Enjoying SRW Alpha so much, I didn’t waste any time getting to its sequel, which is not just also made by the same team at Banpresto, but it also is the last SRW game to be released on the original PlayStation. It understood it to use largely the same engine and a lot of assets from Alpha 1, so I didn’t think it could be *that* different, but I was ready to be wowed either way. I played through it on my PS2 in Japanese, and it once again doesn’t have a play time counter, so I’m gonna once again give a conservative guess of at least 50 hours for how long it took me to beat.
This is a fairly immediate sequel to Alpha, and it deals with the calamity unleashed by defeating the bad guys in the true ending of that game, namely the giant dimensional destruction wave slowly approaching Earth from out around Neptune. With the timer ticking slowly down, the Earth’s agencies and governments desperately try to get Project Aegis ready in time to protect the Earth and its surrounding space from the wave, but attacks and intervention from the Titans (yup, them lads from Zeta Gundam) causes things to go wrong, and a huge explosion ends up launching our heroes countless thousands of years into the future to a world slowly clawing back from the calamity they clearly failed to prevent. They must now battle the new forces of evil while trying to find some way of getting home, if such a thing even exists. Despite the “gaiden” in the title, this is a pretty direct bit of story between Alpha 1 and 2, and is for all intents and purposes the real SRW Alpha 2, but that’s just splitting hairs :b. They decided to cut down the included series a bit from Alpha, and that choice combined with the base premise means most of the story is spent focusing on adapting three of the four new franchises to the series: Combat Mecha Xabungle, Gundam X, and Turn A Gundam, and they do a bang-up job of it! This is the first game in the series I’ve played where I’ve actually seen one of the animes in the source material (Turn A), and they do a great job of adapting it and meshing it with the other stories while also giving many of our heroes from the past some great story beats as well. This game definitely does a lot to show that less absolutely can be more in a crossover title like this, and combined with the almost total lack of Banpresto original characters (this game even foregoes a player avatar character) and great as ever fun, silly crossover indulgences, this is easily my favorite writing I’ve seen in the series so far. The gameplay is very similar to Alpha (so I won’t belabor repeating all of that game’s mechanics here), but the changes here are once again very significant in how they shake things up. First of all is how the Skill Point system has been altered. The optional objectives are still unfortunately secret, but they determine not just whether or not you get certain secret characters and what ending missions you get, but they also actually live up to their Japanese name of “Difficulty Points” and dynamically determine the difficulty of the game. If you have below a certain (secret) threshold, you’re on easy. If you’re above that, you’re on normal, and if you’re above the upper threshold, you’re on hard. The difficulties don’t change THAT much, sans how tough bosses are, adding a few more or less normal enemies, and the ending you get (and that hard ending, the true ending, that I got is DAMN hard), but it’s another really smart refinement in letting the player make things just as hard as they want them to be (outside of the objectives still being secret, though at least they’re a lot easier to guess this time around). The other changes are a little more minor but still important in their own ways. The least important of those is the bazaar that the Xabungle crew’s blue stones can be used to trade in. You can get new mechs and equippable items and sell old (sellable) ones, and while stuff from there is usually pretty not worth it, there are sometimes very beefy mechs for sale, and often very well worth it equippable items as well. Sure, you can only get blue stones when you’re fighting Xabungle enemies, but it’s a neat addition to the game’s economy on top of how grabbable crates on the map containing goodies of money, blue stones, or equippable items (something last seen in Super Robot Wars 4 on the SNES) have been readded to the game. The most important minor change has to do with how this is the first game to remove the ability to individually upgrade weapons on mechs. Now all weapons are upgraded at once, and they’re pretty minor upgrades given how much money you’re spending on them, and I’d say it borders on almost never being worth it compared to just upgrading armor or agility with that money. This may not seem to be an important thing on the surface, but it very drastically changes how you gotta play the game if you’re a series veteran more used to trying for the harder objectives in the older games. On the more positive side, this makes option objectives like Skill Points almost always somehow possible, since you can really be only so strong by a certain point, the game is generally well balanced enough that they’re always possible if you plan accordingly. On the less positive side, this breaks the back of how you used to be able to make heavy hitters, and some units (my old favorite of the Dancouga in particular ;w;) being far worse than they used to be on account of how it is now effectively impossible to just dump a lot of cash into a big unit’s scariest moves and let them go to town on the enemy. Units are now more than ever just as powerful as they are, with the most important determinant of that strength being what level they are compared to their opponent. It’s far from a problem, even in a more distanced subjective sense, but it’s absolutely a big change for how you have to play the games and use your money from this point on in the series. As far as presentation goes, this is more or less on par with Alpha in most ways. On a note I was very personally happy with, the karaoke mode has never looked better, and between having battle animations during them (something Alpha’s karaoke mode omits most likely due to how long it takes to load them, if I had to guess) and the timing on the lyrics is, no matter how weird it is to say, the best karaoke mode in the games to date XD. Aside from that, the game generally just has a fair bit more music, with different units from the same series often getting different tracks from that series to help break up the tunes you’re hearing a bit. The maps are still isometric, but there is a lot less map reuse in this one (which might be down to overall less missions and route splits than Alpha 1 had), which is nice to see, and units actually turn the direction they’re moving when moved instead of just hovering around like a chess piece like they did in Alpha (though there is still nothing mechanically determined by what direction they face). Battle animations are still very pretty, and while a lot of Alpha’s rougher models have been given new designs entirely, the battle animations look again better than ever. This also welcomely comes hand-in-hand with significantly shorter loading times compared to Alpha (5 or 6 seconds compared to 10+ seconds), though the game’s framerate even in maps takes a very significant hit. I didn’t hit any of them personally, but the game’s worse performance does come with an increased risk of the game crashing because of too many enemies on a couple of maps. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Alpha was pretty damn good, but I was blown away by just what an improvement Alpha Gaiden turned out to be. It’s a wonderful swansong for SRW on the PS1 and is, again, from the writing to the mechanics, easily the best game in the series up to that point. The best part about recommending this game is that it actually has an unofficial fan translation you can play it in! It’s not the best work I’ve ever seen (of the small amount I have seen), but it’s really great to be able to recommend a game so highly that the audience that reads these reviews actually has a good chance to play themselves for once x3
