IC Forum Archive

Sub · Posts: 696

I have, this past weekend, come into the possession of the lovely Super Robot Wars Complete. The game is a set of 3 PS1 remakes of Winkysoft's Super Robot Wars 2, Super Robot Wars 3, and Super Robot Wars EX.

If you're unfamiliar with the series, Super Robot Wars is a famous, long-running Japanese strategy RPG series in which the characters and robots of many different Japanese robot anime series team up to answer the age-old question "how much ass can an army of giant robots kick?"

Between these three games there are 145 missions. The average SRW mission is about an hour long. This is a pretty massive undertaking, so I figured it would be cool to do a little game-journal for it. As I get through the missions, I'll tell you guys what a totally rockin' time I'm having. I'll be putting this up in my LJ, too, for archival.

Anyway, a little overview of SRW2! This was originally a Famicom game, and it lays down most of the fundamentals of the SRW series we know. The very first Super Robot Wars is omitted in this collection; it's typical Banpresto licensed fare, which is to say it's kind of crappy. Not too many people have bothered going back to play it, and the people who have don't really like to talk about it. Neither does Winkysoft, apparently!

I won't outright list all the robots that appear in this particular game; see this FAQ for a very, very comprehensive listing by the Gamefaqs guy himself.
http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/super_robot_taisen_robot_series.txt

Also see Gamefaqs for specific plot details; this game's already been pretty thoroughly written up by someone who can, you know, actually read the language it's written in. I'm just here to tell you whether or not I'm enjoying myself.

On with it, then!

Sub · Posts: 696

Mission 1: To The Rescue!! Zeta Gundam

The English mission title is a lie. Zeta Gundam didn't save me, I saved his ass. What's going on here is the old "save your friends" bit. The world is under control by a bunch of no-good dudes (the Divine Crusaders; JRPGs do so love to kill God for justice) and they've apparently captured everybody who runs around fighting evil in a big robot. The only dudes who managed to escape were, of course, the major franchise leads: Amuro Ray and his RX-78 Gundam (he's brought the ship White Base with him, which acts as the player's home base), Kouji Kabuto in Mazinger Z, and the Getter Robo team. Their buddies, the tit-missile-firing Aphrodite Ace and the super-cool American-stereotype cowboy robot Texas Mack, are along for the ride.

Nobody looks like they do in the pictures though. They're just icons on a map. When in battle, they're all squatty little guys, and in the early SRWs, they are largely static. Most of the sprites are actually drawn so that they can be made to look like they're doing more than one different thing, so that they don't have to animate them. That's cheap! That's Banpresto!

Anyway, it's a starter mission and about all you do is figure out the interface and proceed to plow through a small group of weak enemies. If you get bored, there is a kind of tough enemy to fight (Amuro's nemesis Char Aznable in his custom Zaku). It takes a little bit of effort to take him out before he runs off, but this is pretty much cake all around.

So Zeta Gundam comes out, and Kamille, the pilot, is all "thanks guys." He's on my team now!

In between missions you can choose to upgrade your robots with the money you got beating up on other robots. I didn't do any upgrading this time.

There's a little something that's biting me in the ass here, though: unskippable battle cutscenes. These aren't the grand spectacles of later SRW games, but every attack is done by way of a brief cutscene. Even this little tiny mission feels like it takes forever because every damn time I want to Rocket Punch something I have to watch Mazinger stand around, and hear Kouji scream ROCKETTO PANCHI and all that for thirty seconds. Like the summons in FF7, this is fine the first time, but it becomes more and more tiresome the more frequently one uses the attack.

One down, 25 more to go for SRW2. Wish me luck!

TOLLMASTER · Posts: 1977

I've always wanted to play a Super Robot Wars game. Then I found a translation for one of the SNES games and was completely lost. It was a lot of series I had never heard of battling villains whose names I had never seen before.

They should make a US version for 80s and 90s cartoons, where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles team up with He-Man and the Defenders of the Universe to defeat Mumm-ra and "the guy with the bone ship" from Pirates of Dark Water.

Sub · Posts: 696

CHAPTER 2: CITY OF INTRIGUE

This sounds like an episode title from something, but Google only gave me the Escaflowne episode title, and that got made, like, four years after this game. There is in fact a city on this map. Don't ask me what the intrigue is though! Can't READ THAT SHIT!

It's not too intriguing, but my buddy <a href=http://mazinworld.com/Getter/get3.JPG>Getter Q</a> is in trouble. She's like the chick version of Getter One except she can't shoot boob-missiles. See, at first she's yellow. Yellow is for neutrality. Then the bad guys appear, and they're red. She TURNS RED. RED IS FOR BAD GUY. This cannot end well! So she starts hitting my guys, and apologizing, and hitting them some more. If you don't hit her back she turns blue like your guys. Blue is for good guy, so things are just fine.

Usually in SRW, at the part where somebody's supposed to die, they don't die, and on top of that, they join your team. SRW only does happy endings.

In between levels I upgraded Mazinger Z's HP and armor, and he's totally shrugging off everything the grunts do. He's laughing at them and everything.

Battleships are pretty much exactly like giant robots in SRW; it still makes me laugh to see the White Base SIDESTEP missiles and shit. It should be strange to see anything that's 40 feet tall sidestep anything, but I play videogames, you know. I have a certain suspension of disbelief going.

We are running through minor Gundam villains pretty fast, here. In this mission I had to beat up <a href=http://img274.imageshack.us/img274/8325/jerid1hu.gif>Jerid</a> from Zeta Gundam, who is kind of like that series' Wile E. Coyote. He would appear every couple of episodes in a newer, more sophisticated Mobile Suit, and he would always get his ass kicked. When I think of him I think of the Coyote putting on that ridiculous green flying Batman suit and crashing into a wall. Also there was <a href=http://www.gundamofficial.com/worlds/uc/msg/characters/images/chara_ranba_a.gif>Ranba Ral</a>! He was totally awesome in the TV series but here he's just a midboss. Sorry, Ral.

I can only barely pick out some kana, but I know when everybody's saying their famous lines.
THIS IS NO ZAKU, BOY! NO ZAKU!
KAMILLE IS A PERFECTLY GOOD NAME FOR A MAN!!
And so on.

I already find myself saving and loading too much. SRW has a lot of situations where if this particular shot doesn't hit, or if it doesn't completely kill the guy, you're totally screwed on getting that nice item. In this mission, Jerid runs away if he's under a third HP, so you have to land one big hit on him. Mazinger's big hit (<a href=http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/1540/breastfire3re.jpg>BREAST FIRE</a>) hits 75% of the time, the game says. So it'll take you four or fived tries toactually hit the guy. Because of the save/reload thing, accuracy in SRW doesn't really repesent your chance to hit the guy. It represents how long it's going to take, and how much of a pain in the ass it's going to be, to hit the guy.

After seeing how effective those upgrades were, I did pretty much the same upgrades for Getter One. Even though Getter Robo is a transformer, you have to upgrade <a href=http://img289.imageshack.us/img289/8053/getterone8zh.jpg>Getter One<a/>, <a href=http://img289.imageshack.us/img289/2734/gettertwo0kv.jpg>Getter Two</a>, and <a href=http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/2448/getterthree1qc.jpg>Getter Three</a> seperately, which is both retarded and infeasible. It kind of guarantees you won't use Two and Three for much of anything.

Sub · Posts: 696

TOLLMASTER wrote:

I've always wanted to play a Super Robot Wars game. Then I found a translation for one of the SNES games and was completely lost. It was a lot of series I had never heard of battling villains whose names I had never seen before.

They should make a US version for 80s and 90s cartoons, where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles team up with He-Man and the Defenders of the Universe to defeat Mumm-ra and "the guy with the bone ship" from Pirates of Dark Water.

I always thought it would be sort of cool if somebody did a game like this with superheroes. Don't the comic publishers do crossovers a lot? That said I'd totally take Super Late 80's/Early 90's Cartoon Wars.

SignOfZeta · Posts: 46

I actually played the first SRW game. It was pretty OK for the time, but the Famicom versions really were the start of the series. The original game was for the b/w GB, and didn't even have changeable pilots, or plot or anything. I got stuck on something and lost interets. I eventually sold it for a pretty nice price even without a box.

