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Super Robot Wars Community Thread

Shouta

Member
Oh yeah tag tension. That's limited by leveling up though no? I guess you could rotate units and do it, lol

I never bothered with it aside from certain situations as I recall. I always just had my units counterattack enemies to death.
 

Acosta

Member
I'm happy to say that after many years buying and playing SRW games, I'm near of completing my first one (Z-2 Hakai-Hen). I love the saga, but I have always found that my lack of Japanese knowledge discourage me from completing games as I have the feeling I'm not getting the full experience (zero story, just a vague glimpse of systems and skills, finding combined attacks by chance...). Also, a stubborn refusal to skip combat sequences, something that I have come along in this game.

Anyway, the question is, I have been thinking about reading the faq for understanding the story as I have just skipped the dialogue, but now I have doubts that if I read the story, I will spoiler myself from series I'm interested (like Getter Robo or Eureka 7). Will it be so?

Thanks in advance.
 

Tsukumo

Member
I'm happy to say that after many years buying and playing SRW games, I'm near of completing my first one (Z-2 Hakai-Hen). I love the saga, but I have always found that my lack of Japanese knowledge discourage me from completing games as I have the feeling I'm not getting the full experience (zero story, just a vague glimpse of systems and skills, finding combined attacks by chance...). Also, a stubborn refusal to skip combat sequences, something that I have come along in this game.

Anyway, the question is, I have been thinking about reading the faq for understanding the story as I have just skipped the dialogue, but now I have doubts that if I read the story, I will spoiler myself from series I'm interested (like Getter Robo or Eureka 7). Will it be so?

Thanks in advance.

You won't spoil much about Eureka 7 since Z-2 ties into the movie and not the tv-show.
It's pretty much a given for any movie "following" a tv show, but the sequel/prequel/remake movies are usually absolute shits. Char's counterattack notwithstanding, of course. In the case of Eureka 7 the tv-show is definitely the way to go, first. Then the movie.
Getter Robot Armageddon gets completely covered by Z-2: I would suggest to watch it because the first three episodes are some of most amazing Japanese animation I've ever seen. They were directed by Imagawa, same guy behind Giant Robo and Shin Mazinger Z. The rest of the OVAs are... a mixed bag, IMO.
And if you haven't see Lagann yet, PLEASE do it now :D
 

Bebpo

Banned
You know, some of the maps in BX are nuts. The only reason the difficulty isn't on the same level as A Portable is that the hit percentages are very player-favorable in BX. But goddamn the game is way more brutal than Z3, especially during the splits.

For example, Map 19 Real Robot Route:

-You've got a bunch of generally weak real robots, only decent power hitters are the Battleships, Celestial Being crew, OG Unit, AGE3 and Mac F main unit.

-You start out having to fight the Unicorn OAV4 Mobile Armor + 2 Boss Unit AGE enemies + Big Boss unit Zehart in his new super mech + grunts

-Then you beat all of them and 2 waves of grunt reinforcements show up, you get no reinforcements. Normally in a Z game this is the part where new waves of grunts show up and then a cutscene happens and a new friendly unit shows up destroying them all and gets added to your roster to help with your worn out units all out of SP/EN from round 1. But nope, this almost never seems to happen in BX. Waves and waves of new enemies/bosses arrive and no support units magically show up to either recharge your crews SP/EN or be a powerful unit that can help out.

-Then after beating everyone who are all up north in the map, you suddenly have to rush to the 4 corners of the map to defuse bombs in 5 turns, all guarded by Mac F mid-sized Vajira in Defense mode. Meanwhile you're out of SP so you can use any speed up movement seishin and there's no tag tension here, so the best you can do is load people in spaceships and get double movement next round.

-Then after just barely taking out the 4 corners and defusing the bombs, and you think them map is over Roni and the Unicorn OAV4 Mobile Armor COMES BACK at full health and Ridhe joins (oh yay, who cares), and you have to fight the MA again + new grunts surrounding it and get it down to <10% hp without killing it all with your units scattered across the 4 corners of the map and with nobody having any SP or EN left at all.