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After some far more difficult than it needed to be technical difficulties (which boiled down to me just not realizing that the disc I had had discrot/a big hole in the data XP), I was finally able to get back to playing more SRW. This is the first console game in the series not made by either Winkie Soft or AI, but by Banpresto themselves. I figured if I had anything to expect from this game, it’d be that they’d be trying to make their mark and start things with a bang. I played the game on my PS2 in Japanese, and my conservative guess for how long it took me (as this once again don’t count playtime) is about 50 hours at least.
This is the first game in the Alpha series, which would end up having four games. It has a good few new additions (most notably Macross) as well as a *lot* of returning old series, and Banpresto sorta decided to get as many big chunks of all of them in as they could. This means there are a lot of route splits and a lot of characters, but I think they do a pretty good job of making it all fit together in this big mission to defend the Earth from terrestrial and extraterrestrial invaders. It’s definitely not without its faults though. In trying to make their mark, Banpresto gives FAR too much attention to their original protagonists and antagonists, which wouldn’t be a problem if they weren’t so much more dreadfully dull and uninteresting compared to the licensed characters. I really hope it’s a lesson they learn not to repeat in later games, as the writing between the licensed characters is as fun and well crafted as ever, showing that whether it’s Winkie Soft or Banpresto writing these games, the level of care and attention to adapting the characters involved hasn’t diminished one bit~. The gameplay is pretty darn similar, with the units & pilots being separate, spirit abilities each pilot has, money to level up units, quicksave ability, and the linear mission structure. In broad strokes, it won’t be unfamiliar to any returning player. However, what HAS changed is that it’s received a very well needed rebalancing that has made the game WAY better to play. Super Robots in particular have received a MASSIVE shot in the arm by across the board getting *far* better accuracy on their moves. This doesn’t diminish how kingly the power of dodge tanks are, sure, but it makes the big, smashy, tanky Super Robots actually able to smash and tank enemies the way they should be able to, and it makes for a much more fun play experience. Aside from that, the most notable addition is that pilots no longer have only four spirit abilities each, as that number has been raised to six. While this is an important change that makes each pilot have a lot more options available to them, this on top of the power rebalancing with Super Robots comes with the double and triple damage skills being far more uncommon or later received than in past games, while accuracy and evasion boosting skills are very thankfully much more common than they used to be. Nothing is a game-changing experience that flips the world on its head, but these on top of some general UI improvements just make the game significantly more fun to play. Outside of those base mechanics, the design has gotten one more significant addition in the form of what would (eventually) be localized as Skill Points. These are optional objectives in each map that are often quite difficult and don’t give any rewards unto themselves. However, the main thing they *do* give is extra bonuses. There are far less recruitable secret pilots and units through arcane optional story events, and instead a lot of them are dictated solely (or in addition to the arcane optional persuading and story stuff) by how many skill points you have by that point in the game. The last thing they do is also determine which ending you get, as having 45 points or more by the last few missions gets you the true ending while having less than that gets you the normal one. It’s a really neat addition to the series that I think is a really well thought out way to let the player make things just as hard as they want it, with the only caveat being that these are SECRET objectives. They’re generally just “do the hard thing” or “beat the mission fast”, but the secret nature of them does a lot to spit in the spirit of making things just as hard as the player wants them to be. Presentation-wise, we still have great music and a nice karaoke mode, but outside of the music, the series gets a *massive* upgrade with this game in a lot of ways. First and most obvious thing is how character portraits look. They’re now much larger in-between missions, and they’re even animated so their mouths move and they blink! Some characters look a bit odd, but generally it all looks really nice. The other big additions come in battle. Maps are no longer top-down, but are now isometric. This doesn’t actually change how the gameplay works (this ain’t FF Tactics with unit directional stuff or anything), but it does make things look significantly better. However, I imagine the increased resources used to make it like this is probably why there is SO much map reuse in this game compared to previous ones, as designing them must take a lot more work. The next and coolest addition is that now we finally have proper battle animations! No longer do the robots just dance around like papercraft cutouts, but they move properly and everything! Sure, the loading times for this are AWFUL (at like 10 seconds per battle no matter what console, PS1, PS2, or PS3 I tested it on), but that’s solved by the actual most important feature this game adds: You can FINALLY skip combat animations! This makes playing (or replaying) missions so indescribably faster. Finally gone are the days when missions take 2~3 hours as a baseline rule and they actually take like 30 to 90 minutes now! I cannot overstate how necessary a feature this is, and even if the rest of the game were only an okay adaptation of what Winkie Soft had spent the previous decade refining, it’d easily make this game the best one to date for me. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It has some hiccups in its design writing, and it is definitely trending towards the easy side a bit too often for my liking, but Banpresto wanted to start things with a bang and hot damn did they succeed. With this game’s stellar cosmetic upgrade, much needed stat rebalancing, and well needed addition of the ability to skip animations, this is an awesome entry in the series and easily the best game in it up to that point. If you can read Japanese and like mecha stuff and SRPGs, this is not a game to sleep on. After completing Xtreme 1, I of course immediately fired up its sequel, as it was basically the last traditional-style Mega Man game I hadn’t yet beaten that I had any interest in playing. Now, this being a proper GBC-exclusive game, not a black cart game like its predecessor, I expected something at the very least a bit flashier, if not ultimately more of the same. While perhaps not quite what I expected, I certainly got something ambitious, that’s for sure ^^;. It took me about 6 hours to get the best ending with pretty gratuitous save state use, playing the English version on an emulator with an Xbone pad.