The thing with SRW is that they make the games faster than anyone can actually play them, so there is no need to linger on partictular versions you don't care about.

Sub · Posts: 696

A SETBACK APPEARS

So basically, I didn't give Episode 2 enough credit. There was intrigue in the city, and it was well-hidden. Turns out I wasn't reading my FAQ hard enough; if I take the Gundam to a very specific spot on the map, Amuro finds his old buddy Kai ( a man who once wrote this letter). Anyway, it just so happens that the G-Armor upgrade was also lying around at that particular square. Why? Because this is an NES game.

Now how the hell was I supposed to know this? The answer is simple: I wasn't! I cleared Episode 2, having overlooked the G-Armor business. I realized immediately that I completely missed it. I hadn't had the foresight to use multiple save files, and I ended up having to start the game over from the beginning. But I NEEDED that goddamned G-Armor! NEEDED it!

The game offers no hints as to its location (unless maybe it's in the dialogue!) and the FAQ I have actually told me to go to the wrong spot. But I persevered and stuff, and I got the G-Armor.

See, I love the G-Armor. Let's share some history. Back when the Gundam TV series was airing, 1979 to 1980, it didn't do so hot in the ratings. It didn't sell any toys, either. It wasn't crazy enough to be a popular kids' giant robot cartoon, and the older fans hadn't caught on to it yet. The toy company that sponsored its creation, Clover, was kind of pissed. They had an awesome solution, though. Midway through these kinds of series, the robot always gets an upgrade so that the kids have a new toy to buy. Clover had big plans!

Behold, then, the G-Armor!
G-Sky! G-Sky Easy! G-Bull! G-Fighter! GO! FIGHT! It's about the most ridiculous thing in a consistently ridiculous series, barring maybe the Byg-Zam.

Gundam had, relatively speaking, been attempting a semblance of realism, and this was sort of the nail in the coffin for that treatment. The director hated the G-Armor, and when they made Gundam into a movie trilogy, everybody kind of forgot it ever existed. Well... excepting us fanboys. The G-Armor is really dumb, honestly, but I like it so much that I started my damn game over to get it.

Lesson learned: If you press all the shoulder buttons and start and select, it takes you back to the title screen. If you HOLD them it loads your last save file, no questions asked. Ingenious!

Sub · Posts: 696

SignOfZeta wrote:

The thing with SRW is that they make the games faster than anyone can actually play them,

Not necessarily! I know a guy who finishes every SRW game that comes out within the weekend of its release! But yeah, faster than MOST PEOPLE can actually play them, definitely.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 3: CONQUER DAKAR

I'm pretty sure all these English episode titles are completely wrong, but I think they're funny so I'm going to continue using them. I beat this map last night, but I got mysteriously sleepy, so I didn't bother to write it up until now.

That goddamned Char showed up again, with his special underage friend Lalah. Yes, Gundam names are weird. The creator denies that Char has a thing for 15-year-old girls but everybody else knows what's up. She's Amuro's love interest too, except he's actually underage so it's okay. Anyway, Lalah, in MSG is the turning point in the Amuro/Char rivalry. In Super Robot Wars, on the other hand, she is an item to be collected! I will black-text some MS Gundam spoilers now. The word "Elmeth" is not a spoiler.

In MSG, Char's grooming her to be an ace pilot. She runs into Amuro by chance and falls for him too. Long story short, Amuro gets in an MS fight with Char, Lalah flies her Elmeth in front of Char, Amuro accidentally incinerates her with a beam saber, and the two hate each other for it for the rest of their lives.

In SRW 2 this whole messy situation is resolved by running Amuro up to Lalah and talking to her. Here is an approximation of the conversation which takes place.

Amuro: "Hey Lalah."
Lalah: "Hey Amuro."
Amuro: "Stop shooting at us and let's be friends!"
Lalah: "Okay!"
Char: "What."
Lalah: "Sorry Char!"
Char: "Shit."

And then Lalah's Elmeth turns BLUE and you get to keep them both. Remember what I told you about SRW and happy endings!

In SRW, if you fight in a city, you not only get better attack and evasion stats, but you regain a sizable percentage of HP and EN (effectively Robot Magic Points, they make BREAST FIRE possible) every turn. This stands in sharp contrast to the actual robot anime stance on fighting, where everybody fights in desolate wastelands so as to reduce collateral damage and cut back on the animation budget. In SRW, I guess collateral damage GIVES YOU ZA PAWAA. I camped out all my guys in the nine spaces of city area on the map. The place was probably thoroughly devastated. I'm willing to use the NES-game explanation again for this one.

At the end, the Gundam F91 showed up. F91 is regarded by fans as "the crappy one" for reasons I won't bore you with here. I didn't really get to do anything cool with him, but I guess he's on my team now.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 4: STRIKE BACK

More like "these guys just don't give up". I beat up Jerid, his buddy, and the Black Tri-Stars, and now they want me to do it again. So I did. Nothing too interesting happened along the way, except for a robo-fish puked on my guys a bunch of times.

I used Mazinger Z's Navel Missile a lot this level. It comes out of his navel, see, even though he's a robot and he doesn't have one. You know, Go Nagai probably wanted it to be a crotch missile. Whenever he shoots it in the anime, he kind of thrusts his crotch forward. Plus it really goes well with the whole tit-missile thing. On Great Mazinger the missile's just below the waist, but not quite where the robo-wang would be. Here they are, for comparison purposes Never mind Goth Mazinger, there. He doesn't show up till SRW F Final, I think. I got that game for ten bucks but F and F Final put together are about the length of all the games on Complete Box. I probably won't blog them.

Speaking of tit-missiles, my merry band of robots has suffered a great loss. Aprhodite Ace, the INVENTOR of the tit-missile, has left us, for whatever reason. The Methuss takes over her chores as healer. They're both kind of useless units, but need I remind you that one had missiles for boobs? That's CRAZY.

As a side note, I would gladly play an MS Girls SRPG.

Also, they swapped my White Base for the Argama, which is more powerful but not nearly as Lego-ish and charming. Oh well. Such is the shift from late 70's Japanese robots to early 80's Japanese robots.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 5: WILDERNESS OF TREASON

But I'm in the desert! The desert is, however, treasonous. Apparently super robots can't walk in sand very easily, so what you have to do is load all your units that can't fly into the Argama, and take everybody to one of the two spots on the map where they can actually move around.

In the conversation scene before this map starts, we meet Zeta Gundam's Four Murasame, who claims to have defected from the Divine Crusaders (THE BAD GUYS REMEMBER?). They seem to want to introduce all the tragic Gundam heroines (and every Gundam heroine is tragic) as quickly as possible. Kamille (the Zeta Gundam pilot) is all "hey baby" and she's like "*giggles*". SRW has just got to fix all these sad endings! She is packing a Psycho Gundam. A Psycho Gundam is the height of, like, TWO regular Gundams, and if you were the DC you'd be sort of mad if somebody ran off with your Double Stuf Gundam.

So it's not long before they show up with something even LARGER, the Byg-Zam (which I believe I called the most ridiculous thing in the original Gundam, earlier. I could be wrong!). The Byg-Zam is the height of THREE goddamned Gundams. How's that for an arms race? You can't even begin to do anything about this guy at this point in the game. Running like hell is your only option while poor Four fights the Zam by herself.

Eventually Baron Ashura, the lackey Mazinger Z always beats up, appears in. Ashura is especially worth mentioning because on one side, he's a guy, and on the other, she's a chick. Split straight down the middle. There was a shower scene in the recent Mazinkaiser anime, but they didn't answer the question of whether not Ashura's reproductive organs are split straight down the middle like the rest of the body.

...ANYWAY, after Ashura swoops in, in that thing he's always flying around in, Ashura and the Byg-Zam proceed to kidnap Four. Now this is REALLY starting to feel like a Nintendo game, because we're gonna save somebody's kidnapped girlfriend.

