Overall 9.6 Graphics 9.5 Sound 9.5 Addictive 10 Story 7.5 Depth 10 Difficulty 5
9.5
Strategy the way it was meant to be done DocRetro
Super Robot Wars is one of those series I've always wanted to play, but haven't been able to because of the limited availability of the series in English. I haven't been terribly interested in the Original Generation games that have been localized either, seeing as they lack the crossover element that is the main draw to the series. So I was delighted to find this hack when I went looking, and though this game took a long,
long time for me to beat once I finally got around to it, I can say without a doubt that the experience was well worth it.
So let's get into things. The story, as one might expect from such a crossover, is a beautiful mess. There's a cast of about, oh, I don't know, 300 or so (about six pages in pilots alone), many of which have similar appearances and characterizations. And of course, that's not even getting into how all the stories of the various series are meshed into one. However, what I was surprised to find is that the game does a very, very good job of getting you to know which character is which, what series they belong to, and whatnot, even if you're unfamiliar with the series in question. The game features a good number of series; to be specific, it has SPT Layzner, Martian Successor Nadesico, Space Knight Tekkman Blade, Combattler V, Voltes V, Mazinkaiser, Full Metal Panic, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, Super Bestial Machine God Dancouga, Brain Powered, Hades Project Zeorymer and Mobile Fighter G Gundam alongside the original characters they created for the game. Full disclosure here: I'd seen all of Mazinkaiser, G Gundam and Dancouga before playing this game, so that probably helped in making me familiar with the cast. However, these aren't the primary series featured in this game. That honor goes to Nadesico and, unfortunately, Gundam SEED. SEED makes up a large portion of the plot, and even though I have not seen a minute of that show, I am now sufficiently turned off from it based on the events I've seen in this game. But anyway, it is surprisingly hard to get everyone mixed up when they all have their own specific robots, power suits or support craft that they pilot. You associate the character with that machine, that gameplay function, and your brain is just able to compartmentalize it to the point where you remember. Though granted, the huge amount of time you spend playing the game helps.
That said, it's obvious that some of the series fit into the main plot far better than others. Zeorymer, for example, integrates all of its own events fairly well with the knowledge of the mysterious figure of Masaki Kihara. He's able to provide info on what happened in the original plot. Of course, Gundam SEED and Nadesico fit in pretty well too, what with the story being designed around them. Brain Powered also unfortunately gets lots of focus, and that was another series the game turned me off to due to the dull characters and the uninspired mecha. Beyond that, however, it starts to get... interesting. You have some series, such as Mazinkaiser or Voltes V, which make up a small share of the story and are fairly self-explanatory, but seem more like distracting divergences from the main plot. And then you have others like G Gundam that make very little sense in context despite the story's best attempts at explaining and shoehorning elements from the series in (I'd be very confused as to who these people were if I hadn't watched the series). And then finally, you have series such as Dancouga and Combattler, which have little to no relevance to anything at all and are pretty much only there to give you an extra unit or two and have a token cameo from a series character. It's a bit confusing in Dancouga's case. Given the military aspect of that series, one would think it would fit right into this game. But I digress.
As far as the original plot of this game goes... it's not very well done. Granted, at the time of this review, I've only done the playthrough for the female character, but I assume the male one is largely the same (and judging from what little I've done on my new game+ file, it is). It's another one of those instances where they don't introduce the villain until the plot is almost over and then proceed to dump info on you to make you care before you kill him. In fact, most of the plot is like that. They keep you in the dark about almost every single detail until the story's almost over, and even then, you still have a few questions remaining once all the answers are given. It needed better pacing, and it certainly needed to fit in better, because like many of the series, it doesn't really mesh well with the UEFA vs ZAFT conflict that so much of the game revolves around.
But enough about that. The bottom line about the story is that it works in some places and in others it doesn't, which is inevitable when you have a crossover like this. There's a very, very small chance that any person will enjoy every single series in this game, even when you factor out those series that have no representative events. However, I can say that if, like I was, you're not familiar with every single series in this game (and I doubt that most people are), this can be a good way to get acquainted with them. For all the bad things I said about Gundam SEED and Brain Powered, the game now has me keenly interested in watching Nadesico, Tekkaman Blade, SPT Layzner and Voltes V, and I've already seen a fair bit of Combattler V since I started to play. I just couldn't resist watching a robot that fights with yo-yos. Zeorymer and Full Metal Panic, I find myself favorably indifferent towards. I enjoyed what little I saw, but it didn't quite inspire in me a want to watch like the others did. Well, Zeorymer did at first, mind you, but then I looked up some info about the series and got turned off to it, which I could see happening if I saw more of the Zeorymer events in the first playthough.