The story is once again more or less an excuse to remake a bunch of levels from X 1, 2, and 3, but with a bit more effort put into it this time. X, Zero, and confusingly enough, some crew from the later X games as well go to a mysterious island to learn who has been stealing reploids souls, and they end up having to do battle against the island’s strange inhabitants. It does its job just fine to set up the story as well as give the game excuses to have a lot more original levels and bosses that aren’t from any of the adapted games. For anyone who played the first Xtreme, the setup of this game will likely be very familiar. You once again have 3 routes, with the first two each having half of the bosses, and the 3rd one (unlocked after beating the first two) has all 8 of them as well as the real final boss to fight. However, instead of just differently named difficulties like the last game, now it’s X mode and Zero mode, and then Xtreme mode where you can swap between them whenever a lot like Mega Man X3 does. However, this game is just as much a victim of its own ambition as it is just poorly designed. The adapted levels are ones left over and not yet adapted in Xtreme 1, and its pretty clear that all the best ones had already been taken. As far as both the bosses and the stages go, they feel far more poorly adapted than the previous game’s (including one of the worst bike stages in the franchise), especially ones Zero has to fight who were never intended to be fought with him. What takes the cake though are the original levels and bosses. This is up there with the other worst MM games in just thinking “good Mega Man levels are hard” and running from there. They are unfair, difficult, and grueling trials of memory and attrition, and the true final boss is easily one of the worst bosses in the whole franchise. As far as the presentation goes, this is once again really flexing just what the GBC was capable of. The animations especially look really impressive in just how many frames they get for the player characters. The music is also once again not really anything to write home about, as while its doing its best to adapt the tracks from the games its adapting, the GBC sound chip can only do so much. They’re noble attempts, but I’d stick with the original versions myself. Verdict: Not Recommended. This is easily one of the worst traditional Mega Man games ever made. While it isn’t the absolute bottom of the pile of the ones I’ve played, it’s very very close at either #2 or #3. Even if you’re a big Mega Man fan, this is a game where it’s pretty darn hard to get much fun out of it, and you’re likely better off avoiding it entirely. This was one of the last things on my list of yet unplayed Mega Man games, and so I set about finally getting to it. Given what I’d heard about how it controls, I really didn’t particularly want to play it on real hardware, so I ended up emulating the English version and playing it with an Xbone gamepad instead of playing a Japanese copy on real hardware. It took me about 4 hours to get the real ending with fairly light save state use.