I'm going off a FAQ for the NES game and I'm starting to notice the differences between the remake and the NES game. They dragged poor Ral out again for no good reason other than to give the player a harder time. It's fine to make the level harder and all, but it's really costing old Ral his dignity.
You know how Ral went out in the original series? When the crew of the White Base had him surrounded, he said to them, "THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE DEFEATED IN BATTLE!" He pulled out grenade, yanked out the pin, and jumped out of a building towards the Gundam. He landed in its hand; didn't really do any damage.

And this is the guy they keep trotting out! It makes sense that Jerid is a recurring mid-boss, but Ranba Ral is no Coyote! Christ!

In the NES version, there's a building on the map that just happens to house a giant robot parts store. It's an NES game, after all! In the PS version, there's still a building on the map, but they didn't seem to be selling anything. That's too bad; the lonely office building in the desert that happens to be selling Chogokin Z, Magnetic Coating, Certain Hit Aiming, and a HEART OF JUSTICE (you can't just BUY that kind of thing in real life!) is just too charming to leave out. Maybe they really were selling, and I just couldn't figure it out. Oh well; I'm not going to go playing the game over at this point. Unfortunately, the PS version is mostly undocumented, so I'm gonna have to play it by ear.

TOLLMASTER · Posts: 1977

sub i am commenting in your lj account and not here okay :-(

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 6: DESTROY THE ENEMY FORTRESS

You figure you're going to get what it says on the box, here, but you don't. See, some ASSHOLE destroys the enemy fortress halfway through the mission, before you even get there. It's Masaki (who I couldn't google up a good picture of), in the Cybaster, or Psybuster, or Cybuster. People on the internets bitch and moan a lot about how you're supposed to spell it. I don't care.

Cybaster doesn't appear in any anime (at least not at the time, he hadn't). He's one of Banpresto's original robots. See, Banpresto is in the business of selling merchandise. Trinkets. Tchotchkes. Starting with this game, Banpresto decided that it would be a good idea to make up their own robots to fight alongside Mazinger and Gundam and such. The more robots you have, the more robot-shaped keychains you can sell. The plan worked. Cybaster's very popular among SRW fans, and he's sold quite a respectable amount of merchandise.

So, how to endear a new robot to your fans? You go for the time-honored robot anime strategy: the ritual of obsolescence. I think the earliest they ever did this was at the end of the Mazinger Z TV series. In the last few episodes, they started to hint at the fact that Mazinger Z was on his way out. In the last episode he pretty much gets the crap kicked out of him by monsters who are JUST TOO STRONG. Right before all is lost, though, Great Mazinger swoops in cavalry-style, dispatches the bad guys with minimal effort, and utterly outclasses poor Mazinger Z. If memory serves me correctly, old Kouji flies off to America to recover from his injuries and live down the shame of replacement, while Great Mazinger takes over the Japan beat (Japan is always Job 1 for giant robots). They've been doing it pretty much the same way ever since.

On one side of this map is your group. On the other side is that enemy fortress, and in between are a bunch of enemies. A couple turns in, before you've had the chance to deal with them all, Masaki strolls in from the other side of the map, berates you for not having destroyed the enemy fortress already, and then, effortlessly, DESTROYS THE ENEMY FORTRESS. Son of a bitch! Sure, he'll be on my side soon, but what of poor Texas Mack? He's been working hard too, but after a display like that, isn't it natural to feel a little bit unneeded? It's alright, Texas Mack. Keep on yelling in hysterical Japanese-guy-playing-American-guy English when you fight, and I'll always have a use for you.

"OH! IT'S LUCKY STRIKE, NE?!"

Anyway, you get left with the task of cleaning up the same old recurring Gundam enemies. They're really diluting these poor guys. This is the third time the Black Tri-Stars have appeared, but at least it looks like two of them are dead now. The last is out for REVENGE. Maybe he won't come back this time; I'm tired of seeing him, already.

There was kind of a boss (the hilarious Asshimar), but he's one of those ones who disappears after losing half his health, and he has too much HP to take out more than half in one hit. No prize for me! Waste of my damn time!

I got a totally cool new team member. She's a Getter Robo villain (getter had to talk her over to the side of justice) whose name I can't read 'cause it's in kanji, and she's in this robo-monster-woman thing that just doesn't look right. It's pink, and it's got a horn, and I think it shoots its limbs like a boomerang or something. How wonderful!

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 7: DUEL! RHINE X1!

That ASSHOLE Masaki shows up just as you get into the enemy fortress, and he's all "OH HEY, GOTTA GO! MY NAME'S MASAKI ANDOH! LATER DUDERS--". Then he runs off.

Masaaki Endou is not Masaki Andoh but he does sing the Psybuster song (except not in this game). You want? I send. Masaaki Endou's greatest achievement is singing the Gaogaigar song. However, Gaogaigar didn't even exist at the time the games in Complete Box were released, so naturally he isn't in any of them. Even so, it is extremely important that you hear at least one of the ten-or-something versions of the Gaogaigar song, so here's THAT too. From now on I'll start putting the robots' theme songs in with these writeups where appropriate. Silly theme songs are critical to the IMPACT, nay, the IMPACTO of super robot anime. These are Yousendit links so they're first-come, first-serve. I don't think I've got ten people reading these, anyway. OH BURRRRN.

So yeah, the level. It was a duel with the Rhine X1, alright. I never saw this episode of Mazinger Z so I don't have anything for you on this one. It's kind of elephant-looking.

Man, this level was really nothing interesting. It was just a long corridor and then the boss. It's a good thing I can go on tangents and send you theme songs, because otherwise there wouldn't be anything here. Nothing cool happened until after the mission, when Mazinger Z got the JET SCRANDER hookup. Now he can FLY. There's a song about that too, you know! But let's save that for next time.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 8: MA-CBE'S TRAP

I'm serious. They spell the name MA-CBE.

Gundam names have been a subject of debate since people started to romanize them. However you decide to spell somebody's name, there's a Gundam fanboy out there who'll get mad at your for it. For our sake, let's skip the boring debates. Officially, Bandai settled on M'quve, so I'll call him that.

M'quve did indeed set a trap for me and my robots, and it was a huge pain in the ass to deal with. This is the first time so far that I've had much trouble getting through a level.

So here's what this bastard does: The map starts with Mazinger Z standing around, and who should appear before him but his distant relative, UFO Robo Grendizer! Sup Grendizer? How's life been treatin' ya? BUT WAIT! This is M'quve's trap! In the original series he just set some bombs, but in Super Robot Wars he gets to use an EVIL TWIN GRENDIZER. If you approach him, he'll attack. If you go elsewhere, fake Duke Fleed will say something that probably amounts to "dammit, he didn't fall for it!" Once the gig is up, M'quve and his cronies appear. Among them is another pal of Mazinger's, Minerva X.

Minerva X is, for a change, a Mazinger tragic heroine. I never saw the Minerva X episode, but lucky for you, the Internet did. She was supposed to be Mazinger's partner robot, but she was stolen away by the bad guys. The good guys got her back for long enough for Mazinger and Minerva to go on a date, but the bad guys took control of her again, and the good guys had to shoot her up with tit-missiles (Aphrodite A's pilot was sort of jealous of this whole business, anyway). There was a sad song, which you may download here.

Minerva can Rocket Punch just like Mazinger, and shoot fire from her chest, just like Mazinger. What she loses is his ability to shoot those "navel" missiles. What does Minerva have on Mazinger, then? The ability to cry.

Actually, in the game, she's pretty strong. This is great for us, because remember what happens to tragic heroines in Super Robot Wars: you send the appropriate dude to talk to her and she's on your team now. That's how things work here.

A turn or two in, the rest of your guys show up to back up Mazinger. Once you get close enough to M'quve's Gyan to attack him(all the way in the corner of the map), the sonofabitch springs ANOTHER trap on you; three robo-monsters show up in the mountains behind you. I'm mobbed by strong enemies here, and some of my weaker guys don't even stand a chance any more. After a lot of dying and reloading, I had to put away the Gundam and Texas Mack because they were getting killed in one or two turns. Jack says "GADDODEIMU!" when he dies. Should I bother upgrading them or will I just be wasting money on robots that'll still get their asses kicked every fight? Decisions, decisions! Even without my weaker guys to worry about, things are looking kind of bad.