Then the map finally ends.

It's totally ridiculous. The only reason it's surviveable is if you debuff the MA, her hit percentages against your real robots is only like 25%. If those percentages were more like 75-100% it'd be near impossible.

Also the maps are friggen long. The intro to maps are long, the maps are like 2-3 waves like that long, and the outro to maps are long. Probably takes about 2 hours a map at this point.

Sometimes I miss the days of short, simple GBA/DS SRW games that you could blow through most maps in 30-40 mins and the games were only about 25-30 hours long.
 

Acosta

Member
You won't spoil much about Eureka 7 since Z-2 ties into the movie and not the tv-show.
It's pretty much a given for any movie "following" a tv show, but the sequel/prequel/remake movies are usually absolute shits. Char's counterattack notwithstanding, of course. In the case of Eureka 7 the tv-show is definitely the way to go, first. Then the movie.
Getter Robot Armageddon gets completely covered by Z-2: I would suggest to watch it because the first three episodes are some of most amazing Japanese animation I've ever seen. They were directed by Imagawa, same guy behind Giant Robo and Shin Mazinger Z. The rest of the OVAs are... a mixed bag, IMO.
And if you haven't see Lagann yet, PLEASE do it now :D

Thanks a lot! will do.
 

Shouta

Member
That BX map was the only notable one for me mostly because of the length. It wasn't particularly hard though.
 

Bebpo

Banned
I dunno, when I run out of SP in maps in SRW it freaks me out. Because on tougher maps once your party is out of SP, you're fucked. Your real robots can't dodge and die on counter-attack and your supers can't hit anything because their accuracy sucks. I depend on SP a lot in my SRW playthroughs.

The smarter way to play is not to use any SP for the first 2 rounds of moving and grunt clearing and just take the hits and misses as long as it doesn't kill you. Then you've at least saved enough SP to last 2 more rounds than you would have otherwise on the tail end.

Also speaking of real robot BX, what's the heck with the EN refill ship from Mac F having the best map attack in tank form with 4 lines of gun? That's so crazy, especially as I find map attacks really hard to land in BX since most of them are just single lines and without continuous movement you can't cheat and move then use MAP like Z3.
 

Bebpo

Banned
On stage 25 now in BX and these last few stages....phew! Counting the story visual novel bits I think these are the longest non-endgame maps I've ever seen in a SRW. Each stage is taking like 2-3 hours at this point and that's with 95% of battle animations off in the actual stages. The pre-stage visual novel and post-stage visual novel bits are just long as hell. It's like they're still trying to pack in as much story as Z2/Z3 100 map game in half the maps so they so go on and on in setting up each stage and then a lot of outro explanations.

It's fine, just makes progression real slow on this one and there are times where I do get a little annoyed like "shut up already" and I'm super tempted to just skip the rest of the dialogue and get to the damn map or save screen.

I do like the Panzer World Galient and Giant Gorg stuff, Raijin-Oh is alright; not a ton of plot in that one. Most of the other shows barely have a story presence, which I'm glad for shows that were done recently in Z2/Z3/UX since I'm not really interested in playing through all their story again so soon.
 
About to start my 2nd play-through and what?? You can customize seishin for the main character?? How about Concentrate and Soul unlocked at lv1? lol

If you want an overpowered map-weapon, just fully-upgrade Nadesico mothership and give it hit&away.
 

Bebpo

Banned
About to start my 2nd play-through and what?? You can customize seishin for the main character?? How about Concentrate and Soul unlocked at lv1? lol

If you want an overpowered map-weapon, just fully-upgrade Nadesico mothership and give it hit&away.

Doesn't it just have one of those single line map attacks? Also hard to give things "hit and away" since the part system sucks. It's so rough going back to EN refuelers who can't move and then refuel :| But yeah the game is pretty easy at this point so it's not a big deal, just kind of slow.

