I was in a bit of a rut on which SRW game to play next, and bounced off of the couple that I tried. It was then that I remembered that I have the Ultimate Box Collection, remakes of SRW 2, 3, and EX using the engine from F and F Final. It was released on the PS1 in 1999, and I see it as a sort of last hurrah for Winky Soft before they ceased making SRW games. Something more simple and like the first SRW game I played way back in March turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. These still don’t count playtime, so I reckon it probably took me around 30 or 40 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on original hardware.
SRW2, despite that “2” in the name, is actually the first SRW game in many respects. Way back in its original incarnation on the Famicom in 1991, it was the very first SRW game that Winky Soft made, and also the first one to have a story of any kind (with the first SRW on GameBoy, the one actually made by Banpresto, being more of a collection of maps not unlike the early Advance Wars games). This is the first in what’s known retroactively as the Divine Crusaders saga, where our heroes fight primarily against the group of bad guys (themselves primarily from U.C. Gundam, Getter Robo, and Mazinger Z) known as the Divine Crusaders. A great scientist foresaw the attack of Earth by mysterious aliens, and in order to defend Earth from them, he believed that the forces of Earth must be united entirely. To this end, he constructed the Valshion, a super robot of unimaginable power, and created the DC. The plot of this game is primarily fighting against the Valshion and the DC, who are comprised mostly of bad guys from the original 3 Gundam series and F91 in a plot that *mostly* resembles the One Year War from the original 0079 Gundam series, but differs in many ways due to all of the other actors present in the story. To be honest, basically every other SRW game that adapts U.C. Gundam treats the One Year War as backstory, so it was mostly really cool to see that conflict adapted in any way at all for once. While I’m not sure how much this has been altered from its original Famicom release, it’s a *very* light story, and talking and quips are kept to a minimum to keep the gameplay flowing. It’s a formula that, while certainly different, I still found very charming and funny, and it does exactly what it sets out to do. Mechanically, this is more or less identical to SRW F Final, which makes sense given that this is just a remake of a Famicom game, but that also makes it far more interesting. The original Famicom game has a lot of limitations by virtue of being a Famicom game: units and pilots are no discrete bodies (a unit IS their pilot and vice versa, so no swapping pilots between mechs), the only way units upgrade is by leveling up with EXP, units only have a couple moves each, and maps tend to be smaller and have very few reinforcements. What this means, however, is that when combined with F’s mechanics such as units separate from pilots, large move lists, and units upgradable with money, is that you have a really tightly executed SRW game in the Winky Soft model (complete with their unskippable albeit short battle animations). You have a pretty small total unit list of only 14 or so, so you’re generally fielding your whole army every map, and it makes the whole thing feel much more like an Advance Wars-style puzzle game as a result. This is made even better by the addition of some rebalancing I now realize I falsely gave credit to Banpresto for innovating. The #1 case of this is how super robots (the slower tanky and hard hitting units), hopelessly inaccurate and damn near useless in F and F Final, have been given the big accuracy boost in their weapons that they so badly needed. This means your tiny army is *far* more able to take on the things your up against since everyone can actually pull their weight properly. They’ve even gone a little bit farther with the rebalancing than that, and made it so you simply don’t have the upgrades possible to create field-dominating dodge-tanks that are so incredibly powered in both Winky Soft and Banpresto SRW games, forcing you to really strategize around who in your army is going to take on which foes. The game is still only 26 missions with no skill points, alternate routes, or hidden endings, just as the Famicom game was, but that sat just fine with me. A short, sweet, yet very polished SRW game in this style wasn’t something I thought was possible for this series, but damn if I wasn’t impressed that they actually pulled it off so well. As far as presentation goes, while this game *does* still mostly reuse assets from the F and F Final rosters, there’s quite a lot new or changed here as well. Most of the sprites, for starters, while still not animated properly like they’d start doing in SRW Alpha the next year, are smaller than their F Final counterparts. Whether that’s down to a matter of data compression (to fit all 3 games as well as the video cutscenes on one tiny PS1 disc) or a simple stylistic choice, I’m not sure (as they don’t particularly look like their Famicom and Super Famicom counterparts so much as they look like somewhat smaller versions of the F Final models, for the most part). Either way, it gives them a unique look to set apart the Ultimate Box from the scads of other PS1 SRW games. Another fun change that I can’t really chalk up to either a stylistic or data limitation reason are the music tracks which are all different from their F Final iterations. They sound much more old school, and the amount of “SNES Guitar”-type rifs in so much of the sound font makes me think this very well may be a stylistic choice rather than one made of data compression necessity. One or two of the tracks sound a bit off (particularly the Great Mazinger theme), but they all generally sound great as they always do in replicating the anime themes they’re representing~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it’s far from the prettiest, most technical, or most anime-packed SRW game on the PS1, this is a title that does really well to set itself apart from its sister titles. Whether it was the intention at their outset or not, Winky Soft did a great job crafting a more streamlined and puzzle-like experience in the mold of one of their older titles, and it’s a blast the whole way through. If you’re into SRPGs and don’t mind that this version of SRW2 ain’t in English, this is definitely one worth checking out~.