But then the cavalry comes in! The REAL Grendizer and the REAL Duke Fleed! The real Boss Borot and it's pilot, the real Boss, came with him, too. Boss has always been Mazinger Z's jokey sidekick and SRW is no exception. His attacks are weak, and you can't use any of the good stuff unless you've already killed five or so units on that map, never mind the improbability of killing something with Boss Borot. In later SRWs his only use is his suicide-bomber ability. I got him far, far away from M'quve.

After that, I got the permanent use of Minerva and Grendizer. I'm contemplating those upgrades now!

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 9: GALE OF REVENGE

People always want their damned revenge after getting beat up by my robots, and M'quve is gladly following the trend.

The mission starts with your and your guys across an empty map from M'quve and his Gyan. Nobody else is on the field. Obviously, it's another trap. That cad! After the first turn, M'quve springs all his buddies on you; there's nothing we haven't seen before here. ZZ Gundam comes out to support you on this turn, and they play Silent Voice, which is the theme song from the serious part of ZZ Gundam that people like, as opposed to Anime Janai, the theme song from the goofy part of ZZ Gundam that people hate. Z Gundam was kind of bleak, and they wanted to lighten things up for the kids, so uh, they went a little too far. I don't know why I haven't watched it yet; it sounds like my kinda thing.

Next turn, M'quve gets a bunch of MISSILES to fight you. The way they handle the missiles is really weird. They fly up to you, and when they attack, they don't actually hit you directly. They shoot a couple of missiles out of themselves. These missiles are the same size as the first missile. So the missile doesn't fly into you. It spawns more of itself, and THEY fly into you. It's really frickin' weird.

I didn't upgrade them, but my older units are sort of getting by; I'm letting them make easy kills and flying them into the base after they take a hit. When Texas Mack's HP is low, Jack says:

"IT'SU SOOO DENJERASU!"

It's pretty hilarious. Meanwhile, that Getter Robo villain I talked over to my team seems to have gone missing for this mission. I dunno exactly what's going on in the dialogues, but according to this faq, she's probably DEAD. That sucks. She was really cool. AFTER the mission, we lose Minerva X. She overheated and requires maintenance, the FAQ says. I'll never see her again either! What sad endings!

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 10: MARIONETTE FOUR

At the beginning of this mission, the guys decide to split up into two groups, for some reason. Grendizer, Zeta Gundam, and ZZ Gundam are over on one part of the map, and everybody else is on the other. I thought that was retarded, so I brought Group A right over to hang out with Group B. Tactics don't figure much into SRW, but you don't put three guys (one of whom is kind of thin-skinned) right in the middle of a bunch of enemy units and say "SUPERIOR TACTICS!"

Our friends from Zeta Gundam are back. Jerid has brought Four and Lila Milla Rira with him. I'm going to talk about the role of the love interest in Gundam for a sec. Spoilers for Zeta (and Char's Counterattack, which we're not even UP TO in this game) follow.

Lila was sort of Jerid's love interest for about five minutes in one episode, but she died in the next one. Zeta gundam rule: Jerid can't win. Gundam general rule: The love interest always dies.

After Zeta Gundam, Tomino (the creator, you'll remember) wanted Amuro Ray to settle down with his girlfriend from that show, Beltorchika Irma. The suits at Sunrise didn't really like this; they wanted Amuro to have Bond Girls, and they forced the character of Chan Agi into Tomino's movie Char's Counterattack.

Tomino, bitter and vindictive as he is at this point, lets them put Chan in, but makes Amuro (save for the requisite kiss) completely unresponsive to her advances. When she dies, nobody really seems to notice. In Tomino's novel version of Char's Counterattack (Tomino always novelizes a Gundam series when he's not happy with how it came out), Beltorchika's unborn child saves Amuro's life with Newtype powers. Tomino's Gundam novels aren't very good, but they ARE pretty fascinatingly crazy.

Jerid probably got tired of getting beat up all those times before. He's skipped the whole Wile. E Coyote routine seen in Zeta Gundam, where he gets assigned new MS after new MS, only to be embarassed in them, and brought Byalants with him. One is his and one is Lila's. Surprisingly, they aren't really tough opponents, and I tore through them about as easily as anything else on the map.

Four is under MIND CONTROL, see, and mind control makes her stand around in the Psycho Gundam and not do anything. On turn 6, she gets a bad headache, and we do what we always do with tragic heroines, which is talk them over to our side. Now I'm kicking ass in a Psycho Gundam. Score.

After the mission, we seem to have recruited the Argama's mechanic from Zeta Gundam, Astonaige Medoz, which means I can upgrade the hell out of my robots now. Before I could only put them through five upgrades, tops. Now it's TEN. You don't have nearly enough money at this point in the game to take any kind of advantage of this, but there it is.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 11: SO TERRIBLE VALSION

I'll have to take their word for it. Valcion showed up, but all he did was taunt me from the other end of the map. I'm sure if I'd bothered approaching him, he would have wasted me.

In this level I'm making more happy endings with tragic Gundam heroines; this time I protected Matilda Ajan and her Medea supply ship. As is the formula by now, I'll tell you what happens in the original Gundam in black. It's nothing you wouldn't expect, if you've been following the patterns.

The crew of the White Base saves Matilda in more or less the same way as seen this mission; she gets herself killed the very next episode, while attempting to return the favor. I doubt SRW will cover this part, because, you know, it's a bummer.

So you save Matilda and happy endings for everyone! Not only that, but her Medea was carrying, now get THIS shit:

-Nu Gundam: Amuro's not supposed to build this for about fifteen years or so in the real Gundam story , but fuckit, SRW doesn't have that kind of time. He gets it NOW.

-Getter Robo G: These guys are the goofier upgrades for the original Getter team. The best description I've heard of Getter Dragon was simply "bowling shirt."

-Great Mazinger: They just give this to Kouji instead of giving it a proper introduction (it did, after all initiate the ritual of super robot obsolescence), and its proper pilot, Tetsuya Tsurugi.

If that isn't enough, we even get Cybuster this mission. After Valcion shows up to laugh at you, Cybuster shows up too, I guess to do the same. What a prick. Anyway, he joins up, for uh, whatever reason.

THIS IS A LOT OF ROBOTS TO GET.

Proper introductions are the problem here; it's kind of nice having all these awesome robots dumped on you so off-handedly, but at the same time, it lacks the kind of buildup and theatrics that should come with your main robots getting major upgrades. That's a shame; Great in particular deserves better.

Since we're talking about Cybuster, I can fix an error made a few entries back. The song I uploaded wasn't the Cybuster song at all, and I don't know how I didn't notice earlier. It was actually the opening from the pretty crappy SRW Original Generation anime. They were on the same single. Forgive my error; here is the song. I won't bother fixing the link in the old entry because Yousendit links don't last that long anyway.

Soon: a challenger appears! Look forward to it!

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 12: BATTLE OF LASA

This is more specifically a battle with Dozle Zabi and the giant green egg with feet, Byg-Zam. We met them earlier, but couldn't fight them. Thanks to all the really powerful robots they gave me last mission, this fight was a total breeze. Hell, the mission itself is barely worth discussing. Let's nitpick at little points instead.

Kouji has Great Mazinger, and there's just something not quite right about hearing HIM say "ATOMIC PUNCH" and "BREAST BURN", because we know that Kouji's supposed to say "ROCKET PUNCH" and "BREAST FIRE". Meanwhile, Kouji leaves old Mazinger Z empty, and the only guy who can pilot is, I kid you not, our comic relief sidekick Boss. He certainly sounds overjoyed to finally get to pilot a good robot.

They've emasculated poor Byg-Zam. In the original Gundam, the Big Zam was seemingly invulnerable thanks to a beam-reflecting shield. Amuro and his Wacky American Buddy Sleggar Law have to attack his weak point (the soft underbelly) for massive damage. In this game, due to obvious technical limitations, you just hit the Byg-Zam until it explodes. It doesn't reflect any beams either. Hell, when it shot beams at my guys, they reflected them.