Xtreme is effectively the handheld version of the first couple Mega Man X games, but it has handheld versions of a jumble of stages, and to get around the fact that story-wise this makes no sense, they make a story here based around going into a computer database to set right all of the memory data of past battles that are being corrupted by the bad guys. The story is ultimately fine, but it’s really not why we’re here, as is usual for the older MMX games (though this was actually made close to the year 2000, so closer to when MMX7 was released than 1 and 2, but just ignore that bit :b). The gameplay is pretty straightforwardly handheld ports of half of Mega Man X 1 and 2. Technically you have 3 difficulty modes of Normal, Hard, and XTREME (because of course you do), but all that really changes is how many of the game’s 8 stages you do as well for whether or not you fight the real final boss (Normal is first 4 stages, Hard is 2nd 4, and Xtreme is all 4 + the real final boss at the end). Now there aren’t much in the way of new stages, but what is here are pretty darn competent versions of levels from X 1 and 2 (as well as a Sigma stage from each game). Some of the more technically difficult parts of them have been cut out or shortened down, but it’s still a really impressive version of those stages. The boss fights have been changed a bit too to work better with a smaller screen, and there are even just about all the bonus X parts from both X1 and 2 to find hidden more or less where they always were. The only real design complaint I have is that with only two buttons and a D-pad, you’re forced to use double-tap to dash, which is less than ideal in the harder wall climbing sections. Graphically, this is a REALLY impressive looking GBC game, and it’s even more wild that it’s also a black-cart game that’d also work on a normal GB. Granted I don’t have an original GB to test it with, games like this *really* show off the differences in power between the GBC and its older brother and just the kind of stuff the little colorful 8-bit machine was capable of. The music is basically all 8-bit versions of tracks from the represented games. That’s a pretty tall order for the GBC’s sound chip, and it does its best. It’s hardly a substitute for the real thing, but it’s ultimately fine. Verdict: Recommended. I thought this game would end up being a lot rougher than it actually is. Now sure, part of how much I enjoyed it may be down to the hardware and controller I played it with, but even still, this is a remarkably well put together game considering how rough the 8-bit portable version of the early MMX games would be expected to be. Well worth playing if you’re a Mega Man fan and looking to change things up a bit~. This is another game I’ve had in my sights, and even owned, since last year’s Mega Man Mega Marathon. In all but name, it’s a Mega Man game to me, so I figured it was only appropriate to include it. A friend of mine had an extra Steam key for it lying around, and she was kind enough to give it to me so I could finally experience this controversial title. I had heard all the hate for it back when it came out and since then, but I’d also heard several people I trust say it’s pretty decent, so I went in not really knowing what to think but being pleasantly surprised with what I found. It took me around 4.5 hours to beat the English version of the game.
The game followed our titular Mighty No. 9, Beck, as he tries to get his rampaging fellow Mighty No.’s under control after they suddenly go berserk. There’s a fair bit of intrigue between stages around the reasons why the robots went bad and who was involved, and it all has a very Saturday morning cartoon-vibe to it, right down to the voice acting. I know some people really didn’t care for how the Mighty No.s are characterized and found them annoying, and while I think that’s a fair opinion to have, I really enjoyed their banter, especially for the one who constantly talks like he’s a traffic helicopter XD. The whole game gave me vibes very similar to something like Vanquish but a bit more kiddy, and I really dug it. I understand not vibing with it, but I think the story fits its purpose just fine. The gameplay very much feels like its made by Inticreates (which it is), as it really does feel like a lost Mega Man X or Mega Man Zero game. Beck controls very much like Mega Man, even down to how he can absorb weapons from defeated bosses and can’t fire up or down, but with the extra addition of a charge move much like Bass or X can do in their Mega Man games. If you weaken an enemy, you can charge through them to destroy them and absorb a temporary buff from them (from more speed to more damage to E-tank fuel), and this is also how you deal permanent damage to bosses (as otherwise they’ll just heal the damage back). That last point isn’t actually properly explained to you, for whatever reason, and that lack of explaining is probably one of my main presentation complaints with the game. I don’t think it works perfectly, but the quick, hit and run style that it encourages was a quite fun way to approach one of these games, and between the stage design and the boss design, I thought this fit right into the quality of Inticreates’s more mid-range titles (right down to the final stage that’s a bit too hard with the final boss that’s a real battle of attrition). The presentation is just fine. I’m not exactly in love with the 2.5D design of everything, but I don’t dislike it nearly as much as some people. Compared to another Kickstarter 2.5D action game like Bloodstained, I’d say this game’s aesthetic is pulled off much better than that. The music is also by and large just fine, although there weren’t any particularly memorable tracks to me. Verdict: Recommended. While it’s hardly the best Mega Man-like game and certainly not Inticreates’s best title, by the time I was done with Might No. 9, I really didn’t understand the hate pile it got. With how badly the Kickstarter was run, I can certainly understand people being set up to dislike it, but the actual quality of the game just doesn’t reflect that at all to me. As a big Mega Man fan, I quite enjoyed it, and if you’re someone who enjoys Mega Man or Inticreates games too, you will likely have quite a good time with Mighty No. 9 too~. After procrastinating on it for almost dead-on a year, I finally got back to finish off my Mega Man Mega Marathon from last year and play the second Mega Man Legends game. It took a little while to get back into the swing of things in both the narrative and the controls, but I was hoping and blasting again in no time~. I played the Japanese PSP port via my PSTV with a PS3 controller, and it took me around 14 hours to complete.