Let's talk gameplay. It's pretty obvious this is where most of the effort in a SRW game goes, and this is where the game really shines. I mean, it is just a standard turn-based strategy game at its core, but here's the thing that makes it special: just about every unit in the game is unique. Oh sure, they all share some common features. Some even have the exact same design (though this is true of surprisingly few of them). But each and every one has something that makes them stand out in some way. Kurz's Gernsback, for example, has a different attack from Mao's otherwise identical Gernsback. Not to mention a different pilot with a different set of spirit powers and a lack of a fin on its head. Most of the Brain Powered units are clones of each other in terms of design and abilities, but their pilots set them apart. And really, this is what sets the game as a whole apart from any other bog standard strategy game. Instead of having a bunch of no-name grunt units to command as you would in something like Advance Wars, you have a whole cast of unique characters with unique robots with unique attacks and their own personalities and uses for each one. You'll get attached to each character and each mecha as you play and you'll really try your hardest to prevent any of them from being shot down. I restarted entire missions just because my Blue Earth support unit got destroyed. I could have likely finished the mission without it, but I certainly didn't want to.
And in all fairness, the units in this game (and SRW at large, I presume), are incredibly versatile, each having a surprising number of functions. Take Mazinkaiser, for example. At first blush, it's an obvious tanking heavy hitter, and indeed, that's mostly what it's good for. Slap a ton of mobility upgrades on it, however, and suddenly you have yourself a nigh indestructible god of war that won't ever get hit and will take barely any damage even if it does get hit. The problem with this being that enemies will know better than to target Mazinkaiser and will aim for someone less mobile instead, transforming it from a tank into merely a heavy damage dealer. More positively, Boss Borot from the same series looks like nothing more than a support unit at first, having little armor, horrible mobility and laughable attacks. Upgrade its weapons and wait until its pilots level up and you'll find yourself with a legitimate boss killer on your hands, pun fully intended. A boss killer that, mind you, still functions great as a support unit because it can still repair and supply other units. Because of this kind of versatility, the loss of even one unit can be fairly profound since it limits your options on the battlefield quite a bit.
Take, for instance, the case of Gundam Rose. It's a fantastic unit, able to hit enemies close and far away, it has a map attack that can damage multiple enemies at once in an area of your choosing, and its pilot has a fantastic set of support abilities. Not to mention it is required for and has access to the most powerful attack in the game, the Erupting Shuffle Alliance Attack. Now imagine that your fighting the final boss and out of nowhere the boss hits you with an atrocious map attack that ends up blowing up Gundam Rose in the crossfire. Not that I'm speaking from experience, but you just lost one of the best distance fighters, a unit with a map attack of its own, and the ability to do the Erupting Shuffle Alliance Attack for the rest of the battle. Now do you see why the loss of just one unit can be devastating? Granted, not all units are capable of all the things Gundam Rose can do. Some will always have a particular role that they will stick to. The aforementioned Blue Earth will always be a support craft, as alluded to earlier. Its attacks just don't measure up to anything else you can put on the battlefield. The Aestivalis units will pretty much always be hit and run light attackers. But for a lot of units, there's so much that they're capable of that losing one feels like the worst thing even if it means nothing other than the fact that you can't use it anymore and that you'll be paying a small fee to have it repaired at the end of the mission.
Unfortunately, however, that is this game's main strength, as the attacks have surprisingly little in the way they vary themselves other than animation. You have a few attacks that will lower a stat or two, but nothing that will cause serious change, such as a "poison" status effect or whatever the robot equivalent of that would be. There's not much variance in the missions either, with most of them amounting to "kill all enemies." Granted, I'm happy to see that, but I'd like more changes than I got.
Graphically, the game is a bit of a mixed bag. The attack animations, of course, look splendid, but other than that, there's really not much to the game. There's some nice maps, I guess, and a few backgrounds, but that's about it. There's no character sprites outside of battle sequences except for the OCs and their mechs (and these are shown very rarely), so most of the story is just character portraits and textboxes set against a backdrop. Now I can tolerate that, but I do find it rather jarring when having to switch from gameplay and back, and it doesn't do a whole lot to keep your interest if you're not into the story. You kinda just want to skip the dialogue and get to the gameplay, because that's where there's actually stuff to see. On the bright side, there are a few CGs for certain events, and while they're nice, I do feel some of them could have been done better. The final scene in the G Gundam plot comes to mind; you can barely make out the characters.
But other than that, it all does look well done. That's about all I can say.
Musically, you've got mostly remixes of songs from various anime done for GBA, and some of them impressively sound better on the GBA. "Reason" comes to mind. "Fire Wars" and "Majin Kenzan" unfortunately got the short end of the stick, but they're serviceable enough. It all sounds good, though some tracks are a bit dull, such as "You get to Burning." And it is a little irritating how the music reverts to the same song after passing every turn. It's alright until you're 30 stages in, look at the turn counter and realize you've heard that song come on literally 500 times. Especially since almost all of the other music in the game is better.
