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The 3rd Super Robot Wars Z - Tengoku-hen |OT| 7 Years, 4 Systems, 100% Burning Spirit

As far as I can see, it's not separate on Vita: I have a single SRWZ3 Tengoku-Hen entry with already several trophies unlocked, most of which I'm fairly certain I haven't unlocked in Tengoku proper since I only played three stages or so. So it appears both Rengoku and Tengoku share the same list, but since I can't read the trophy descriptions, I can't be 100% positive :-D

Another note: I had hoped they'd touch up the "water" background with the radioactive blue color, but no dice. Oh well, so far everything else is pretty nice. It's also pretty funny how most of the new attacks for each unit has way more fluid and dynamic animation than the untouched rest, makes it all feel a bit disjointed :-D


Thanks for the info!

Can't wait to play later when I get home (left the PS3 downloading them all lol)
 

Bebpo

Banned
Another note: I had hoped they'd touch up the "water" background with the radioactive blue color, but no dice. Oh well, so far everything else is pretty nice. It's also pretty funny how most of the new attacks for each unit has way more fluid and dynamic animation than the untouched rest, makes it all feel a bit disjointed :-D

Yup. Just to check it out I played the first stage of Tengoku and pretty much all the old attacks are untouched. But going by Rengoku, all the new stuff is going to be more fluid, so yeah I can see the disparity happening.

I do think that all attacks have been sped up 25% though to make them feel more fluid and exciting. Even just Unicorn's standard beam saber fly forward and slash feels better in Tengoku and I think that's why.
 

Teknoman

Member
There is a gamefaqs walkthrough that summarized each chapter in pretty extensive detail. Not exactly a full text translation but I played it with the menu translations patched in and read his summaries and had a great time with it.

Now this i didnt know about, thought the wiki was the best resource. Thanks for the heads up!
 

Pehesse

Member
Yup. Just to check it out I played the first stage of Tengoku and pretty much all the old attacks are untouched. But going by Rengoku, all the new stuff is going to be more fluid, so yeah I can see the disparity happening.

I do think that all attacks have been sped up 25% though to make them feel more fluid and exciting. Even just Unicorn's standard beam saber fly forward and slash feels better in Tengoku and I think that's why.

I think you're right - I'd need to do a real side by side comparison, but most of the old attacks feel slightly faster, and I think some parts have also been modified (Mazinger's Photon Beam for instance, the cut-ins of the buttons seem bigger with less wasted space, closer to how it was in Z2). I also get the feeling the FMP units "vibrate" less, or at least do so more coherently, when firing their guns, but maybe I'm just wishing here :-D Also: Tuatha finally differentiates between water and space when firing, yayy! (and the space variant has an awesome cutin)

Music behaves interestingly, too - you have an enormous selection to start with, some of which from shows that debut/you haven't seen yet (Gargantia/Diebuster, essentially), allowing you to think you've got the whole list right off the bat.. and yet some music unlocks as normal once you've heard it the first tim and doesn't appear in the list until you do, like the new Unicorn theme when you NTD. Strange, but nifty, I guess!

Thanks for the info!

Can't wait to play later when I get home (left the PS3 downloading them all lol)

No problem! As an added bit: I bought Tengoku digital, and it seems I got Rengoku for both PS3 and Vita. I only tried the Vita one, but I definitely got two files for it, and one suspiciously looked like a PS3 one, so I suppose it's at least cross-buy, possibly even cross play too? I'd have to try it to know for sure, but SRW feels at home on portables for me, so I'm slow with all things PS3 :-D
 

Bebpo

Banned
I think you're right - I'd need to do a real side by side comparison, but most of the old attacks feel slightly faster, and I think some parts have also been modified (Mazinger's Photon Beam for instance, the cut-ins of the buttons seem bigger with less wasted space, closer to how it was in Z2). I also get the feeling the FMP units "vibrate" less, or at least do so more coherently, when firing their guns, but maybe I'm just wishing here :-D Also: Tuatha finally differentiates between water and space when firing, yayy! (and the space variant has an awesome cutin)

Music behaves interestingly, too - you have an enormous selection to start with, some of which from shows that debut/you haven't seen yet (Gargantia/Diebuster, essentially), allowing you to think you've got the whole list right off the bat.. and yet some music unlocks as normal once you've heard it the first tim and doesn't appear in the list until you do, like the new Unicorn theme when you NTD. Strange, but nifty, I guess!