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I was getting a little burned out on Alpha 2, but by the end of it, I was as ready as ever to hop right into the next SRW game on my list~. Dealing with the squad system in Alpha 2, I was very happy that I only had one more game in the series that uses it, Alpha 3. There were a fair few changes I was hoping they’d make here, and for the most part those dreams came true! Alpha 3 is a sequel in every sense of the word, as it sits down with the biggest problems that its predecessor had and sets to work at solving them (even as it makes some new ones in the process :b). I played this on original hardware, and as I once again am forced to guess my playtime, I reckon about 80 to 90 hours easily if not a bit longer to get the good ending.
Alpha 3 is very much narratively the sequel to Alpha 2, and while it’s not as iron-clad as the connection between Alpha and Alpha Gaiden, it’s a bit more connected than Alpha Gaiden to Alpha 2. After only a few months since the end of Alpha 2, the shaky state of Earth and earthlings in space is coming under turmoil yet again. This is an all-around more space-centric adventure, as we’re not only adapting the second half and sequel OVA to GaoGaiGar, we’re also bringing back the Macross crew (among others) as we go through the story of Macross 7~. The other most interesting new series adapted here is Gundam SEED, which while definitely a weaker narrative and a pretty poor choice for a game like this (it’s narrative is very hard to follow when its split up like this, especially if you skip one of the routes that its in at a route split), it’s very interesting to see SEED injected into a world where U.C. Gundam also exists, and Amuro & Co. have already gone through the events of Char’s Counterattack. The writing has once again taken a big step up. The original characters, particularly the player protagonist (of whom I picked the female real robot pilot this time around), who not only manage to be less annoying than ever, but even just all around well written characters whose appearances I was happy to see. We’re not just getting meaningful character growth and pathos via how a licensed series is adapted, but also finally among the originals as well. The central theme of “fighting against fate, and the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to do it” is a really interesting one, and this game does the best job I’ve seen yet of tying together the themes and plots of the different series into one well functioning whole. It’s so nice to finally get to say that I can recommend the writing of a SRW game beyond just campy crossover fun or how well a licensed series is represented. I didn’t think I’d ever feel that way, frankly, but it rarely has felt so good to be wrong~. Mechanically, this is still very much SRW as you’ve known it, especially if you’ve known Alpha 2. Separate pilots and units, units can be upgraded with money while pilots level up and upgrade with pilot points, spirit abilities act like spells for each pilot, you have scads of units and squads of 1~4 units that they operate in, and difficulty points to dynamically determine the difficulty (though while kill counts on respective units influence special unit acquisition rather than difficulty points this time around, we not only have a good vs. normal ending determined by how many difficulty points you have (57 out of 59), but you also can’t surpass a total turn count of 420 turns for that good ending either). As far as differences go, on the more subtle level, I’d say they have a much better handle on how to design missions around having the squad system. This whole game just flows so much nicer and faster than Alpha 2 did largely because missions drag so much less despite the game taking about as long to play. As for more major changes, most of them are on UI or quality of life improvements, particularly the one I most wanted to see which was allowing you to select multiple spirit abilities within a squad to trigger all at once. That saves SO much time compared to how you had to do it one at a time for each member and each