Power Dolls

Power Dolls or (Power Dolls: Detachment of Limited Line Service) is a series of turn based tactical VideoGames, developed by Kogado Studio's Usagi San team.

The plot of the original game takes place in the year 2535, the planet Omni, originally a colony of Earth, declared independence over Earth government's heavy-handed approach to land disputes. The player is placed in charge of the 3rd Company, 177th Special Duty Battalion, known as "DoLLS", and contributes to Omni's war of independence from Earth, using a variety of mecha-based weapons.

The original game spawned several sequel games including:

• Power Dolls FX
• Power Dolls 2
• Power Dolls 2 Dash
• Advanced Power Dolls 2
• Power R Dolls 3
• Power Dolls 4
• Power Dolls 5
• Power Dolls 5X
• Power Dolls 6

A 2 episode Anime OVA was also adapted from the games, produced by the joint efforts of Oriental Light and Magic, Kogado Studio, Shueisha and VAP, under the direction of Masayuki Hidaka. Released in 1996 in Japan and 2003 in North America. Detailing the actions of the 177th Squadron in their quest to defend Omni against the seemingly endless Earth forces invading the planet.

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Tropes found in the games and OVAs include:

• Amazon Brigade - The titular "DoLLS".
• A Mech by Any Other Name - Power Loader, or PLD.
• Fun with Acronyms - Detachment of Limited Line Service; Power LoaDers.
• Glass Cannon - A power loader can carry twice the firepower of a main battle tank but does not have the latter's raw survivability.
• It's Raining PLDs - Your troops tend to be airdropped into mission areas by aircraft or submarine-launched cargo rockets.
• Lady Land - The reason behind the DoLLS being an all-female unit is its being deliberately advertised by the Omni military as an "idol" unit to further conceal its true role as a special operations unit and the Omni military's practice of segregation between males and females at company level in order to simplify personnel logistics and avoid gender politics.
• Lady of War - You are in command of an all-female special operations unit. Anyone you can do anything with is bound to be good at operating either power loaders, artillery vehicles, or combat aircraft- all you need to do is to match skills accordingly.
• More Dakka - Your general-purpose PLDs can, and often need to, carry different guns to deal with different kinds of enemies although many weapons have overlapping utilities (for example, shoulder-mounted cannons are useful against main battle tanks but can augment rifles by firing fragmentation shells against PLDs). Also, only direct auto-fire (D1) weapons get reaction fire at all. Reconnaissance and close-combat PLDs are often limited to hand-held weapons, however.
• One-Gender Race - The English localization of the original game is said to describe all of the people on Omni as female and reproducing asexually. Averted in the Japanese original, where the DoLLS just so happens to be an all-female outfit.
• Spider Tank - The first-generation Earth forces power loaders are essentially light tanks on multi-legged chassis.
• World of Badass - Everyone in the game, be it your troops, allied support, or the enemies, tend to be rather good at what they do. You are dealing with a wide variety of enemies- tanks are very durable, infantry fighting vehicles and armored cars have long-range sensors, power loaders are highly-mobile, helicopters outright ignore terrains and are hard to hit, and all of the afore-mentioned enemies are more than both able and willing to pummel your troops at range, either by themselves or by calling down airstrikes (which fortunately can often be prevented with timely deployment of friendly airpower) or artillery barrages on you. Because intelligence gathered by one unit is instantaneously shared by everyone else of the same side, it is imperative that you eliminate everything (especially enemy reconnaissance assets and helicopters) that can detect you by their next movement phase.