One thing I noticed about the Rengoku animations are a lot of little touches in colored lighting effects the reflect on the unit. Like when guns or beams are fired you get nice lighting reflected on the unit. Not sure if that's a new thing, but it feels new and I wouldn't be surprised if they went back and added some of those effects to the older Jigoku animations to give them a little more "omph".
 
No problem! As an added bit: I bought Tengoku digital, and it seems I got Rengoku for both PS3 and Vita. I only tried the Vita one, but I definitely got two files for it, and one suspiciously looked like a PS3 one, so I suppose it's at least cross-buy, possibly even cross play too? I'd have to try it to know for sure, but SRW feels at home on portables for me, so I'm slow with all things PS3 :-D

Now that I think about it, there were 2 Rengoku-hens in my donwload list too.
 

BlackJace

Member
post-49639-spongebob-waiting-gif-Imgur-co-tfl3.gif


These games'll never be translated, will they
 
One thing I noticed about the Rengoku animations are a lot of little touches in colored lighting effects the reflect on the unit. Like when guns or beams are fired you get nice lighting reflected on the unit. Not sure if that's a new thing, but it feels new and I wouldn't be surprised if they went back and added some of those effects to the older Jigoku animations to give them a little more "omph".
Nah, just your imagination. The beam rifle fire lighting up the sprite was about the most dynamic thing that happened to Jegan in Z3-1.
 

Sinople

Member
You can always just skip 2 and play 3.
It's not that I don't like it, I just lost interest after playing it for a month and still being only halfway. I wish they'd cut the roster and number of maps by half in those games, they're too long for me.
Btw, is there a website somewhere with a summary of the story map by map for every game, in English or Japanese?
 
Now this i didnt know about, thought the wiki was the best resource. Thanks for the heads up!

No problem! Hope you're able to enjoy the game more now!

It's not that I don't like it, I just lost interest after playing it for a month and still being only halfway. I wish they'd cut the roster and number of maps by half in those games, they're too long for me.
Btw, is there a website somewhere with a summary of the story map by map for every game, in English or Japanese?

For the Z2 games? Yes there is! This guy did chapter by chapter write ups for the Z2 games, and maybe some others IIRC. I used them and had a good time.
 
Registered SAL peasant waiting for next week here lol.

To be fair, it only took a week last time and my plate is more than full.
 
Probably not. Learn to embrace stumbling through Japanese with the help of translation guides.

That's what I've been doing for a while now. It's gotten to the point where I can "read" the stage requirements for a lot of the stages. I played through Rengoku-hen and played up to stage 2 of Tengoku-hen and I've had a blast so far.
 

Pehesse

Member
That's what I've been doing for a while now. It's gotten to the point where I can "read" the stage requirements for a lot of the stages. I played through Rengoku-hen and played up to stage 2 of Tengoku-hen and I had a blast as always.

Haha, yeah - and it's not like the requirements are wildly varied, so after a while you can recognize some of them just looking at the numbers inside :-D

Today's update: I'm at stage 8 on the Super route, meaning I've been playing through the Gargantia introduction, and... wow, I really like it! I know basically nothing about the series so everything is a complete surprise, and I think everything works pretty well.

From the music (what I suppose to be the OP is great!), to the unit's animations, to the new backgrounds (seriously, that's how you do water backgrounds :-D or that town BG for the narration segments that reminds me of King Gainer's in Z1... good memories there), to the... water levels, yes!

I mean, yes, it's basically full maps of water with little land/ship spots, like the one island map from Jigoku - but this adds a bit of variation in level design/unit placement and actually makes you think about where to place your units for a change :-D That level with an SR point requirement of
shooting down 16 in the same turn when most are in water
was a nice change to the usual formula. Never had so much use out of the Macross MDE MAPs!