Continuing from a little bit after where the last game left off, this game has Rock and the crew of the Digouters on a quest to try and find the mysterious Mother Lode by assisting the crew of the giant Sulpher Bottom ship. There’s a beautiful in-game cutscene to open the action with, and that combined with the first brief mission introduce a ton of new hooks to old questions about the history of the world, the nature of the Mother Lode treasure, and just what happened to Roll’s parents. However, as Rock goes off on his quest to find the four keys to unlock the Mother Lode, this original setup isn’t really touched much at all, as each of the four locations involve fairly self-contained stories (or at least ones only distantly related to that initial premise) until we get to revealing and expositioning everything else after our some 10 hour long key hunt. The story isn’t bad, but I definitely preferred how the original game told its story. This game doesn’t seem to be able to decide if it wants to be one longer story or a more episodic adventure, and that indecision of the parts harms the pacing and quality of the whole. This is best exemplified in how the game is just drowning in relatively flat side-antagonists compared to how involved and detailed an experience you got fighting the Bonne family in the first game. Again, I wanna stress that I don’t think it’s a bad story. I just think that the first game’s story is better. The gameplay is a significant evolution on the gameplay of the previous game. Where we still have dungeons to explore, puzzles to solves, and bosses, now you have a world map where you can fly around in your airship between different hubs. There are a fair few more mini-games in this game, and some fairly annoying bosses at times, but on the whole I think the gameplay, very similarly to the story, isn’t so much “better” than the first game so much as it is very differently focused. We have a much more linear approach to the design here compared to the last game’s bigger emphasis on exploring more and more of one location. Again, I personally prefer the approach the first game takes, but I’d still say that on the whole this game’s dungeon and boss design is more solid than its predecessor’s. The presentation is once again very good. The way the game’s painstaking use of all sorts of 2D sprites on 3D models once more brings forth that feeling of “playing an anime” that the first game did so well. The music is also once again quite good, but that isn’t a surprise either given the quality of the first game’s tracks. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As much as I may prefer its predecessor, this is still an excellent game still worth playing. It is a great Zelda-like action/adventure game on the PS1, and if you like that sort of thing, this is definitely not a game to sleep on. Despite my rough time with the first game in the series, I was nonetheless curious to see if its sequel fixed anything. Given what a boilerplate shameless mechanical clone of Dragon Quest the first game was, I basically just hoped that this would be a fixed up version of that. No matter how fair my expectations were, there was no way in heck I ever would’ve expected what I actually ended up getting. It took me about 13 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware.
Where the first Super Famicom KGM game was based on the first Knight Gundam story, this is based on the second, so while our main character is once again the titular Knight Gundam, this is an entirely new character in an entirely new world. You play as Knight Gundam, the sole survivor of the royal house after the Zeonic Empire invaded your kingdom and slew your father King Gundam I. When the empire’s grasp finally reaches the tiny village you were secreted away to, you must take up the challenge to avenge your father and free your kingdom from the Zeonic Empire’s evil clutches. This is a much less silly game than its predecessor. Really, it feels more like a more typical JPRG that just happens to have Gundam fantasy aesthetics. While you do have some U.C. Gundam-homage characters here and there, many of the main characters that you’ll meet are only loose inspirations if not entirely original characters. It works pretty well too! It’s not exactly high art, but it succeeds in being an engaging and good story with well presented, charming characters. Now not just the story is different, but so are the mechanics. They’re so different I don’t really know what else to compare it to, though people I’ve talked to say it sounds most similar to Chrono Cross to them. Now while there are still random battles from a first person perspective, you only actually gain money from battles, and money stops being terribly useful pretty darn fast, so for the most part, battles don’t mean all that much. Not having any experience point system, the game doesn’t even have individual character levels either, and instead you have a shared level for the whole party. Your whole party is composed of up to THIRTEEN MEMBERS (including yourself), and your party level goes up every time you recruit a new character, so there’s a lot of incentive to keep your eyes peeled for potential new recruits and to check towns at both daytime and nighttime for secrets. Now most of your party will head off after each chapter ends, but you can get them back later on near the end of the game (and you only have one possible final party composition anyhow for plot reasons), so while you don’t often have a full party, you will have one for a fairly significant amount of time. This all makes for a very unconventional gameplay loop, and as you possibly could already tell from just how fast I beat the game, the game is well aware of that too. Knowing that your only new sources of power are finding/buying (though usually finding) new armor and finding new recruits, it doesn’t dilly-dally around throwing massive dungeons at you most of the time, and story beats move pretty quickly and are signposted quite well too. The game’s balance is also very well tuned, though the VERY hidden character to get you an extra 15 levels was something I wasn’t super happy to discover existed (after looking up a guide), given how tough a bugger the final boss is. I really loved searching for hidden characters, as they always had fun and interesting designs, and I managed to get all but one of them (I think XP). The game’s presentation is once again really nice. As most SNES games do after ‘91, it looks much more “next gen” than its predecessor, with much more well detailed sprites and better use of colors to make some really cool looking allies and enemies (my favorite of which was the Zakutopus boss). The music is pretty good too, albeit quite generic and nothing especially memorable. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I went into this game with expectations basically below the floor and walked away from what’s easily one of the coolest hidden gems I’ve stumbled across on the SFC. I don’t believe an English translation exists for this, but if one ever does, this is absolutely a game worth playing if you like Gundam or JRPGs, as this is easily one of my favorite surprises this year. During my time playing Super Robot Wars, one of my mecha anime-loving friends mentioned this series to me. I told her if she could hunt me down a way to play them, I’d love to give them a try, and she was kind enough to do that for me~. I didn’t really know what to expect from an RPG parody series of SD Gundam trading cards-inspired JRPG that itself is effectively a remake of some earlier Famicom games, but I got what I more or less should’ve expected? ^^;. This is another game that doesn’t count your playtime, but I reckon it took me about 25~30 hours to beat in total. I played the game in its original Japanese emulated with a fair bit of savestate use when things were most optimal to do so (and I will elaborate on just what those parts were in due time, believe me XP).