skill in Alpha 2, and I’d also go as far as to say that that improvement is significantly responsible for how much better paced this game feels over Alpha 2. You also have training modes for the squad system as well as a squad auto-creation feature for if you’re not too comfortable taking on that system from the start, which was also very nice to see. The main and kinda only negative change I’d say this game has is that it brings back route splits that split the party up, of which Alpha 2 had none. In Alpha 2, the route you picked more so only changed the order in which things happened, where here we’re back to splitting the party up into different groups to take on different challenges simultaneously. While this does make for more faster paced and better designed missions, Alpha 3 REALLY could have used a feature to save squad layouts, as after almost every major splitting or rejoining of the team, you need to completely remake ALL of your squads complete with giving all the items back to whoever had them. I never trusted the automatic squad maker to make good squads, admittedly, but it took AGES to put my 15~20 squads back together each time, and I’m talking like 30 minutes to an hour. It ain’t a short process. Given everything else that Alpha 3 improves on from the last game, it’s a shame it still makes a rod for its own back in this way, but given that you only gotta do this a handful of times, if this is the worst problem Alpha 3 has, then things are looking pretty good I’d say. As for presentation, this is very much like Alpha to Alpha Gaiden was. We’re still pretty clearly using the same engine and reusing most of the same assets, but a good few units have new attacks, new animations, and even sometimes new sprites, and that’s on top of the larger, nicer character portraits this game uses as well as to all of the new units it adds to the stock that Alpha 2 had. Still no karaoke mode (as there never will be again TwT) and the weird omission of some very iconic songs that in some cases Alpha 2 even had (like no Anime Janai (the ZZ Gundam them) which both Impact and Alpha 2 have, and Dancouga also doesn’t have its most iconic theme either and uses a much worse one instead) are some unfortunate marks against the music in this game, but on the bright side, we have a bunch more new tracks from many series (like the Great Mazinger using Tetsuya’s Theme instead of the Great Mazinger them) as well as rearrangements of old favorites (my personal favorite of which being the Daitarn 3 theme) AND the ability at long last to pick and choose everyone’s used theme music individually and from any series~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Even with squad system nonsense, this does such a better job of justifying its inclusion than Alpha 2 did on top of everything else design and presentation related that this game does so well that it’s easily the best SRW game that had been made up to that point. As I was with the similarly flawed and similarly short-lived demon loyalty system in the SMT Devil Summoner games, I’m not really sad to see that this is the last time Banpresto tries anything with the squad system, but I’m glad that the improvements made to it are done so well and that they allow what’s otherwise a great SRW game to keep on being so darn great~. Continuing my current Super Robot Wars obsession, I moved on to the next game in the Alpha series, and Banpresto’s first proper PS2 game in the series (with Impact technically coming out before this, but that game both not being by Banpresto and also primarily reusing assets from Alpha Gaiden rather than ones made for the PS2). Given that this game is the first one to use the new squad system, I knew I’d be in for a bit of a learning curve, but it all ultimately grew on me in the end. These games still don’t count playtime, so I can only guess at how long it actually took me to beat this over the weeks I was playing it, but it was easily 80~90 hours if not longer to beat the game on real hardware (and I’ve also begun to suspect that other games I’ve played in the series have been closer to that mark as well).