SRWJ is a really nice package for we English-only plebians. It's a stand alone title, so no real context is required (though doubtless some knowledge of Gundam SEED would help), and all in all is a great strategy game featuring lots of characters you probably like. Enjoy it, and make sure you light a fire in your soul.
Graphics 9 Sound 10 Addictive 10 Story 6 Depth 10 Difficulty 3
Review Rating: 5/5
Submitted: 06-12-15
Review Replies: 1
10
Super Robot Wars! clarissaexplains
Super Robot Taisen J is an excellent game in the Super Robot Wars (or Super Robot Taisen) franchise which I would recommend to many different types of gamers. If you are a fan of story driven games with tons of characters interactions and dialogue this is definitely a game you should look into. Fans of super robot series, both classic and modern, will be drawn in and fully satisfied by the awesome cast of different mecha from various franchises. The action and attack animations are top notch and truly capture the spirit of the different series that inspired the units in this game. Lastly, fans of strategy RPG will definitely find hours and hours of joy by picking this game up. Even if you are unfamiliar with the different anime that inspired this game or if you're not interested in the story there is still tons of very addictive gameplay to satisfy the tactician deep inside of you. For this review I'll talk about the different elements that make up the game and why I assigned each score to each category. The categories are Graphics, Sound, Addictiveness, Story, Depth, and Difficulty. I'll also talk about the Representation and the Translation.
First I will make a list of the anime series represented in this game and talk about the Representation in this game. Hopefully this will serve as a helpful quick reference to any players who might be interested in the Super Robot Wars franchise and want to know this information alone. Here is the full list:
Blue Comet SPT Layzner
Brain Powerd
Dancouga
Full Metal Panic!
G Gundam
Gundam Seed
Hades Project Zeromyer
Martian Successor Nadesico
Mazinger
Combattler V and Voltes V
Tekkaman Blade
In addition there are some original characters and mecha featured in the series. I was not familiar with all of these anime before playing this game, but the game is still very easy to follow. No outside knowledge of these anime series is required to understand the plot of Super Robot Taisen J. Many of these series have more than one playable representative, as well as a number of supporting NPC characters who factor in as support pilots, antagonists in the story, or side characters who have dialogue but don't actually pilot any units. One of the joys of having so many inspirations is that you may be drawn to the game by the ones you are familiar with and end up being exposed to a new franchise or series that you end up liking. I am a big fan of the Mazinger series, and I got into Combattler V as a result of this game.
I rated the graphics a 10 out of 10. This is one of the strong points of the game. Enemy and ally units are easily identifiable on the map. The only time you might get confused is in cases such as the units that come with the Nadesico. There's a handful of pilots who all ride the same mass produced unit and have the same icon as a result. Since the HUD is so quick and informative, this was never a problem for me anyway. Moving your cursor onto a unit immediately tells you who is piloting it. Mostly every other robot in the game has a unique icon and even the different battleships have their own icon.
As compared to other Super Robot Wars games on the GBA (notably the OG series which was actually localized proper), the attack animations in this game are even better. As the standard for the series each unit has more than one attack with different properties and unique attack animations. Many units even have one or more super attack that has a very flashy animation, sometimes with anime graphics incorporated along with the traditional sprite graphics. The amount of detail that goes into such minor things as the smoke trails which follow missiles in combat, or how enemies explode when they die, is pretty great. If you get tired of the animations and want to speed up the gameplay you can turn them on and off at will. You even have the option during every single attack phase on both sides of combat (Ally and Enemy Phase). I use this feature sometimes when I'm speeding through a combat, and then turn on the animations for flashy finishing attacks whenever I feel like it!
I rated Sound as a 9 out of 10, only because I find this to be a very subjective category. Admittedly I am not an expert on music or sound quality so I don't feel confident giving a 10 out of 10. Personally, though, I think the sound quality sounds good. I mostly use headphones when I play. In terms of variety there are a ton of BGM, many of which are inspired by the different franchises incorporated into this game. One interesting feature is the ability to assign any BGM you want to any ally unit. By default the Mazinger theme will play when your Mazinger Z attacks, but you can change it to something else if you like. Combined with the sheer amount of BGM featured, this makes for a very satisfying audio experience while playing this game.