I'm not counting any of this stuff as spoilers, because of course the boss of the level is gonna die. The most memorable part of the battle with the Byg-Zam was how Dozle chose to die. Once it's obvious that he's beaten, Dozle hops out of the Byg-Zam (in space, you know!) and starts firing his rifle at the 40-foot-tall giant robot in front of him. Of course it's useless, of course he's crazy, but that's balls! This game is too low-budget to animate the robots at all, much less a little dude walking out on top of the thing and screaming while making a final, futile attack, so we don't see that scene. The Byg-Zam does go down in style, though. Everything I've fought up until now had a really standard-issue, tiny explosion, but this guy had a beam-shaped explosion that went up to the skies.

Also, apparently the egg was stuffed with money, because blowing Byg-Zam up got me 50,000 cash, which is more than I've ever had at any single point in this game prior. I'm going to spend it all on Getter Dragon, who is practially too good.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE ??: I AM THE BONE OF MY SWORD

I switched gears for a little bit and did a mini-writeup on Battle Moon Wars, an SRW derivative with characters from Type-Moon's games. It's not officially part of this project but it's on my LJ all the same.

THANKS DESS

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 13: SHADOW OF SCIROCCO

We have a lot to talk about! At the halfway point, the game has given us a pretty epic battle. It took me 20 damned turns! Aside from all the fighting going on there's a lot of characters entering the picture here, so this writeup is going to take a while.

First, here are things I forgot to tell you last mission. The Argama has been upgraded to the Nahel Argama which, uh, don't ask me what that means. It looks a little bit more like ol' White Base; this ship came in halfway through ZZ Gundam, and if I might speculate a little bit, this was probably to appease the fans who were pissed off by the first half of that show. More importantly, tit-missiles are back in style this season. Our good friend Sayaka Yumi is back, and she's brought a new and improved chick-robot with her, Diana A. Diana has a pretty hilarious startup sequence which I'll describe to you here with pictures I got from the very useful Mazinworld.

First, you see, Sayaka shoots a beam out of the front of her bike.

Then she RIDES said beam up to the back of the robot's head.

And all done!

Kouji has the luxury of having a little hovercraft (the Hover Pilder) to fly into Mazinger's head, but Sayaka doesn't really get any of the perks of the whole super robot pilot gig. She's a girl, so her robot isn't made out of Chogokin (but the action figures of her robot are-- talk about adding insult to injury), and she has to drive up that goddamned rainbow to work herself. In Mazinkaiser they even made her show tits (link not worksafe, will probably only exist for a few hours; also the name is right in the filename so it won't take long to guess). On top of all that, I'm not even sure where my Sayaka figure is right now. For a fictional character, the girl lives a rough life.

Anyways, we're trying to launch into the space from the base we beat up Byg-Zam for last mission, but just before the launch happens, it seems we've been jumped by a whole boatload of Z Gundam villains. The most important of the bunch is Haman Karn in her Qubeley over on my left. Haman is one of Zeta's two main villains. She's also the bitter ex of Char Aznable. In recent years, they've turned Char and Haman's relationship (a point left largely unclear in the series themselves) into a pretty silly romantic comedy manga called Char's Deleted Affair, where we see how Char transformed her from sweet airheaded schoolgirl to total psycho bitch (widely regarded as a good move). There's a gag about the Zeon Knife of Love. With her is Mashmyre Cello from ZZ Gundam in a Zaku III. I don't know anything about this dude, so I don't have any entertaining trivia on him, but he was a pretty major pain in the ass to kill. In a Quebeley Mark II is El Peo Ple, who I don't know anything about save a bit of trivia. Supposedly she's named after a Japanese lolicon magazine called L-People, which is pretty fucking creepy. Thankfully I don't actually have to deal with her; all I need to do is send the ZZ Gundam over, have a little chat, and she leaves.

On the opposite side of the map is Haman's rival, the "Man from Jupiter". Paptimus Scirocco is an expert manipulator and a Newtype pimp capable of melting women in a single psychic glance (I'm seriously not making this up). In tow is the adoring Sara Zabiarov. All I remember about her is that she was really annoying. In Zeta Gundam Scirocco plays everybody, so it's safe to say that he is up to something here. Sure enough, on the second turn, Paptimus decides he just doesn't feel like it today. He leaves with Sarah and lets recurring midboss Jerid stay to take care of things. Jerid is in the Bound-Doc this time. Remember how before I said I thought Jerid had skipped all those failures and picked as powerful a machine as he could? I was wrong. I forgot about the Bound-Doc. And look how goddamned crazy it looks! Can you blame me for forgetting the Bound-Doc? It's weird!

Meanwhile, my robots and I are stuck in a mountain range, between all these terribly powerful people and their terribly powerful robots, and their arrival is imminent. Furthermore, the Argama is stuck in the middle of launch procedures. This is a protect-the-base mission with a tiny little amount of space to work with. The grunts are first on the list, and they're pretty serious business, too; Dreissens and Byalants all around. My new toys are getting a pretty serious workout after last mission's cakewalk. What I decided to do was set up camp around the Argama. Around the base, there's a city, and for whatever reason, cities restore your HP and EN every turn. For my Gundams, this means they can pick people off with their biggest gun and gain back all the energy it took them to fire it. With a location like that, I figured there was no point going elsewhere. So I took care of the grunts and Jerid that way. The bosses take their sweet time getting there, and when they do, the bastards make my strategy backfire on me. See, Haman can snipe, too, but she can do it from a greater distance than I can. So she's standing on a mountaintop, taking her potshots at my guys, and they can't do a thing about it. Haman, you bitch! I brought my bruisers-- Getter, Mazinger, and Grendizer-- over to see her. They weren't fast enough to actually hit her, most of the time, but they were making her waste ammo. Once she was out of it, things were over.

I couldn't actually kill her, though. I mentioned before that sometimes bosses in SRW run when they have less than half their HP left. Haman runs at about 60%. While it's possible for one of my guys to do half damage, they can't quite do the rest. It's possible to do thisat this point in the game, but you'd have to know it was coming and plan your upgrades accordingly. I guess if I ever played this game twice, that's what I'd do.

After the mission is over, even MORE guys show up out of nowhere, just as we're about to finally get through with the damn launch already. Four jumps out in the Psycho Gundam to protect us (Kamille protests), and the little blue icon of the Argama on the map abruptly changes into this huge, scaling Mode 7-era sprite that hurls itself into the screen, like those things always used to do. Do you think they would have considered that intentionally retro, back in a 1999 remake of a 1991 game? I do.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 14: INTO SPACE...

Ah, a change of scenery. Up until now, all my super robot warring has taken place on a pretty limited selection of scenery. Either I'm on a flat plain, I'm in a forest, I'm over the water, I'm in the montains, or I'm in a city. You don't have any of that stuff in space. We were charting our progress on a world map before; now, space. That is, our camera sways back and forth between lonely , chunky models of asteroids and space colonies, hanging in front of a flat wallpaper of stars. Like an episode of Lost In Space. I hope we stay in space for the rest of the game.

In space (and I'm sure this surprises you) more characters from Zeta Gundam are lying in wait so as to kill us. If you're looking for a videogame-style progression of enemy robots, Zeta Gundam is probably your best bet. Today's boss is Yazan Gable, who you'll note sort of resembles Beavis. He and his unimportant buddies are in Hambrabis, which fly around and shoot your dudes with those stringy things in the picture.

(Aren't you glad I thought to start using DVD-ripped caps instead of whatever I can find on Google Image search? I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. Was I lazy? Probably!)

They're pains in the ass but I beat them up by pretty much doing what I did last mission. Instead of holing the robots up in a city, I hole them up in a space colony, which is pretty much a city in space. Because it's in space, you don't recover as much HP when you hang out there. Hey, I dunno either.