Now, to gripe about one animation thing: with the quality bar raised a bit here, it becomes more apparent what some of my main issues are. There is still some horrid gradient airbrushing during closeups, but it's really the use of what I gather to be modern 2D sprite deformation toolkits that makes for really cheap animation, as if someone took a big "fluidify" photoshop brush and smeared it over the sprites. I understand it's basically the cheapest current way to add "motion" to a still sprite, but I feel it doesn't mesh at all with the high level of detail they have (and rest of animation techniques they use), since it deforms parts without actually moving them.
Case in point:
Zambot's Ion Cannon
, where the closeup is basically a big case of that moving to the left, or
Mazinger's new Rocket Punch combination, when it lands and waits for the fist to reattach before sliding right (while completely still)
.
This ties in to my second overall dislike, which is the proportions of the sprites: I feel the more "realistic" (or at least, true to the shows) proportions actively hurt the movements they can make. The legs especially always seem to pose problems, which they had mostly solved in previous iterations, the main offender being Gundam DX, which I... don't really care for here. I suppose they were going for a heavy feel in its animations, but it ends up having weird stiff angled poses (supposedly to add "dynamism", but since there is no motion to those poses and close to no inbetweening, it just falls flat), and the legs always look bent or weirdly out of place. It doesn't help that the unit has no ALL attack, mechanics wise... so, yeah, for now, DX is a bit of a letdown for me, but everything else is kind of a high, so it's still all good overall :-D

Ranting wall o' text over, back to the game!
Zambot
just arrived, meaning it's time to immediately change it's theme song. (I mean, I like it, but... kind of overheard at this point :-D)

Oh, and one last note about those water levels: another good point is that they justify the extended use of Tuatha de Danaan, which has to be the best battleship by a mile! Where does it get this power from??
 

Teknoman

Member
Probably not. Learn to embrace stumbling through Japanese with the help of translation guides.

Seconded.


But then again...if J Stars victory or whatever is actually getting an english release...

At any rate, this is going to get me to the point where I can "read" certain requirements and abilities as well...kinda like how I learned what certain menus were in DBZ Super Butoden 2 back in the day.
 
Spoiling myself on few attack vids. Based Terada still blowing their budget on the Nu Gundam.

Always happy to hear that.

Ordered both Z3 games last night; happy to hear I can play Rengoku-hen on my PS3 since I don't have a dedicated Vita memory card for my JPN account. Does the team up work like it did in L?
 

Pehesse

Member
Always happy to hear that.

Ordered both Z3 games last night; happy to hear I can play Rengoku-hen on my PS3 since I don't have a dedicated Vita memory card for my JPN account. Does the team up work like it did in L?

No, unfortunately - in L both partners could use whatever attack they had available (I think? or am I confusing it with UX already? I'm pretty sure both had a similar system), whereas here the partner is limited to whatever "assist" attack his unit is geared with. There are also ALL attacks to target both enemies in a pair at the same time, and your partner can't support you if you use one of these (though you can be supported by an adjacent unit). Same as it was in Jigoku, but it works overall, you have to think a little harder to make nice combinaisons :-D

Stage 9, 10 and 11: man oh man,
Diebuster
- man oh man,
Turn A
! Oh, and
Gunleon
too!
Pretty happy I picked that route :-D (top one when you have a choice, for those who'd want the same!)

Whoever did the Zeta animations is amazing.

Agreed, especially the new one. And it seems Turn A went to the same school! (and it ends most of its attacks by posing, what a show off)
 
No, unfortunately - in L both partners could use whatever attack they had available (I think? or am I confusing it with UX already? I'm pretty sure both had a similar system), whereas here the partner is limited to whatever "assist" attack his unit is geared with. There are also ALL attacks to target both enemies in a pair at the same time, and your partner can't support you if you use one of these (though you can be supported by an adjacent unit). Same as it was in Jigoku, but it works overall, you have to think a little harder to make nice combinaisons :-D

Stage 9, 10 and 11: man oh man,
Diebuster
- man oh man,
Turn A
! Oh, and
Gunleon
too!
Pretty happy I picked that route :-D (top one when you have a choice, for those who'd want the same!)