That reminds me that MC has like the worst seishin of any MC. He's got a half-dozen useless support ones that I've never needed. But main stuff like steel wall, hot blooded, accelerate, nope so far.
 
Doesn't it just have one of those single line map attacks? Also hard to give things "hit and away" since the part system sucks. It's so rough going back to EN refuelers who can't move and then refuel :| But yeah the game is pretty easy at this point so it's not a big deal, just kind of slow.
Nadesico ship has 2 map attacks and the 2nd attack is possibly the most broken map attack in the game. If I remember correctly, it covers 4x4 grids and shoot 2 grids diagonally from the ship and the damage is insanely strong (think about it as Lelouch's map attack from Z3 but much easier to aim.) Yurika will get "Love" Seishin later in the game which makes her ship the best unit for grinding money.
 

Reishiki

Banned
About to start my 2nd play-through and what?? You can customize seishin for the main character?? How about Concentrate and Soul unlocked at lv1? lol

I think this is pretty standard in NG+ on the handheld games. It is even more insanely broken in SRW W with the SP/Hotblood+Soul glitches that allow Valzacard to solo every stage it appears in a single turn.
 

Tsukumo

Member
Did anybody completed SRW OE? Impressions?
Going through MX atm but I definitely want to complete OE.
Specifically:
- did they fix the loading times?
- is there any difference playing on the Vita?
- what about the story?
- does it become tougher?
- did they add a feature to set the same BGM for all units, like any other recent SRW?
 

Bebpo

Banned
BX
Stage 28
I got the OG unit's upgrade and...the upgrade stats don't carry over?????? Wtf. I'm guessing it's some kind of temp upgrade until I get the real upgrade. But still, once I got slots 6-10 unlocked I spent all my money maxing the OG unit and money is hard to come by in BX, and then like the next map I lose my OG unit and this new one comes along with all stats at lvl.3. This sucks.

Otoh, Silverion Hammer was woaaaah even if the animation sucked.
 

Pehesse

Member
BX
Stage 28
I got the OG unit's upgrade and...the upgrade stats don't carry over?????? Wtf. I'm guessing it's some kind of temp upgrade until I get the real upgrade. But still, once I got slots 6-10 unlocked I spent all my money maxing the OG unit and money is hard to come by in BX, and then like the next map I lose my OG unit and this new one comes along with all stats at lvl.3. This sucks.

Otoh, Silverion Hammer was woaaaah even if the animation sucked.

Yeah, without entering spoiler territory too much, that's not the OG upgrade (you're talking about Blue Victor, right?). You haven't wasted your money, don't worry :)
 

Pehesse

Member
Gonna be playing SRW J! I'm hype.

Have fun :) It's the one I started with, so I still remember it fondly! It often gets flak because of its reinforcement system/patterns and somewhat lackluster AI, but if it's your first go at the series, you probably won't mind/notice so much and just enjoy the crazy ride. The animations are some of the best on the system, too!

And if you want, here's some completely subjective advice:
Calvina in Belzelute FTW, Brain Powered are life because of warping everywhere+cheap combination attacks, Zeorymer is death (if you pour some money in it), and you might need to upgrade God Gundam a bit for when it's a forced deploy so it can actually take some hits :v

Actually thinking back on it just makes me want to play it again...
 

Bebpo

Banned
You know, I've got to take it back, BX is a pretty mediocre SRW game. I'm not done with it yet, but I can't remember any SRW where I've been less invested in the storyline or characters. The OG plot is like non-existent, there's almost no continuity between the world, every stage is just like oh hey there's this event from one of the major enemy factions happening halfway across the world, let's go stop it (go and fight the same enemies over again).

The battles are pretty slow compared to Z. It feels like sitting through an enemy turn with animations off just holding R+A over and over still takes like 3-4 mins of watching through all the short grunt animations. Every map has like 3 waves of reinforcements, there's usually like 2-3 bosses per map, bosses do the "ok, you beat me, now I'm refilling my health back to 100%" thing almost every map. I mean the game is still easy because you do a lot of damage and don't take a ton, but it just feels pretty tedious to play.

