Jura (Day 251)

After I finish Super Robot Wars J, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do. I originally had these grand plans to attempt to play through one of the games in Japanese, but after giving that a brief try with Super Robot Wars W, I came to realize that it's a lot more difficult than anticipated. If Spirit commands didn't exist, then it might be viable because I could just move my units around and attack as normal. I don't need to know the names of the attacks so long as I can interpret the symbols for Range and Melee and read their power values. However, Spirit commands are very important skills that should be used extremely frequently. The game's probably not impossible to play without them but it would be considerably more difficult--and not as fun.

What I could do instead is immediately replay Super Robot Wars J with a different focus. I could pick a different protagonist and a different robot for him to use as well as using entirely different characters from the last runthrough. There are more than enough robots in the game to support this, although I would definitely have to reuse some in the early stages. I would probably focus more on Super Robots even though I don't particularly care for those characters aeshetically. I do like having units with multiple pilots because it gives you a lot more strategic depth since you have a huge pool of Spirit Commands to choose from.

I assume there are hidden units that I've already missed as well. I should probably looked that up a long time ago since I'm on mission 25 now and I believe I've recruited the vast majority of units in the game--though I could easily be wrong. I assumed that Gai from Martian Successor Nadesico would have been a recruitable pilot at some point, but so far I haven't been able to use him. In the game and the anime, Akito "borrows" Gai's Aestivalis so it makes sense that he wouldn't be usable right away, but I sort of had the feeling I'd get him eventually. He's a pretty funny character.

In Nadesico, many of the characters are enamored with a fictional anime called Gekiganger that deftly lampoons many of the giant robot genre's tropes. It's pretty hilarious to see it in action, especially considering how much of that kind of thing I've been exposed to recently while playing this game. The older series like Combattler and Voltes exemplify exactly the kind of thing that Gekiganger parodies. 

I've always wondered about that