Agreed, especially the new one. And it seems Turn A went to the same school! (and it ends most of its attacks by posing, what a show off)

Thanks! That is unfortunate, but doesn't sound bad. Speeds things up a bit probably too which I never mind.

Diebuster
THIS. Happy to hear it's available so early on, can't wait!
 
Hey Pehesse looks like Rengoku does not have a separate trophy list after all.

Played it for a while earlier and was able to reach stage 6 in an hour (after viewing each attack animation once that is).

Can't wait for the main game to finish downloading!
 

Beckx

Member
Do the returning units get new attacks? I mean I'm still going to use Chirico's max attack all the time even if it hasn't changed and will never tire of it, just curious.
 

Pehesse

Member
Hey Pehesse looks like Rengoku does not have a separate trophy list after all.

Played it for a while earlier and was able to reach stage 6 in an hour (after viewing each attack animation once that is).

Can't wait for the main game to finish downloading!

Yeah, that's what I thought!
Rengoku goes by really quick, maybe you'll be done with it before the main game is done dl-ing :-D And even if it's not, it's short enough and the bonus is sweet enough to justify finishing it first, if only because you've started already :)

Do the returning units get new attacks? I mean I'm still going to use Chirico's max attack all the time even if it hasn't changed and will never tire of it, just curious.

Yeah, they do! Not all, and not many, but they do (and most look quite nice, special mention to the Zeta one) - as for Chirico, I don't think he has one so far (stage 14) but I suspect he'll be getting other stuff in the way of upgrades.
 

Beckx

Member
Cool, thanks, looking forward to seeing Zeta. I guess there's no way to out-badass Chirico's existing max attack.
 

Bebpo

Banned
On the last stage of Rengoku. Rengoku starts off kind of slow and by the book, but the last 5 maps or so are cool.


Not sure if the OG returning character themes are identical to the Z2 ones or remixes. Sounds pretty much the same or worse (Rand's starting theme is way worse; slooooow version of gun gun leon). Would've liked some crazy awesome new remixes for Rand/Setsuko/Crowe. Gotta wait for OGs...

And yeah, Crowe is awesome. It really feels like the Z1 MCs are anime stereotypes for teenagers, but Crowe (and many of the Z2 OG characters) feels a lot more mature and intelligent. I like that most of the time Crowe is as smart as the player and questions things that seem questionable.
 

Bebpo

Banned
Also, looks like my PS3 copy got misrouted or something. I'm on the west coast and packages from PA usually just go HK -> CA, but for some reason even though they broke street date and shipped it a day earlier, it went HK -> to Chicago to Tennessee WTF. Glad I picked up the digital Vita version to play while waiting.
 
Also, looks like my PS3 copy got misrouted or something. I'm on the west coast and packages from PA usually just go HK -> CA, but for some reason even though they broke street date and shipped it a day earlier, it went HK -> to Chicago to Tennessee WTF. Glad I picked up the digital Vita version to play while waiting.

Play Asia: THE DESTROYER OF DREAMS.
 

Bebpo

Banned
Play Asia: THE DESTROYER OF DREAMS.

lol

Looking at past shipping with PA it seems like it breaks down into two categories. If they ship it from HK to CA, it's takes 1-2 days. If they ship it to Chicago, it takes 4-5 days. Also it seems like PA very recently stopped giving the option to use normal Fedex and is now saying the fastest shipping they offer is Fedex Economy, which results in the 4-5 day route. They're even retroactively going back and changing old orders with normal Fedex to Fedex Economy. Kind of annoying. Will have to take it into consideration for future imports.
 
I used to always order from NCSX since I'd get games on Saturday, but their prices have never gone back to normal levels after the Yen tanked. I think they want $83 for SRWZ3-2 before shipping, when it was $70 with EMS shipping at AmiAmi.