Zeta doesn't just have a large cast; a high percentage are kind of nutjobs, ranging from imbalanced to insane. Poor Rosamia Badam is probaby the craziest person in the series. It's not her fault; she's been all brainwashed and experimented on, and she thinks Kamille is her brother. Today, though, she is not in a horse-drawn carriage, she's in the Psycho Gundam Mark II; that is, the Psycho Gundam's mildly 80's-riced younger brother. Kamille is so used to saving tragic heroines at this point that he doesn't even need to talk to Rosamia; just get within a couple squares of her and she'll turn blue, join your team, and follow her big brother wherever he goes. Happy endings all around!

Once the welcoming party is taken care of, Rosamia (she uses "Rosammy" with her big brother) comes aboard. If I recall my dudes' history with this kind of thing, she should be around for two levels, and then disappear. Shame.

Cybaster was supposed to be really strong but man, he can't take a hit. Even after putting him through some upgrades I'm wondering what the big deal is supposed to be. Boss, meanwhile, is making Mazinger Z useless. But hell, it's either Boss drives it or nobody does. Might as well keep him around.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 15: FIERCE SHOWDOWN!! JUPITRIS

We showin' DOWN. On the Jupitris. That's where Scirocco hangs out. Rosamia couldn't even be relied on between missions, and seems to have run over to the Jupitris. Scirocco (and presumably his mind control) turn her from blue back to red again. There doesn't seem to be a happy ending here; apparently Scirocco's mind control is beyond even the reach of the SRW Happy Gundam Heroine Solution. On the bright side of things, you sure get a hell of a lot of money for taking out Psycho Gundam.

The Jupitris, in this game, is just a simple grid of nine big, empty boxes. In each box, enemy MS lie in wait. You simply proceed from room to room, cleaning up as you go. Having not seen ZZ Gundam, I had never seen the Jamru Fin before, and it caught my attention. It's a birdlike MS in design, but in the game, the hunched posture and the much larger head make it look like some sort of robo-puppy. Around the middle, there are a pair of Bound Docs. Jerid, of course. The other pilot is Mouar Pharaoh. Yeah, I know. This is one of Tomino's weirder names but by no means his weirdest; this is a man who named a character SHOT WEAPON, for chrissakes. That's Jerid's shoulder, in the screencap. If you're wondering what happens to Mouar in Zeta Gundam you should probably refer to your Gundam Girlfriend Handbook and connect the dots. Up front is Scirocco and his love triangle, Sarah and Reccoa Londe, in a trio of Pallas Athenes.

We have not introduced Reccoa yet, I don't believe, because Reccoa has not appeared yet. In Zeta Gundam she was initially an ally of the heroes, but the dumbasses snet her to infiltrate the Jupitris, where she fell victim to Scirocco's powers of Newtype seduction. All the guy had to do was shoot her a look, and she turned on her buddies more or less on the spot. In her screenshot, she is contemplating how Scirocco treats her as a woman and a soldier. Char couldn't do that for her, see. That's why he's into underage chicks.

Moving right along, they're starting to throw a lot at me at these missions, so that even though my robots looked way too strong a couple missions ago, they are now consistently exhausted by the end of the level. Even so, taking care of all these guys isn't so much hard as it is time-consuming. My guys can't fly around indoors so everybody moves much more slowly. There are energy tanks strewn about the floor, and for whatever reason, you can stand on them to regain HP and EN. Still not as much as you would gain from an Earth town. Best not to think about these things.

At the end of the mission, Scirocco will tell you that the DC are ready to launch the Solar Ray and Amuro will be all "OH SHIT!". Amuro's dealt with Solar Rays before. Here, as a bonus, you can see what happens when combat waitresses from the future use the Solar Ray on unwitting Federation fleets and Degwin Zabi.

Persona-sama · Posts: 1145

Wow, there's a surprising amount of Mikuru beam parodies on Youtube!

When will there be a Haruhi SRW doujin game, I wonder?

Karoshi · Posts: 968

Sub wrote:

I always thought it would be sort of cool if somebody did a game like this with superheroes. Don't the comic publishers do crossovers a lot? That said I'd totally take Super Late 80's/Early 90's Cartoon Wars.

CARTOON ALL-STARS TO THE RESCUE!

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 16: ESCAPE

Any half-decent super robot hero knows that escaping is for pussies. This stage is a test of how good a super robot hero the player really is.

On our way to stop the Solar Ray from blowing up everybody, we are interrupted by ruffians. Dreissens in the middle, Bawoos to the right, a lone Vigna Ghina among them. In the Vigna Ghina (snicker) is Cecily Fairchild. I have to assume that she's the love interest in Gundam F91, because when you take F91 over to talk to her she doesn't shoot any of your guys anymore. To our left is the Last Battalion.

They're four Jagd Dogas. We have passed ZZ Gundam, here, and moved into the movie Char's Counterattack. Ah, CCA. I managed to see this one on the big screen a few years back; it holds a little spot in my Gundam-fanboy heart. Two are piloted by grunts, one belongs to Gyunei Guss, and the last is Rezin Schnyder's. Gyunei had a thing for the same underage girl that Char was manipulating into exploding people for him. Bad call, Gyunei! Leading the Last Battalion is the Rafflesia. It's what it sounds like. One of the things I love about SRW is that a group of soldiers can be led by a giant mechanical flower that shoots laser beams, and nobody bats an eye.

So yeah, Last fuckin' Battalion! These guys are some serious shit! When Duke finds out who they are, he tells everybody to run like hell, because they'll slaughter us. Sure enough, their equipment's a lot stronger than ours and their pilots are a couple of levels above anybody I've got. The game shows you a spot over on the right side on the map; you're to run there as fast as you can, in order to end the level. If you don't go near the Last Battalion, the Last Battalion won't go near you. On my first play of the level, I decided to see if I could actually just run through my enemies' fire and clear the level without doing any fighting at all. I could, and at the end of the level I got to see my guys express frustration that they couldn't fight those bastards. I felt the same way.

I restarted right away, this time actually trying to fight the enemies. I went to the right first, and the groups on the right and the middle swarmed me. By the time I was done, my guys weren't in any shape to fight the Last Battalion. They didn't actually want me to fight them, right? It was probably one of those RPG fights where you're supposed to lose. So I left. Again, Kouji and company were frustrated. I decided to keep a seperate save and then restart again the next day, this time to fight the Last Battalion.

I went straight for them, which was a pretty huge mistake. SRW has a morale system. When a kill is made, the robot who makes the kill gets 5 morale points, and all the other robots get 1. This is vital for super robot pilots, who have to be sufficiently pumped to use their strongest attacks, but not so much so for the average Gundam pilot, because they're all pretty mopey bitches to begin with. Logic dictates, then, that you take out all the small guys, and work your way up to the boss. But it was late! I wasn't thinking!

I took heavy losses, but I was able to take out everybody except for the Rafflesia, who was in fact capable of killing many of my robots in a single hit (my big ones in two), and had a rather impressive 20,000 HP (my robots have range from 2,000 to 5,000, for comparison's sake). This must have been the boss I wasn't supposed to fight. I gave it a shot anyway, and lo and behold, he was vulnerable. Getter Dragon's Shine Spark did 10,000 damage. It was only supposed to do 5,000, and it was my huge last-ditch attack. I thought I didn't have a chance at this guy, but it seems that the game has rewarded me for trying. Still, I'd wasted all my energy, and I couldn't do Shine Spark twice on the guy. I had to restart and save it for tomorrow again. See why this writeup took so long?

Tonight I finally did the bastard in the right way, with minimal losses. Most of the attack animations in these remakes aren't very impressive, but the Shine Spark is the first attack animation in the game thus far that is. Getter surrounds itself with light and plows into the enemy. What makes the scene is the voice. Akira Kamiya has been playing the role of Getter Robo's main pilot, Ryoma Nagare, since the 70's. He plays manly men who yell; guys like Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star. After the pain in the ass that had been beating this level, I deserved to hear a good yell. When you want a victorious howl, man, you can't beat a guy taking twenty seconds to scream SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKU at the top of his lungs. The yelling is one of the key points in super robot anime. The reason everybody yells their attack names was always so that the kids could entertain themselves yelling at the screen. It works, so they decided never to mess with it. Gundam did, though, nobody shouts "BEAM RIFLE!" in Gundam. Whether or not you shout the name of your weapon is one of the main ways fans of robot anime classify you and your robot as "super robot" or "real robot". They may shout "GOD FINGER!" in G Gundam, but G Gundam is at heart a super robot show.