This game picks up two years after the end of Alpha Gaiden, with the world relatively peaceful in the intervening years but things slowly getting more turbulent as they lead to the new oodles of returning old threats and brand new threats facing Earth. The new additions to the larger franchise in this game are Brain Powerd as well as Steel Jeeg and GaoGaiGar, while we also have some old favorites like Tosho Daimos and Go Shogun joining the fray as well (though my beloved Dancouga is left absent from this story TwT). This story goes back to including more Banpresto original characters as well as a player main character after having virtually none of either in Alpha Gaiden, so I was a bit nervous about how this game would be written, but I was very pleasantly surprised with what I found here. Banpresto has gotten a LOT better at writing both their original characters as well as their protagonists since Alpha 1, and from the licenced characters to the original plot and themes, I really liked the story here. Perhaps the other protagonists have stories a bit worse or a bit better, but I really enjoyed playing through the male super robot pilot’s route~. The gameplay is mostly very familiar to past SRW games. You have a Fire Emblem-style tactics game with separate units and pilots, spirit abilities that each pilot can cast as spells, mechs upgradable with money, support attacks and defense, items to find and equip, and a difficulty point system with optional objectives you can complete to dynamically change the difficulty (and that’s all they do in this game, as they don’t affect secret stages, endings, or units in any way this time around). There are a couple of more minor changes, as the bazaar to buy and sell items and mechs that Alpha Gaiden had is gone, the UI in general has gotten a really serious usability improvement, numbers in general have changed (all around values are like 1.5 to 2 times higher), and you can now use the new resource of Pilot Points to directly give pilots new passives, better terrain affinities, and better stats (and completing difficulty point objectives give everyone in the army a +5 bonus to their Pilot Points). But the most major and obvious addition is the squad system, and it is by this squad system that your enjoyment of Alpha 2 will live or die. Likely as an effort to allow you to use more of the massive cast of the game without having you actually manage 30~40 individual units on each map, Alpha 2 introduces a system that still has you controlling 10~15 units (depending on the map), but each of these units is a squad composed of 1 to 4 individual mechs. Each mech has a new Cost stat, and each squad can either have a maximum of 4 units or a maximum of 5 cost. You can change who the head of a squad is mid-mission, but not who is within a squad. Once the mission starts, a squad is a squad, but thankfully you almost always have a pre-deployment secondary intermission prep phase, so you can alter squads or item distributions as needed depending on how the mission has gone up to that point. Only the unit at the head of the squad can attack, but there are new mechanics to help make more sense of having squads of units instead of individuals. For starters, all weapons now have the factor of being either single-target or ALL target, as well as being able to be fired as support weapons. A single-target move will hit the guy at the head of the enemy squad, and it can also be backed up by support attacks by other squad members (though for these intra-squad supports, they’re weakened versions of those attacks). Additionally, while members within your squad can potentially take a hit for you just like adjacent units could in prior games, if you have support attacks, those defenders will only defend against those supports, and the leader of their squad is still hit by your leader’s attack. Finally, while an ALL-target attack can’t be blocked against, it also can’t have support attacks help it out either. This change to single vs ALL attacks also means that MAP attacks are significantly rarer than they were in past games, and those that are here tend are often comparatively weaker attacks than they used to be. While the squad system isn’t bad per se, as once you get past the learning curve, it’s a pretty simple system, I found it really fails to meaningfully justify its inclusion. As just mentioned, it’s ultimately a pretty simple system. It doesn’t really do anything to change the flow of battle because it’s so limited in how it’s implemented. It comes off as more of a side-grade than an upgrade, and while that sort of thing isn’t often a problem, it’s a problem here in how it adds SO much time to your playtime in terms of micromanaging ALL of these units. Now instead of a core of 15 or 20 units you’ll always use, now you’ve gotta manage 40+ units to outfit your 12~15 main squads worth of units. That includes everything from balancing who gets what item and who gets money to get upgraded to the much more clunky and menu-heavy task of arduously popping a whole squad’s worth of spirit abilities, one at a time, EVERY turn before they attack. Presentation-wise, this game is NUTS compared to what came before it. Putting Alpha Gaiden and Alpha 2 side by side, it’s not hard to see why people were so damn hyped for the PlayStation 2. While I’ll always mourn my beloved karaoke mode which stopped appearing in these games at the start of the PS2 generation, everything in Alpha 2, from the music to especially the animations, is a whole new heckin’ world of flash and detail from what came before. The old animations were pretty impressive compared to the non-animations from before, but now we’ve gone from good animations to nearing the point where it’s like watching an anime scene for each attack. I know that later games, including this game’s own sequel, push that boundary even further, but god damn is the level of detail the PS2 allowed for impressive and a hell of a way to kick off the console generation. Verdict: Recommended. As much as I moaned and complained (rightfully so) about the squad system both in this review and to any friend that would listen while I was playing through the game, Alpha 2 is still a damn good SRW game. It’s SUCH a shame the squad system is as rough as it is, because every other facet of this game, from the presentation to the writing to the mission design, is SO well polished, it’d easily be the best one yet if it didn’t have that self-placed stone around its own neck. Still, this is an excellent SRW game, and if the time commitment involved in dealing with the squad system doesn’t put you off of it, it’s a worthy successor to Alpha Gaiden and well worth playing if you can read Japanese~. This is a game a close friend of mine has talked to me about on several occasions as a game she remembered being just awful to control and a rough experience all around. Therefore, when I saw a copy at Book Off for the low low price of 500 yen, I knew I had to jump at the chance to play through it with her at some point x3. She watched me play through it over the course of two Twitch streams. I played the Japanese version on real hardware on my PS2 (it just wouldn’t work at ALL on the PS3), and it took me about 6.5 hours in total with the best ending.
