A series of mecha-based action and strategy games designed and sometimes published by NCS or Masaya or maybe they are the same thing (does it really matter anyway?). The exact lineage has been often confused due to localizations which substantially altered storylines, as well as unrelated titles which feature remarkably similar gameplay. Or something.
Both US releases had almost completely altered plots, including what appears to be censorship on the part of Konami or Nintendo.
Trivia/e-rumor extermination time! Although it has been rumored that the celebrated SNES underdog Metal Warriors was originally an NCS-developed Assault Suits game (sometimes identified as “Assault Suit Gideon”) that was eventually passed onto Konami for whatever reason, it has been reveleaed this is not the case. Rather, the game was developed by various employees of LucasArts, then published by Konami.
This information comes directly from Dean Sharpe, current head of Big Ape Productions, and programmer/design for Metal Warriors:
Mike Ebert and myself made it from scratch after finishing ZAMN. So no, it was not a spin off of anything. As far as the idea, we just wanted to work on something head to head with a more serious note after doing ZAMN. The only other part of the story was that Nintendo was originally going to publish it. We even did about 3 months worth of changes by their request. Then at the last minute they decided that it was too much like Cybernator and the deal got nixed. It was then we went back to Konami whom had also published ZAMN. The only other name it ever went by was Battle Droids.\\
Its funny that you emailed me about this since I'm currently working on a GBA version of that game. It won't be called Metal Warriors however.
Sadly, Big Ape has apparently been consumed in a black hole since this message (which was circa 2004).
Interesting to note is that much of the manual's interior art has been blatantly cribbed from early 1990s X-men, X-Force, etc. comics. It's fairly obvious that the group shot on pages 2 thru 3 is traced over art from the Marvel Comics series. This piece in particular is originally scribbled out by boy millionaire, Rob “Not a fan of Feet” Liefeld. The character named Jeorge is obviously traced over a drawing of the Marvel Comics character Cable. Even the scar over his right eye is still there. The mecha illustrations seem to be original.