You can hear something like what I was treated to here, but the shout just isn't as good. You'll note this is from the most recent SRW game: at this point the attack animations have gotten genuinely beautiful in a sharp contrast to early SRW's no-budget corner-cutting animation. This Shine Spark scene is just one of many. I still haven't bought Alpha 3 yet. Shame on me.

Once the last enemy is down, the map is conspicuously quiet. One unit remains: the Vigna Ghina. Cecily hasn't done a thing since we spoke to her, but she's still red. Are we supposed to kill poor Cecily? What did she ever do to us? I saved and left the map, to see what would happen. The guys were as disappointed as they would have been if we'd just run away. I reloaded, and blew Cecily up with Cybaster's COSMO NOVA. I got 5000 bucks, a Magnetic Coating, and the guys were totally pumped. Take THAT, Last Battalion. So I have two saves here: a "dead Cecily" save and an "alive Cecily" save. I'm probably going to let Cecily live; it's not very super robot heroic to kill her. And how else am I ever going to get the Vigna Ghina?

Zing.

NEXT TIME: THE KAMIYA CONNECTION
LOOK FORWARD TO IT

Sub · Posts: 696

Super Robot Wars Complete Box Side Story "THE KAMIYA CONNECTION" has been delayed due to exciting new developments in the Kamiya department. Expect a truly epic, feature-length discussion of the Kamiya Connection in the not-too-distant future. The Super Robot Wars Complete Box Blog Project will continue as normal.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 17: SOLAR-RAY BURST

You saw it last time, but Amuro totally freaked out when the Solar Ray fired. It blew up a whole assload of people and that's just no good at all. Indeed, Amuro, we can't let the light shine.

Well, it's about to, anyway. A Solar Ray is powered by solar panels, see, and if I get rid of all those, it won't be able to explode anybody. As you can see here, it runs on quite a lot of them. The game knows that it would be boring for you to go destroying all these mirrors yourself; that was only cool when Bruce Lee did it. So, arranged in a large triangle around the Solar Ray, there are three big, red mirrors. Boss mirrors, if you will. They have a thousand HP, and they fire machine guns. The Solar Ray will fire in a few turns, and I need to get rid of these mirrors before then.

Between me and the Solar Ray are some Neo Zeon grunts; just the old Jamru Fins and Bawoos that we've been dealing with. In the middle of the mission those comic relief mobile armors, the Zakrellos, suddenly appear, and the "uh-oh!" music plays. The designers are always in on the joke. Right by the Solar Ray are Glemmy Toto, who I can't find any pictures of, and our old friend El Peo Ple in a Quebeley Mk. II. Ple must not be Judau's girlfriend, because he has to talk to her twice to get her to join your team. Glemmy is, I believe, the main villain of ZZ Gundam, but I still haven't bothered seeing that show. Anyway, here he's a monster-of-the-week in a Bawoo, and he's not much harder to beat than the grunts.

Nobody's really too hard to beat here. After beating the Last Battalion when I didn't need to, a lot of my guys are much stronger than they would have been. This makes the whole mission a cakewalk. Glemmy taunts you every few turns by telling you how much time you have left before the Solar Ray fires. I was in no hurry; I was able to take out all the enemies and the mirrors with minimal effort. Next, please.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 18: INFILTRATE! KONPEITO

I don't know what Konpeito is, but man, one thing you can't really do with a giant robot (never mind a whole goddamned gang of them) is infiltrate. What we're really doing here is just walking on in. This place looks exactly like the inside of the Jupitris, the only other indoor area we've been at any point in this game. It stands to reason, then, that this is what every indoor area is going to look like. Trailers are lying about to be walked over, and energy tanks are still lying on the floor to be stepped on, and thereby absorbed. Grendizer (one of my three main bruisers, along with Getter Dragon and Great Maz) and ZZ Gundam are both undergoing "repairs" right now, which means the game thought it would be too unfair for me to have all these guys to kick ass with.

The enemies are, again, kind of weak. Glemmy and his grunts are back to get beat up some more, and hell, I won't stop them. The new enemy robot is the pretty cool-looking Doven Wolf. Mamoru Nagano's design influence from his work on Zeta Gundam is still evident, but Nagano's robots were and are elegant, slim and quite often feminine. That last one isn't from his Z Gundam work, of course. Sunrise would never let that shit fly. It's from Nagano's masterwork, Five Star Stories. Nagano is too protective of his baby to ever allow it into something like SRW. As such it's kind of completely irrelevant that I'm telling you anything about FSS at all. You know what, though? There's nothing else going on in this level but the Doven Wolf. I need something to talk to you guys about. Back to the Doven Wolf. He has the rounded lines of a Nagano robot, but this guy's had some 'roids put in him, just like everything else in ZZ Gundam. Bandai needed to sell some model kits. Bandai always needs to sell some model kits.

Piloting the Doven Wolf is Rakan Dahkaran, who I'm sure is a very tough and intimidating fellow, but too bad for him because I exploded him in one hit with Getter Dragon. After the mission, the game gave me a lot of money for reasons which are unclear to me. Moving right along, then!

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 19: DEATH MATCH ON THE MOON

That's right, on the moon. I don't know why, but there we are. It's grey, and there are craters. Standing on craters increases your evasion and hit percentages, and that's about all we've got. It's the moon. You can't exactly dress it up.

So then, it's a deathmatch. Life and death are a tricky subject in the land of the super robots. The rule goes like this:

"They're not dead unless you see the body."

You can see their robot explode onscreen. Doesn't mean they're dead. The name of the episode can be "Kouji Kabuto Dies In Magma." It's just fuckin' magma, dude. Doesn't mean he's dead. Let me talk to you about Char's Counterattack for a second.

The following appears pornographic, thanks to links.

We've covered that our old friend Yoshiyuki Tomino, the creator of Gundam, was stressed and pissed-off by the time the movie Char's Counterattack was green-lighted. He wanted to end the franchise, but he couldn't do it. He decided that if he couldn't do that: he'd kill off his hero and villain, Amuro and Char. The suits wouldn't let him do that either, so what Tomino had to do was hint at the fact instead, and none too subtly. Char's Counterattack ends with Amuro in the Nu Gundam, pushing a huge asteroid out of the earth's atmosphere. The pop-out cockpit of Char's Sazabi is in Amuro's hand the whole time. It's made clear that the robot can't push the damn thing, and the last we see of Char and Amuro, they're about to burn up on re-entry. The asteroid does in fact start to drift away from the earth, for reasons beyond the scope of our discussion (people dying in giant robot anime, for those keeping track), and the movie ends right there and then. It has to. Nobody can talk anymore, because nobody would be able to avoid saying that Londo Bell's ace pilot and the dictator of Neo Zeon are both dead. To this day, some Gundam fans will swear to you that the white streak on the lower-right hand side of this shot is in fact the Nu Gundam flying away from the asteroid to safety. They're just never heard from again. Doesn't mean they're dead.

This doesn't apply to SRW: We only ever see the pilots' faces in dialogue boxes, and that's for when they're talking, not for when they're dead. You can't see the body in SRW. The engine's not built for it. Going by the odds, if you see an important character's robot explode, they're not dead. Most bosses in this game come back two or three times in different levels before dying permanently. If one of my robots gets exploded, god forbid, the pilot acts like he's dying, but all that happens is I get charged a couple thousand credits at the end of the mission as a penalty. Once the cash is paid, the robot and the pilot are back, good as new.

Today, one of my pilots managed to get herself killed permanently. Herself, of course. If you haven't been keeping up the curse of the Super Robot Tragic Heroine has manifested itself in this game as follows:

-Super Robot Tragic Heroine appears, often on the side of the enemy
-Man in Super Robot Tragic Heroine's life gives her a stern-talking to
-Super Robot Tragic Heroine defects
-Player gets to use high-level Super Robot Tragic Heroine in her totally kickin' robot/space monster/whatever for two or three missions
-Super Robot Tragic Heroine must leave, for whatever reason. This usually happens between missions.