And yeah a lot of the animations suck. There's good ones in there like Full Armor Knight Gundam which is freaking awesome, but there's a lot of weak stuff. Glad Quan[T] at least got a new sprite, since his UX sprite was darn awful.

This just hasn't been a great SRW couple of years imo. Z3 does a lot of things right, it's fast to play, has nice sprites, good writing to tie everything together and make it flow, but in the end Z3 was almost entirely the OG plot, and that plot was pretty crap, plus so many letdowns like the animations for Asakim's upgrade. I was looking back at my top10 lists for the last decade and when Z2 Hakai & Sasei came out they were always in my top5 every year. Z3 Jigoku didn't make even the top 10 last year and Z3 Tengoku isn't making this years list either and BX sure isn't. I think UX surprisingly is my favorite licensed SRW of the last 2-3 years just because the OG story was pretty good and the licensed stories were interesting like all the Demonsbane stuff. It wasn't amazing, it dragged on and was a bit too grunt filled and slow in battle, but it was a fun licensed SRW.

Last actually "great" SRW I played was 2nd OGs, but even that had that awful dragged out 17 map in La Gieas intro. But everything after was fantastic and the endgame was awesome.

Hope the series picks up again, I don't want SRW to become another Tales of burnt out Namco Bandai franchise filled with nothing but half-assed underbudgeted yearly/bi-yearly entries for the next decade. SRW used to be really awesome!
 

Bebpo

Banned
Another thing about BX is I think you have to really be a big Dunbine fan to get into it because the game has like a dozen+ Dunbine characters and since it's the sequel to Dunbine, you're already supposed to know who all these people are and their relations. As someone whose never seen Dunbine, all the Dunbine stuff is pretty boring and there's a bunch of it in BX.
 

Tsukumo

Member
Another thing about BX is I think you have to really be a big Dunbine fan to get into it because the game has like a dozen+ Dunbine characters and since it's the sequel to Dunbine, you're already supposed to know who all these people are and their relations. As someone whose never seen Dunbine, all the Dunbine stuff is pretty boring and there's a bunch of it in BX.

Great news for me then ;)
Also Dunbine represents war escalation to perfection: from guerrilla warfare with one vs one mech battles, to outright multi-faction conflict with ships, warships and dozens of mechs. And the characters are fantastic.
It's just a bit dated XD

In other news: anybody selling their UX? It's out of stock everywhere.
 

Bebpo

Banned
Yeah I'm sure Dunbine is great, just it's weird starting with the sequel because if you don't know who these characters are it's really tough to follow/care.

Would've liked if they just did the original Dunbine tv series.
 
Funny, I was thinking of bumping this thread. I checked the official site earlier to check if I had missed any announcement and it seems kind of dead. I mean, there's a few updates on BX and Omega but it's always weird to have that kind of slump where there's no SRW on the horizon, let alone a mainline game.
 

Bebpo

Banned
Yeah, actually it's a bit odd. Usually they announce the April game in December. If there's nothing a month from now I guess they're skipping April this year.

Really hoping for OGs3 in April.
 

Bebpo

Banned
First of all, Merry Xmas SRW!

Second, started Christmas break off with finishing the last two maps of BX. Yeah, BX was probably the most generic forgettable SRW I've ever played. Nothing about it is particularly bad, but nothing about it is interesting or good either. The OG plot hardly exists (the antagonists are paper thin and the main characters aren't much better. The main guy & girl have basically no personality in the story, even worse than Hibiki in Z3-1) and the story is probably the least epic plot since the pre-PS1 days. I mean compared to UX which has you fighting
the Kali Yuuga at the end of multiple universe cycles of extinction to stop the final destruction of all freaking universes
, the final stage of BX is
You fight a mean robot who wants to bring his army over from a different dimension and then he dies and goes "oh well, dying like this was just as good welp";
the Z-Master Gaogaigar boss felt more threatening than that.