Knight Gundam Monogatari wasn’t just trading cards. It was also a manga that had four different stories through the time of its publication, and this game’s four chapters cover the events of the first of those four stories (as well as the events covered in the first two of the three Famicom KGM games). You play as the titular Knight Gundam who crash lands in the kingdom of Lakuroa, and are given a mission by the king to save the kidnapped Princess Frow Bow who has been kidnapped by the evil Satan Gundam. The whole thing is a giant, silly fan service-y exercise in turning events from the original U.C. Gundam series into a Dragon Quest-style JRPG, and it hits its mark pretty well. The actual story beats are played pretty straight, but the inherent sillyness of things like partying up with Minister Guntank, your first caster party member, is difficult to ignore. It succeeds very well (in its 1991 JRPG way) of realizing that story in an entertaining way, so it’s hard to give it much flak for being relatively narratively shallow. Mechanically, it’s just Dragon Quest in a flavor of something similar to DQ4. You have a party of characters who come and go as the story progresses, they each have their own inventories (and the inventory management is an appropriately cumbersome nightmare, I assure you), some party members are more melee-focused while some are more magic focused, battles are done in a first-person view, you go through dungeons and you even talk to the king to save your game. This game is in no way trying to reinvent the wheel, and it really didn’t need to. The only places that really becomes a problem is when it runs into problems presented by that old DQ formula. In some ways, this is present through the bad inventory system and how shops don’t tell you if the weapon you’re buying is actually better than the one you have, but it’s especially present in the game’s difficulty balancing. The game becomes absolutely brutal in chapters 3 and 4 despite being very pleasantly balanced in the first two chapters. The signposting also takes a nasty hit in those bits too, and it all feels much more down to deliberate choice rather than any kind of not knowing any better due to how young the genre still was. The game also has a ton of taking party members away and returning them significantly later exactly as strong as they were before, and that’s a big reason chapter 3 is so brutally awful. You’ve gotta rely on some pretty godly RNG luck to be able to level up your awful new main character in that one, and the game makes it about as hard to do that as it possibly could be (and that’s where I ended up save stating a lot). Encounters in general just get way nastier and meaner in the game’s back half, and it ended up having the game end on a really sour note compared to how much I’d been enjoying the first half. Presentation-wise, it’s hardly the prettiest SFC game, and the music is also pretty forgettable, but being only 1991, it’s easy to forgive if not exactly overlook that. But even then, the most fun aspect is seeing all those familiar Gundam characters in their DQ-ified forms. Tons of care has been taken to recreate iconic DQ monster poses and armor designs in all sorts of styles, and it adds a ton to the charm. However, that does sorta put a restraint on the game’s appeal. Compared to something like Super Robot Wars, you’ve really gotta have a pre-existing knowledge of and fondness for U.C. Gundam and Dragon Quest to really appreciate the aesthetics of this game. If you don’t fall into those categories, particularly the former, you’re probably not going to get a ton of enjoyment out of this game unless you’re a massive retro JRPG fan. Verdict: Not Recommended. This game’s aesthetics are cool and well designed, but it’s ultimately too held down by being too darn much of a DQ clone for its own good. The bad design and brutal difficulty in the game’s second half make it really hard to recommend but to the staunchest of U.C. Gundam and retro JRPG fans. If you’re one of those kinds of people, you may get a fair bit of fun out of this one, but if not, I’d say just look up the original CardDasu trading card Knight Gundam art and appreciate that on its own, as its more or less the exact art they took to use for everything in this game anyhow. Totally hooked on SRW even after playing through the F series, I immediately went out and found the next one released back then. Going to the N64, I knew that at least load times would be markedly faster, but I also figured there’d be more changes to come. Almost all the SRW games up until that point had been made not by Banpresto, but by Winky Soft. This was the first one by the new dedicated 3rd party, AI, and their approach to the series is decidedly different than their predecessors. Once again, this game doesn’t record playtime, so I can only guess how long I actually spent playing it over the 2 weeks it took me to beat this, but I reckon about 60 to 70 hours. I played through the original Japanese version on real hardware using a real robot start (to provide a bit of a change from last time).