Minerva X goes in for repairs and is never heard from again; Kouchou, that Getter Robo villain, gets jumped by Valcion. Lalah parts with your group when she thinks she's going to have to fight Char; neither party has appeared since. Four stayed behind when we launched into space, to protect us from some enemy MS.

Ple just gets blown up by her evil clone. I'm serious. The usual grunts are led by Haman in her Quebeley and Ple Two in her Psycho Gundam Mk.II. We've seen everything before, here, except for Ple Two. This is the part where I'd tell you more about the Gundam character, but like I said, I never watched Double Zeta. "Evil clone" is all you're getting.

Right off the bat, Ple Two runs off after our Ple, and our poor Ple doesn't stand a chance. The Psycho Gundam can kill her in two hits, and it only attacks her. It's one of those deaths that's supposed to happen, and so Ple is dead in a few turns. The rest of the map is business as usual. I beat up the Psycho Gundam, I beat up the gunts, I beat up Haman. After the mission I'm charged for repairs on the Quebeley, but when you get to looking at it, there's no Ple inside. I guess the only way SRW can show you the body is by showing you an empty robot.

108 · Posts: 2600

hey sub

new avatar plz

also i see "<lj-cut>" in your post

uh

Sub · Posts: 696

Fix'd. Also when my av stopped working i just decided hey fuckit i don't have an av anymore.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 20: TUG-OF-WAR! GRANADA FORTRESS

It was sort of a tug-of-war if you think of it this way: half the mission I was running for my life, and the other half I wasn't.

This is another one where I spent so much time quitting in frustration (and doing other things and playing other videogames sorry sorry) that it delayed the writeup. It's all because of fucking Granzon. He's new; one of the SRW original robots. SRW makes a point of making its original robots obscenely strong, so that the player will be impressed enough by them to buy related merchandise. It works: Cybaster got his own TV series (which Cybaster's fans denounce as total crap). The SRW games that our friends at Atlus are releasing in English are, in fact, the Original Generation line. It took some time, but Banpresto's original characters became so popular that they were able to make a game containing only those characters, no licensing involved. The games did so well they're remaking them for the PS2 now. Sort of like a game we know, huh?

So they make Granzon a big ol' bad-ass boss robot. Not a Boss Borot. That would be an easy fight. Granzon borrows from both sides of the Real/Super robot dichotomy; he's got that completely improbable fantasy-style sword you see in the picture, and his strongest attack involves the creation of a black hole. On the other hand, despite how huge he is, he's certainly got the lines of a Gundam. Something for everybody. To maximize fan appeal, the villain inside of Granzon is an aloof, effeminate fellow by the name of Shuu Shirakawa. One of Granzon's attacks is called the Worm Smasher, and that's about all you need to know about Shuu's personality.

The mission started inconspicuously enough; it was just me and my guys on the one side, some grunts between us, and Haman (still not dead, that girl!) and her lackeys on the other side. The midboss is Chara Soon in a Geymark. I can't tell you anything else about this character, but isn't she hilarious-looking? She's probably as 80's as Gundam ever got, which is saying something. The only more 80's-ish Gundam thing I can think of is that one piece of promo art with all the girls wearing aerobics outfits and legwarmers. I wish I still had it; "gundam legwarmers" doesn't return any results on Google.

There are also some fascinating enemies towards the bottom of the map called Bongs. I kid you not. Two Bongs. Today is the day for funny names. The Bong is a wonderful Frankenstein mockery of Getter Robo. His head is one of the Getter Machines which forms the robot. His arms are Getter Two's claw and drill, and his legs are the same as Getter Three's weird coily arms. There are chest-mounted cannons, like those on a ship, for good measure. I applauded when I first saw the thing.

Things did not, however, go according to plan. On the second turn, just as you're laying into some cannon-fodder monsters, Granzon shows up and surprises everybody. Unlike the Last Battalion before him, Granzon really is completely out of my league. Only my strongest attacks do any more than zero damage, and even then, they're only chips in his armor. Meanwhile, Granzon is able to kill any one of my guys in two hits. If you let him get close enough to you, he'll blow up the area around him and kill everybody all at once. Our strategy, then, is to run like hell. The only direction to run in is through the grunts and in the direction of Haman and Chara.

The game establishes a nice pace here; you don't really have the option to sit in one place and take care of the enemies at your leisure, because there's an 800-ton gorilla on your heels. Seven turns in, even though I ran like a bitch, he says "YOU GUYS WERE PRETTY STRONG" and leaves. From there it's business as usual. Haman is equally shocked every single time I use shaIIIIIIIN SUPAAAAAAAKU on her. She'll be back, I'm sure.

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 21: STOP TIME

Dio does not make an appearance.

We are entering the fortress at Granada; it looks just like every other indoor structure in this game thus far, but with one critical difference: it is empty. The guys wonder whether maybe they got the address wrong, until our villain Bian appears in the Valcion. He could probably waste us all easily but like any good super robot villain he's got a method that's less probable and more easily dealt with: the fortress will explode in fifteen minutes, and if we don't get out we're going to go up in flames with it.

This is like the "ESCAPE" mission, except there aren't any enemies on the map, and all we're doing is running away. A running mission. What bullshit. This shouldn't even count! They try to make things a little more lively. At first we're not supposed to know where the exit is. See, over on the right side of the map, there's a little open space. It's pretty obvious. Five turns in, Four appears (courtesy of SRW's Happy Ending Policy!) and reveals to us the obvious. So that doesn't work. Enemies appear, but you can't fight them or you won't make it out of the fortress. So that doesn't work either. It's all running. I made it out in ten turns. This mission is such a bore, and there's no new material to talk about, so let's just end this here, shall we?

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 22: ENTER THE ATMOSPHERE

That's right. All space had for us was a goddamn exploding building. We're tired of it. We have a new ship (the Ra Cailum) and we're going back to Earth. Before we do, though, we get ambushed by (get this) Haman and friends. I think I'm going to have to give her the Wile E. Coyote Prize over Jerid. This is getting really out of hand. Anyway, they've got us in the middle of this whole tricky atmospheric entry business. Apparently the Ra Cailum is so busy that it can't move, and the bad guys really, really want to blow up the Ra Cailum. The goal of the mission is to protect the base for 20 turns. We start surrounded by enemies; Haman and her cohorts are in the corner of the map, watching and no doubt cackling. It's actually good thing that the enemies want the Ra Cailum so badly, because they won't bother attacking any of the other units during the battle. They also can't do much more damage per turn than I can repair, so they're left shooting at nothing.

Once those guys are taken care of, we head for Haman and her pals. Ple Two is here in the Psycho Gundam mk. II, so we can, naturally, fly our ZZ Gundam over to talk to her. Judau and Ple Two argue, and then the voice of Ple's ghost convinces Ple Two to turn from red to blue. After that it's down to Chara in her Geymark, Haman in her Quebeley, and Mashmyre in his Zaku III. We've seen all these guys before and it's really no big problem blowing them up. Just as you get close to Haman, though, three Geymarks appear RIGHT NEXT to your ship. I can't read what Haman is saying but I'm sure she was calling me a dumbass. Furthermore, Haman and crew also start ignoring you in favor of running toward the Ra Cailum. Unfortunately for them, this shit didn't work last time. Haman gets Shine Sparked (this is becoming ritualistic, like when Team Rocket blasts off again), everybody else is disposed of in a myriad of exciting Super Robot ways. Most involve beams. Some involve fire. And hooray for us; in far less than twenty turns everything is taken care of and we are ready to go back to earth. Only four maps left. They better be good!

Sub · Posts: 696

EPISODE 23: SCIROCCO'S COUNTERATTACK

You know, like Char's Counterattack. Let's chuckle to ourselves.

We've landed in New York; the place is mostly forest, with a river running through it and a couple of buildings all the way on the far end of the map. We must be upstate. Unfortunately, we always seem to be getting ambushed, and as you might have guessed from the name of this mission, it is Scirocco's turn to do the ambushing. He's got a new ride, The O. His posse is with him too; Recoa is in the Pallas Athene and Sara is in the