Otherwise, yeah not much series integration into a big developed single story. Yeah they teamed up the AGE and Nadesico enemies and a few other team ups, but the story was basically just jumping from fighting one group to going across the world fighting another group repeat repeat repeat. For a game with hardly any real meaningful story, there sure was a lot of party members interaction text and way too many stages at 48 stages + a little branching. 30 something would've been fine.

The only good story stuff in BX is Panzer World Galient & Giant Gorg which are done fairly well and they're enjoyable new entries. Rajinoh is ok, but too much filler and honestly it's not a show with much plot although I liked the antagonist characters.

Outside of forgettable story and characters, the gameplay was a joke. By halfway or so nothing can hit your real robots and bosses go down easily from your supers. There's too many grunts and even with animations off sitting through enemy turns holding R+B and tapping A each time they target a unit and watching the mini-animation is boring. Thankfully once you get Nadesico's MAP attack the pacing of the maps gets better since you just let the grunts all group up while pumping morale into Nadesico and then you shoot a giant gravity blast taking out a huge chunk of grunts in one blast.

Some dumb gameplay stuff like why do I have to reset Unicorn Gundam to Full Armor mode EVERY MAP because I go to Awakened form each map? Also I don't like the parts system too much, you can only get morale break for like 5-6 units by the end.

Speaking of Unicorn, not only do they speed through the story, but even though at first I was happy with the default Unicorn's/NT-D's animations, they really half-assed it once you get Full Armor & Green form. The FA animations barely add anything to the existing animations and the Green form stuff is unimpressive. Z3-2 definitely did Unicorn animations way better, when you get the Full Armor in Z3-2 it was a big deal and looked cool.

Overall animations are kind of a mixed bag. Some good final animations for certain mechs, some fun gattai team-up animations, but not a lot of really impressive stuff. SD Gundam Knight Gundam has all the best looking attacks, although my favorite animation in the entire game is his final attack pre-upgrade with the slab and the smiling at the end, so it's a bummer when you lose that one. Boss attacks are mixed too, some ok ones, but man there's some really pathetic stuff in BX. Like one of the final bosses of the entire game is the Rajinoh big bad, and not only does he have the "we're saving money" modern SRW boss design where he only gets 1 attack animation, but that one animation is just his sprite floating and zoom in on the face and he shoots a flame beam and that's it. It's like a total joke. The OG bosses final attacks were solid. I like the female antagonist's mech, it's very Zone of Enders cool looking. Main mech is ok, kind of traditional and none of the attack animations are particularly cool. I think UX had more interesting series and designs (as well as story & characters).

The music's good. Lots of good tunes. Really like the SD Gundam, Giant Gorg and Rajinoh themes along with Unicorn which is always great. Also the secrets are great. You can save and recruit almost every antagonist in the game and there's even a bunch of gattai attacks where the protag & antag team-up to do a kickass move which makes saving them even better. Though it's pretty impossible to get most of them without a guide since there's a lot of flags required.

So yeah, game is alright, it's SRW, it gets the job done, but I really can't help but feel that the 60-70 hours I put into just going through the motions in BX could've been spent on much better games, so it wasn't really all that worth the time. Maybe if it was half the length I'd like the game more overall because at least it wouldn't waste a lot of time for just something forgettably average.

Also I had really fond memories of Nadesico from when I watched it like 15+ years ago, but going through the plot stuff again here...it's not a very good show. Akito is a really whiny, lame lead character. Didn't like him at all and he never really turns around and becomes a better character until like the very, very end (and then gets dumb again in the movie if I remember). And on top of that, the units fucking suck in BX outside of the Nadesico ship. Awful animations, super weak, terrible aim, just trash characters/mecha outside of the main ship which is awesome.

And AGE3...well, it was ok. Starting with AGE3 kind of works, but it also reminded me that AGE and AGE3 especially has a lot of filler even though I like a couple of the characters like Flit/Asemu. There were some good parts, and the final gattai attack from it is nice (as well as the secret one), but a lot of boring maps. I guess I'm ok if this is the only time we get AGE in SRW.

