Pragmata checks off a crucial element of Japanese sci-fi with giant robot kaiju boss battles
Because this is a cruel world we live in, I will never get to play another Vanquish, my forever answer to the question "what videogame has the most juice?" But if I can't play more of the knee-sliding, giant-sci-fi-mech-toppling shooter made by Capcom's former design maestro Shinji Mikami, I will happily accept a successor from 2026 Capcom, which is now years deep into a hot streak of great games. (When your "duds" are still as fun to play as Monster Hunter Wilds, you know you're on a heater).
Pragmata has seemed like a potentially shaky entry in Capcom's remarkably consistent lineup, delayed four whole years to finally arrive next month. But a meaty hands-on demo at Capcom's office in San Francisco last week reassured me that every look we've gotten at the action game so far has been holding back a lot of the good stuff—stuff like building-sized robot kaiju that demand I shoot them with enormous laser cannons. Maybe someone at Capcom's carrying a torch for Vanquish, too.
Capcom actually snuck a few seconds of this boss fight into Pragmata's most recent trailer, but until then it'd spent the last six years of Pragmata's development not giving away much about the scale of the action. The demo I played last year, which is now available on Steam, is essentially the game's tutorial, putting you up against much smaller man-sized bots who don't pose much of a threat, introducing the heady concept of hacking enemies with a controller D-pad while simultaneously blasting them and dodging their attacks.
Promising, but not bombastic, you know? This is Japanese sci-fi. Do the Power Rangers stick to fighting grunts their own size every episode? No! They hop into mechs, smash those mechs together into a bigger mech, and then do slightly more awkward kung fu at 100 times the scale. If you stick me in a spacesuit that looks even five percent Vanquish-coded, I will immediately crave dodging several hundred missiles while blowing out a robot's limbs joint-by-joint. And call me an overachiever, but if said robot's not at least 10 stories tall it's barely worth the scuffle.
The boss I fought in Pragmata was worth the scuffle. It filled the bombast meter and then some:
- Weird, alien hammerhead design with comically pregnant robo-belly
- Three distinct giant laser beam attacks that demand quick repositioning
- Smart evolution of the hacking minigame that demands shooting specific weak points to drop the bot's cybershields
- Buildings that convey the sense of scale (robot indeed big)
- A weapon called the Charge Piercer that both charges and pierces with a giant laser beam of its own
While Capcom didn't allow direct capture, here's a small portion of the battle:
The particularly erudite among you may watch this clip and think "Hmm, cool spaceman and cool robot kaiju? Yes. But something is missing." That something is of course a building-sized mech of my own to climb into for the proper Super Sentai-style finale. Instead I had to say distressingly normal sized, targeting the giant bot's weak spots until I stunned it and could deliver a point-blank finisher for major damage.
But we must remain hopeful! This portion of Pragmata was still clearly early in the game's campaign, and I have a feeling things will escalate sharply the closer astronaut guy Hugh and android sidekick Diana get to escaping the lunar base gone haywire. Dare I hope for the classical Japanese action game final boss set in space?
I've blown up the moon before, and I'll do it again. Just give me the chance, Pragmata.