Addictiveness is based on how often you may want to pick up the game again after putting it down, and how likely you are to replay the game. Even with the long story sessions between missions, this game features such addictive gameplay that you might stop to take a break and find yourself starting the next mission anyway after fifteen or twenty minutes. There are two main characters to choose from and three mechs that you can pick for your main character. One is a Super Robot, and there is a Real Robot focused on ranged and melee fighting. There's also a fourth which can be unlocked. Additionally, your main character has three co-pilots that can be
selected on a mission by mission basis. It's conceivable that a player could have two runs where neither the main character, their mech, or their co-pilot was the same. I gave it a 10 for those reasons. This game is just fun and if it clicks with you, you will find yourself wanting to play more.
Story I had to rate a 9 out of 10. While not quite perfect, the amount of content alone is pretty staggering. All of the playable characters are faithful to their personalities within their own world, but in completely original scenarios. There are tons of NPCs and antagonists to keep track of, leading to a very complex and deep story experience. The fact that there is so much cut scene discussion before and after each mission is a bit of a double-edged sword, which caused me to knock off a point. It's very cool that every single chapter is almost like an episode of a great super robot crossover anime. However, each mission is likely to take 30+ minutes as a result. At least 1/3 of that is spent reading unless you skim through the text very quickly. Much like watching an anime, you really have to dedicate a certain amount of time to sit down and make it through an entire chapter in this game. This is enjoyable, but not all the time. If you want to get right into the action but you last saved the game at the start of a mission, you'll have to sit through a bit of story before you can start really playing. People who hate reading or story-driven games could rate this a bit lower, but they also have the option to skip the cut scenes.
Along with the story I'd very much like to rate the Translation of this game. In a word: Phenomenal. I was very impressed with the work of the amateur translation team that handled this project. Not only is nearly everything in the game faithfully translated from the source material, there are virtually no errors to speak of. The story reads just as great as if it were written in English. I did not see any annoying hangover symbols from the hacking process that sometimes show up in the text as a result of amateur translations. Although I did not factor this into my score specifically I thought it was pertinent to anyone curious about the game who might worry about being turned off by a shoddy translation. In this case you really need not worry. This is easily a professional quality translation and I really commend the individuals who worked on this project.
Depth is one of the most rewarding of the categories, along with the Graphics. This is the one that didn't take much thought to give a 10 out of 10. There is tons of content in the form of different robots, different pilots, different abilities, different spirit commands, and the complexity of the strategy based combat. Figuring out the system isn't too hard, but mastering it will take a long time. As you play through the game and become more and more familiar with how the game is played, you will be surprised at how it just keeps getting deeper and deeper.
On top of that, the Depth of the story content is amazing. In the above paragraph I talked about how long it can take to get through a single chapter. There are over 50 chapters. Between each chapter is the chance to customize your squad with a very deep system that involves leveling up pilots, mecha, and their weapons separately. There are also puzzle maps that are unlocked by beating chapters. In addition to that there are even secret units to unlock, combination attacks that can be performed when certain units team up, and many more things. The Super Robot Wars franchise is one big love letter to the mecha series, intent on jamming in tons of great content to appeal to fans of super robots, and Super Robot Taisen J is no exception to that rule.
If you want a deep series that you can play for a hundred hours or more between the depth of a single play through and the replayability of the game, Super Robot Taisen J is definitely a strong candidate.
As a side note, I was also asked to rate the Difficulty of this game. Honestly it is not as difficult as some other Super Robot Wars games that I have played. That being said, like all Strategy RPGs, there is certainly a learning curve. If you're picking up and playing this game for the first time you may have no idea what is going on. Figuring out how the game works can be a little difficult. Many tiny details that are super important are not readily apparent at a first glance to a beginner (there are some attacks that can be used after moving and some that can't, designated by a small P which a new player would have no way of knowing what it meant). At a 7/10 Difficulty it's certainly more challenging than the average game, but not so hard that you'll want to pull your hair out. And for those patient enough to learn the mechanics, you will certainly be rewarded.
Overall this game is an easy 10/10. Many people don't believe in a "Perfect Game," which is understandable. As compared to other Super Robot Wars games, there are those who might dislike this one because it contains fewer Gundam series than normal. However, the gameplay is beyond solid. The story is engaging and massive. The graphics and sound are wonderful. The series on display here are very well represented, to the point where you may decide to pick up some new anime series that you weren't familiar with. The sheer depth of the game is astounding. The number of awesome things you can do is beyond counting -- using the Mazinger Z's Rocket Punch to smash enemies to bits never really gets old, and that's only ONE unit under your command. While I cannot stress enough how wonderful this game is, there are not many more ways for me to say it. If you are at all interested in this game, or if you're simply browsing for a new title of high quality that you hadn't heard of or played yet, Super Robot Taisen J is a great choice!
Graphics 10 Sound 9 Addictive 10 Story 9 Depth 10 Difficulty 7
Review Rating: 4.3/5
Submitted: 05-07-14
Review Replies: 2
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