The Final Fortnight was actually secretly bankrolled by a Soviet extremist by the name of Komarov, who wanted to find the strongest mecha in order to destroy it with his own experimental mecha to prove blazenium's legitimacy and uproot America's monopoly on the oil industry.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: One is showcased in a flashback between Coltrane and Shade about how they would thrive in a zombie apocalypse.
• Sequel Hook: Oyabun's spirit reveals to Shade that the yakuza still aren't finished with him and Coltrane and urges him to prepare for the battle ahead.
• Splash of Color:
  • Queen's mecha is colored bright red in an otherwise completely monochrome game to signify its significance as the most powerful mecha in the UGG rankings. Queen's uniform also has red accents for a similar reason.
  • Komarov's mask has a red symbol scrawled on, which makes his arrival as an out-of-left-field opponent all the more jarring.
• The Unfought: The pilot with the Rank 4 in the World, Yankee, has a cunning plan to deal with Cowboy. He pays for their drinks, and proceeds to get them all absolutely smashed in the hopes of giving them a killer hangover, making it impossible for them to fix the mecha... and ends up going too far and drinking himself into a coma.
• Those Two Guys: Junkie Peter and Charlie Boyler, seen lounging around the bar discussing the victories of "Murder Machine" (Cowboy) in the early game, and are later seen as patrons of Arcade Paradise, with Peter egging Charlie on on a punching arcade machine.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Neb burned down her school, and May on several occasions mentions thoughts of wanting to commit murder.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Kamorov only wants to liberate his country from the stifling grip of the corrupt American fuel industry and prove blazenium's existence, but he's willing to push the world towards a third World War in order to achieve this.
• Worf Had the Flu: Queen is already fairly tough when you fight her, but her dialogue indicates that she isn't quite as strong as she should be at that moment, due to her piloting a new model she hasn't fully adjusted to yet.
• Younger Than They Look: Duque plays, looks, and sounds the role of the wise old mentor, yet he is only 32 years old (not much older than Knife and Shade).