I beat the first quest
Man, was that tedious! Here is a tip: get the iron hammer. It packs a very good punch, only costs 300, and to boot it is twice as fast as the ranged weapons which means it does more damage per second. Also it never misses.
Another tip, or just an explanation, the only way to beat the first quest is to go to the junkyard and fight stuff. You get the polyboard from a boss robot at the end of the junkyard and to get the rest of it you have to fight for hours. You get bolts by killing bolt flies, and you get gyrobolts by killing those clockwork windup things. But it's really rare that you get either, you have to be lucky.
At the end of the first quest I get an accomplice, the pilot Barrage and his Stinger MAW. Because of how damn LONG it took to gather those parts, the claim that Barrage's MAW is "more powerful than mine" is downright false. He can't even get the short range weapons which means he's slow and therefore weak, and with the fact that with all that tedious fighting my pilot is level 7, he's even weaker by comparison.
There were a few bugs:
At the save screen on those little terminals, after you save it gets stuck so you have to restart and load what you just saved.
I got an Iron Hammer early on and when I switched it for my Bronze Fist, the Fist just disappeared instead of going in my inventory. Since then it has switched around so that now I have the Fist but not the Hammer apparently. However, whenever I go into battle I have BOTH the fist and the hammer and I can use either one.
Anyway I'm going to do the second quest now.