Now a cursory glance at the English title would give the very reasonable impression that this is based on the film of the same name, but this game actually beat the film to release by a good few months. There are enough narrative differences outside what could be considered gameplay convenience to the point that I believe it’s simply based on the same source material from the VHD books, rather than being an adaptation that happened to beat the movie to launch (which does genuinely happen from time to time). The story is all about our titular vampire hunter, D, and his post-apocalyptic quest to save the daughter of a wealthy man from the vampire lord who kidnapped her. Being a classic-style Resident Evil clone, this game doesn’t exactly have an incredible story, but it’s pretty good and fun and campy for what it is. It doesn’t quite hit the levels of campy fun that the original RE did, but it’s not too far away, and manages to be a nice adaptation of the source material at any rate~. The gameplay, as mentioned, is very much a survival horror game in the making of the original PS1 RE games, with tank controls, fixed camera angles, and resource management. There are, however, some important differences though that makes this a lot more palatable than the classic RE games to someone like me who doesn’t get on too well with those. For starters, this game cuts a lot of the fat in terms of puzzle solving or player inconvenience. While there are indeed items to collect, rooms to explore, and puzzles to solves in the giant Mirelurk Castle, where to go next is always signposted very well, and I was never stuck on where to go next (only using a guide to reference how to get the best ending). You also have no limit on your inventory, so you need not mess around with inventory boxes and such, and you even have the ability to save anywhere even more generously than in Ocarina of Time! Just save where you are, and when you reload, you’ll be put right back at the start of the room you left off at. It’s a really well put together experience for someone like me who doesn’t really get on with survival horror games that well. All that said, there are some other things that don’t exactly add good things to the overall experience. You don’t really have different weapons like you do in RE games. D just has his sword that he can melee monsters with. You have a limited amount of consumable items you can find and use, but I almost never used any of them as most enemies can and should just be run past, as there’s no benefit to fighting them. I ended up burning through literally all of my consumables against the final boss, but that was more down to poor preparation and conservation of healing items on my part than anything. The bosses are relatively well designed, or at least as well as they can be for a game that controls like this one does. There is a bit of a weird focus on the melee combat though, with the ability to strafe and backstep by the use of a lock-on to your enemies. It’s almost never REALLY needed, save for against the harder bosses, and the weird focus on melee combat is easily the most awkward part of this game’s design. Touching back on my friend’s comments about the controls, I don’t think it really controls any better or worse than other tank control horror games of the era, though this game DOES have some amount of platforming in it, as our boy D can jump! Upon first starting the game, this was something I was understandably quite worried about, as platforming is 1000% NOT what RE games needed to make them more fun, but I was pleasantly surprised at how its implemented in this game. While it is indeed nice to have the option to not just run past but also leap over enemies to avoid them, there are very few genuine platforming puzzles in this game, and the ones that are here are super forgiving even if they aren’t super easy. This is another case where I’m not sure the addition of this mechanic to the formula exactly makes the game better, per se, but I also wouldn’t say it really makes it meaningfully worse either. The presentation of the game is very budget 1999 PS1 flair in many ways. It’s hardly the nicest looking PS1 game for the time, but I also wouldn’t call it ugly either. The VA is well done and fun, and character models in particular have that old low-polygon charm that so many games from that era still have. Mirelurk Castle is hardly the Spencer Mansion when it comes to how distinctive it looks, and the soundtrack isn’t exactly particularly memorable either, but on all counts the presentation is very solidly adequate either way. Verdict: Recommended. If you’re someone who really likes PS1 survival horror games, you’ll likely enjoy your time with this pretty well, but if you aren’t into the genre, this isn’t really one to track down (or more likely emulate, given how hideously expensive the English version is these days). While this certainly wouldn’t’ve been blowing anyone’s socks off in 1999 compared to the RE games of the period, I think the hate this game got upon its release was totally unjustified. While perhaps not worth most folks’ time, it’s a perfectly fine game and a nice survival horror hidden gem of sorts on the PS1. |
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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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