SRW 64 takes a markedly different approach to the writing in its story than F/F Final did. Where that game was more hopping between the biggest bits of each of the myriad of stories represented in its narrative and had a much more fun and lighthearted tone, this game goes for a much more serious presentation to its story. The overall tone is much darker and more serious, but I don’t think it really works all that well. Partly because I think a good deal of the fun in SRW is in those more lighthearted and silly fan service moments where characters from different series get to bounce off each other in new and interesting ways, but it also has to do with how the story is constructed on a more fundamental level. SRW 64 *exhaustively* plays out the story of nearly every series represented in it, and this means there’s a TON of time dedicated to exposition exposition exposition. There were a small handful of silly moments that made me laugh, but most of my time with the story in this game was just sorta waiting for the next mission to start ^^;. Mechanically, this is still very much the same SRW that we used to have (with discrete pilots and mechs, individually upgraded weapons and units, convoluted secret unit recruitment, anytime quicksaving, and no permadeath), but with a few new and important changes and spins on things. Most notable among outright new things is the paired unit system, where pilots who like each other (or sometimes just one pilot who likes another) will get a 30% bonus to attack and defense when standing within two tiles of each other. There aren’t many units who fall into these categories, but damn do they hit like a truck when they do. This also works really well with the general rebalancing that super robots and real robots have gotten in the favor of the former, so dodge tanks don’t dominate your strategy nearly as much as they used to, and the changes to enemy AI to make it actually take dodge chance into effect also makes dodge tanks nowhere near as invincible as they used to be. The last most notable change comes from beginning to shift towards more varied mission objectives and shorter missions. You still can’t skip fight animations, and loading animations are indeed cartridge-fast, but missions in general don’t last nearly as long as there aren’t nearly as many units to kill. While F Final started towards more varied objective types, 64 goes even further, and it makes for a much more polished experience. Presentation-wise, the game still looks nice, but it’s definitely a step down from the games available on CD-based consoles. No CD storage means no voice acting, and while there wasn’t exactly more than a handful of voiced story lines in previous games, you will notice the silence of battle barks very quickly, and it makes for a very uncanny experience. The renditions of the anime themes in this also aren’t terribly good arrangements either. Part of that might be due to being balanced for TV speakers rather than the headphones I usually use (as I found to be the case for at least one or two songs), but even with that, neither the audio or the visuals can really stand up to the earlier SRW offerings on CD-based consoles. That’s not to say this game is ugly or sounds awful, as it looks and sounds just fine, but it’s to drive home that the N64 was really not blowing anyone away with the SRW offering it got compared to what was available anywhere else. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I would put this even more hesitantly recommended than the F series of games on the Saturn and PS1. Even though there are a lot of factors that add general quality to the gameplay, the presentation is just as if not stronger than the draw of the mechanics in these games, to me at least, and the lackluster presentation really hurts this entry for me. Of course, this IS the N64, so RPG offerings of any stripe are slim pickings, so being a pretty decent one is something to be proud of, and if you can read Japanese and want to add a quite solid SRPG to your N64 library, this is a pretty good choice, but in the larger spectrum of SRW games, this one fails to impress where it really matters most in an era with a lot of steep competition on other consoles. I originally bought Super Robot Wars F to bond with a friend who loved mecha anime over spring break. Little did I know that I’d end up loving it so much that I’d wind up playing a ton ton more of them XD. Now this is two games being reviewed at once primarily because these are actually really one game whose two halves were released about 5 or 6 months apart. You import your save from F into F Final, and you pick up right back where you left off. Now they are technically both stand alone, but starting with F Final would be the equivalent of starting 25 episodes into a 50 episode show, as it does not do anything to catch you up to the pretty involved story you’ve missed up to that point. Now these games don’t save how long your playtime is, and they’re so long that I can really only guess at how long it took me to beat them, but a likely low-ball estimate is that F (which is like 35 missions) took me around 60 hours to beat, and F Final *which is more like 40 missions) took around 80 hours to beat. I played the Japanese versions of them on real hardware using a super robot start.
Before getting into the story, it’ll probably help if I first explain what Super Robot Wars even is. SRW is basically a Super Smash Bros for mecha anime, but it’s a strategy RPG instead of a fighting game. The story of F/F Final is a remake of the last part of the first sub-series of games known as the Divine Crusaders (the primary antagonists) series. The principle players are the main casts of Getter Robo, Mazinger Z, the U.C. Gundam characters, and a big smattering of others too (from Aura Battler Dunbine to Neon Genesis Evangelion). The actual plot is packed with characters, and much like the game itself, is largely here for the spectacle and the fan service. But it’s pretty entertainingly written fan service, I will say. Everyone is introduced and fleshed out just enough that even a mecha anime newbie like myself found a lot to enjoy in how the game is written, and it serves the purpose it was written for very well. I imagine knowing the series present makes it even better, but even only having base summaries provided by my friend was more than enough to let me get a lot of fun out of the writing in this game. Mechanically, this is an SRPG that will be very familiar to anyone who has played a Fire Emblem game. It’s a top-down SRPG where you move units around a map to complete an objective, so the base moving and attacking was super easy to figure out. Though even with the surface level stuff being so similar, the details past the exterior made for an experience I ended up enjoying a lot more than I generally do with FE games. For example, you can not only design your player avatar at the start for a different first 5 missions or so, and there are various route splits later on to give you some more variety in how you’ll experience the story. Going onward, characters and the mechs they pilot are different entities. Granted you don’t usually have much of a reason to swap people out of the mech they came with (as it’s most often what they’re best suited for), pilots level up with experience gained in battle while mechs can be upgraded with money. Speaking of money, that’s also how this game changes another thing that often irks me about most FE games: no permadeath. Instead, when a unit dies in battle, unless