Where in AmiAmi's case, it's USPS DESTROY OF DREAMS!

EMS will deliver on Sundays, too. But nope, slooowwwwly leaves San Francisco and doesn't get to Seattle early enough.
 

Bebpo

Banned
$70? So Amiami is more competitive than PA these days? PA w/$5 off coupon they always give was $77 with Fedex Economy.
 
$70? So Amiami is more competitive than PA these days? PA w/$5 off coupon they always give was $77 with Fedex Economy.

AmiAmi prices everything in Yen, so it's dependent on the exchange rate. I got 116 Yen/dollar when I paid for the game earlier in the week.

I also bought the Japanese version, not the cheaper HK one.
 
Woah, the Vita version is sold out on AmiAmi. Luckily I preordered. I paid a total of $66 including shipping so I think that's probably the best deal right now.
 

Pehesse

Member
Man, I want more deployment slots. It's never been so grueling to pick and choose. Thankfully there are the route splits to make that choice for you :-D

Later Edit: I guess Dragon's Hive Stage 20 is the new stage to farm for kills now. It's been a while since I was out of EN/ammo on almost everyone, had to rely on Getter 3 and its trusty missiles! Thankfully I made enough cash in that onslaught to make up for the repair bill afterwards :-D
 

Shouta

Member
Looks like my copy won't be here until Monday unless they deliver it Sunday. It's still showing in customs though it arrived in San Fran at 2am.
 

Bebpo

Banned
So I'm playing all the dlc stages as they become available (they seem spread out much better this time, so you don't have to stop every other stage to do a dlc stage) and they seem better this time around. Just played one that introduced a new attack, whereas the jigoku dlc would never introduce anything new like attacks or units.

Also it's a little weird how a bunch of the units that got new attacks just have them in their list from the start with no fanfare. Would've rather had a scene introducing them in an exciting way.
 
Awesome OT, even bigger kudos to the links on wiki. Been watching gameplay and this is the first SRW in a long time that has me excited.
 

Bebpo

Banned
Few observations:

Unicorn's NT-D music is way too epic for the start of the game. Like I can see it working in end game battles but in little early stage fights it's just weird. First time I've ever changed the music for a unit in SRW; but changed it back to RX-0. Will save the new theme for the 2nd half of the game. Also, it hardly seems like a "chiptune game remix" and more like they just copy & pasted the song from the OAV soundtrack. Kind of weird.

Stage 3:
Z3 continues to do a half-assed job with Eva Rebuild. No playable beast mode, Zeruel whose entire design concept is these paper-like razor sharp arms HAS NO ARM ATTACK and is just that long range cross explosion beam; the story doesn't even explain why Eva 01 awakened form is missing an arm (why didn't they have a two second speech bubble where Shinji gets attacked by the 10th angel and they say it cut Eva's arm off); awakened form animation is kind of awkward (that cut-in after a long-range beam shot is kind of weird). And unlike the Asuka scene that got a version of the vocal scene, we don't get a version of this song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hryga7GrKBA), man rewatching those 5 mins all that epic stuff was like a 2 min shallow map event; so lame, it should've been epic endgame stuff in Z3-1, not a starting little map in Z3-2 :( At least the spear pierce part is good.

Rest of the game is good so far, but never been happy with how they're handling Eva Rebuild in Z3 (outside of the Shinji vs. Asuka scene, which was very well done with the correct music and everything). Maybe they can do better next franchise after Rebuild is done and they try again. Eva Rebuild just seems so half-assed in Z3.
 
So I'm playing all the dlc stages as they become available (they seem spread out much better this time, so you don't have to stop every other stage to do a dlc stage) and they seem better this time around. Just played one that introduced a new attack, whereas the jigoku dlc would never introduce anything new like attacks or units.

Also it's a little weird how a bunch of the units that got new attacks just have them in their list from the start with no fanfare. Would've rather had a scene introducing them in an exciting way.

Are these new attacks only obtainable through playing the DLC stages?
 
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