And I hope we're done with Mac F and Gundam 00 Trailblazer in SRW at this point. How many times are we going to do that ELS final mission in SRW. 3 games in a row now. At least there's almost no Mac F story in BX which is an improvement.

Anyhow, hope we 3rd OGs in 2016! Have a feeling we're not getting any more licensed SRW games until at least mid-2017, so yeah, unless they announce 3rd OGs, maybe it'll be a mobile only 2016 haha. The only SRW games I haven't played post Impact-era is MX and L. L seems totally pointless now since it's main draw was just Mac F and Eva 1.11 introduction. But maybe I'll get around to finally playing through MX in 2016 if there isn't a new big SRW game. I really like the MX licensed cast and would be fun to have some G Gundam in my SRW.
 

Tsukumo

Member
First of all, Merry Xmas SRW!

[cut]

Merry Christmas!
Interesting read, though it pains me to read the character interactions aren't on par with UX. Happy to know Galient plot holds it's ground, I love Takahashi's works.
About MX and L:
MX has FANTASTIC plot and character interactions (Asuka from Evangelion pushing everyone around for example) , plus the best animations ever in SRW except Z2's. Nothing, I guess, will ever outmatch Z2 animations.
L has OGs characters that, judging from what you wrote about BX, won't engage you at all: there isn't much to them, the villain is meh and they don't even get a real upgraded unit. The plot is also kind of a mixed bag: it was the first time the group of writers behind UX and BX penned a SRW and quality is really up and down. And since I'm also not a big fan of Macross F myself I warn you now: F is omnipresent XD.
Worth to play factors are: super robot dynamic kills where they have a gattai sequence, Iczer One animations, MazinKaiser animations and... well, Macross Frontier animations XD
Unfortunately they removed a bunch of dynamic kills for Gaiking and gaiking's units, plus this game made a very weird choice of not using dynamic kills on retreating bosses.
 
Yeah, happy SRW Xmas, guys.

Something crossed my mind yesterday: with PS2 games coming on PS4, I'd love to have OGs and Gaiden on PS4. So far, it looks like a western driven initiative, but I hope JP games catch up.
 

Tsukumo

Member
Woah!
Terada just updated SupaRobo blog with a post that says he's going to drop info on upcoming games TOMORROW on the first of January. Also says 2016 is going to be crowded...
hmm.

HMMMMMM
 
Woah!
Terada just updated SupaRobo blog with a post that says he's going to drop info on upcoming games TOMORROW on the first of January. Also says 2016 is going to be crowded...
hmm.

HMMMMMM

Sounds good to me. Since the Z series was mostly on Vita I'd like it if the next big game was developed mainly for console.

After 2nd OGS I want to see them take another crack at it.
 

Tsukumo

Member
So was there any info? It's pretty much January 2nd over there right now.

I might have mistranslated the blog post out of enthusiasm. The post said "gojitsu" which I assumed meant tomorrow, but it was probably intended as "in the next days".
 

HaRyu

Unconfirmed Member
I believe the last blog post mentioned that SRW started back in 1991, which makes this year the 25th anniversary.

The comment about this year being crowded probably means they'll go nuts for the 25th anniversary.
 

Bebpo

Banned
I believe the last blog post mentioned that SRW started back in 1991, which makes this year the 25th anniversary.

The comment about this year being crowded probably means they'll go nuts for the 25th anniversary.

Wasn't OGs the last anniversary thing? Time for more OGssssssss
 

cntr

Banned
THE DREAM: an attempt at localization for the anniversary

THE NIGHTMARE: an attempt at localization for the anniversary, stopped dead by Harmony Gold
 

Keylow415

Member
Super Robot Wars OG: The Moon Dwellers announced for PS4, PS3! Super hyped for this.

Super-Robot-Wars-OG-Moon-Dwellers-Ann_01-19-16.jpg
 
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