On paper, this should be a fun game. You play as a mech with a sword in a beat-em-up fashion, and then you have your sub-boss battle, followed by the boss that you battle in the style of a fighting game.
There are significant cracks in this game's execution of this concept.
For one thing, the beat-em-up part leaves something to be desired. As far as your abilities go, you can attack with your sword, do a little combo, maybe throw enemies, you can run, you can do a running jump, which can be followed up with a running jump attack where you spin with the sword slashing anyone near you...that's all well and good, but I felt like this could have used a little more in the way of power-ups.
As it is, the game has just "okay" beat-em-up mechanics. You'll find gold on the ground constantly that gives you points, there are blue crystals that give you more points. You find so much of these, it's kind of annoying. No one cares about points! Give me power-ups, I want to find ways to wreck enemies other than slashing them with a sword, or kicking them in the air. The other items I saw were some burning blue icon that makes you invincible for a bit, and some kind of atom that refills a bit of health.
It doesn't help that one of the early sub-boss battles confused me. You fight a Garada-K7 in a way where he's a giant compared to you, and he attacks you from left or right with his hand. I never quite understood the way you're supposed to hit him. Whenever I tried to slice the hands as they were coming for me, I took a hit. I had to rely on the running jump attack, which wasn't always reliable since you never really know the side from which the Garada-K7 will attack.
After that came the boss battle that is done like a fighting game. This is supposed to be the climax of each stage, you against a boss, one-on-one, like you're in Street Fighter II.
Except, SF2 was a million times more fun than these battles.
The fights here are slow, your attacks do little damage. It doesn't help that your opponents can shoot projectiles, while you got nothing other than your sword. The controls are strange for these parts, but then again, the developers probably wanted to keep things simple and designed them for the 3-button controllers.
You block with A, you attack with B, and you jump with C. Without special moves of any kind, your options of attack are kinda limited*. This wouldn't be so bad if the fights themselves weren't so slow. The fights do take place between giants, so I understand that they're not going to be nimble on their feet like Street Fighter characters, but the slow pace and the low damage of attacks leads to fights that become boring, or just a hassle to deal with.
Let me remind you, this is supposed to be the climax of each stage. On top of that, you have to go through all the boss battles in that style after you beat stage 5. As if the development team was so proud of these fights that they make you go through them, one after the other. Or maybe they just wanted to fill time because they couldn't design so many full stages for the player to run around in the beat-em-up style.
Either way, I just can't really recommend this game, unless you're somewhat familiar with what Mazinger Z is, or with Go Nagai's work.
* - pressing directions on the D-pad along with B gives you some different options for strikes. But strikes are all you have in the boss fights. No combos.