it’s a critical unit tied to your failure condition (much like a lord in FE), you’ll get them back at the end of the mission after paying a repair fee to get them back into fighting shape. It means that losing units is still something you don’t want, as you can’t grind for resources and money is a limited resource, but losing a unit near the end of the battle is a much easier thing to stomach than in an FE game from the same era. Money is also how you upgrade your mechs’ weapons, as they simply have respective bespoke weapons that use either ammo that must be refilled at a ship or from a refueling unit, or a general energy pool that’s refilled very similarly. No swapping swords or weapons like that. Even though it can take a bit of experimenting to figure out what weapons are worth upgrading and for whom, it’s a pretty simple system at the end of the day. What you can swap around are equippable items that mechs can equip to buff their armor, accuracy, HP, etc. They’re pretty straightforward, but they also provide invaluable buffs, and who gets what is a very important choice. Going back to what makes pilots special compared to their mechs, each pilot has a total of four spirit moves they can learn as they level up in addition to passives respective to each unit. The latter involve things like getting better parry chance (ability to nullify damage from an incoming physical projectile or sword), shield chance (ability to halve damage from an incoming attack), or simply how good a NewType you are (which is a general upgrade that gives buffs to accuracy and evasion). The former are activatable abilities that cost a certain amount of spirit points that refill at the end of every mission. Wisely spending your spirit points will likely be the difference between life and death, as a 100% chance to dodge the next attack, a full HP restore, and more such things are invaluable for just about every unit. The last thing about pilots is their willpower stat, which starts at 100 and goes up for every unit the party kills, every unit they kill, and every time they take a hit. Willpower can be anywhere from 50 to 150, and it acts as a flat multiplier on your stats, so a character with 120 willpower will have 120% stats. Unfortunately, willpower is a good segue to the fairly significant list of issues the game has that are symptomatic of both the era’s notions of game design and the technology it was built on. There are several two-part missions in the game, and something that isn’t really made clear to the player is that pilots who take part in the first half lose 50-ish willpower as they move to the 2nd half. You can still deploy them, but their utility will be severely harmed, and it really pays to upkeep 2 effective fighting forces that you can use for these harder 2-parters. Using a guide to keep track of when and what those are helps a lot. Using a guide is also very helpful for recruiting secret characters, as even compared to FE games, the flags you need to hit to recruit most characters are quite well hidden (sometimes impossibly well hidden) and you’d almost never accidentally stumble onto them, which I can only imagine was the intention. Another big issue the game(s) has is balancing. Now SRW splits its units between two general descriptions: Super Robots (more like Getter Robo or Mazinger Z) and Real Robots (think more like Gundam). The former generally trend towards higher defense and attack but worse evasion and accuracy, and the latter are generally the reverse. The only issue there is that this is a game very much balanced towards one-hit kills. If you’re dealing a hit, you’re probably trying to outright kill whatever you’re firing at, and if you’re taking a hit, it’s likely gonna nearly kill you if not outright kill you (especially for the weedier Real Robots). Long story short, enemies get so hilariously tanky and evasive by even the ending of F (so well before F Final even starts), that dodge-tanks are really the only way forward. Super Robots are really only valuable as damage nuke machines, as their biggest moves are often immune to enemy beam shields or parry skills, and even then, once they run out of their 100% hit spirit moves (if they even have them), they’re basically useless. This isn’t a massive problem, per se, but it does kinda take away from the crossover fun element by so heavily gating which units are even worth using. That said, this also factors into the game’s pretty bad enemy AI. While F generally has enemies who stand still and wait for you for a good while before charging, and F Final generally has much more aggressive enemies who charge at you much earlier, enemies will primarily shoot first and foremost towards the easiest kill they can make. At least, the easiest kill they *think* they can make, as they basically never factor in evasion to their priorities. This makes dodge tanks incredibly powerful as decoy units as well, as enemies will harmlessly waste tons of ammo and turns trying to hit units they literally have a 0% to hit. The last most significant problem is moreso related to issues that tons of 32-bit era CD games ran into, and that’s luxury animations and load times. Now the presentation of the game is really nice. The fight animations aren’t really animated very much, as the mechs are more high-detailed sprites that move more like paper cut-outs than FE-style animations, and honestly their load times are super quick. The thing is though that you can’t skip these animations, and those animations and their half-second load times add up *fast*. A fairly short mission in F/F Final is two hours long, with most taking more like 3~4 hours, and the longest ones took me more like 5 or 6 hours. Luckily the game has an incredibly generous and fast quicksave feature. You only have the one mid-mission save, but you can use it at any time to suspend the game or even just save/load your way to a necessary critical hit. This certainly isn’t a deal-breaker, but just how long missions take is easily the aspect of these older SRW games that makes them the most hard to recommend. Continuing on the presentation, the game really looks quite nice. The limited animations are a bit of a bummer compared to something like Fire Emblem of the time, sure, but the big beautiful sprites and the slight animations they do have still look very nice. There’s also a lot of very fun music in the game too, as the battle music for each of the mechs is the theme song (or a famous insert song in the case of the U.C. Gundam crew) from their series. There’s even a karaoke mode in the options menu to sing along yourself if you want! The game is unfortunately a tad buggy though, as two or three times animations just didn’t actually kick me back to the map screen when they were done, and I had to load a quick save. This can be mitigated by saving early and often, of course, but it still sucks when it happens. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Honestly, I enjoyed these games quite a good deal, and if you want SRW fun on your Saturn, there’s nothing more for you than these. The biggest reason I hesitate to recommend them is just how much better SRW gets in this same generation of consoles, and that if you wanna give SRW a go these days, there are much better polished ways to do it. Still though, if you wanna give these ones a go, even as a mecha newbie, there’s a lot of fun to be had helping the Super Robots in their Super Robot War~. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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