I can't recall what made me finally want to pull the trigger on purchasing Super Robot Wars OG: The Moon Dwellers, but I made the decision to do so at the end of August and then spent a good chunk of September playing through it. What's fascinating about the Super Robot Wars series is that for many years, no game from the series was officially available in English. This is true for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that releasing a SRW game would be a licensing nightmare. Each of the entries in the main Super Robot Wars series is a strategy RPG crossover of various mecha anime, whether it be something well-known like Gundam or something more obscure like UFO Robot Grendizer. It wasn't until 2006 that a game from the long-running series was localized for release in North America, four years after it came out in Japan. This game was Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation.
Original Generation was unique for the series in that it featured only original characters created by series developer Banpresto. In most Super Robot Wars titles, you'll have a protagonist that is an original character and then every character that joins your army will be from a mecha anime. In some cases, theare are other original characters sprinkled throughout the game that may be returning from previous entries in the series. Regardless, the roster is typically over 90% characters from anime. Original Generation essentially serves as a crossover game featuring previous SRW protagonists and other Banpresto original characters that appeared in those games.
When I played the game myself, I had no idea about any of this. It was the first time any of the games was available in English and I just wanted to play it because it was a strategy RPG that involved robots. And I absolutely loved it. I still consider it (and its sequel) two of the absolute best games on the Game Boy Advance. I loved how wild and over-the-top the combat animations were. I loved how much customization there was for your characters' mechs. I also loved how wacky and convoluted the plot was, and that each of the characters that joined your party were unique named characters with their own extensive backstories, ala Fire Emblem, another series I love with which Super Robot Wars shares a lot of similarities.
Because I was such a fan of Original Generation, I immediately purchased and played through Original Generation 2, which was somehow an even better game. I grew pretty attached to the characters and was sad to let them go--but I hoped to one day be able to revisit them. In 2007, these games were remade for Super Robot Wars Original Generations on PS2 with stunning high-res 2D artwork. I watched hours of YouTube videos on this game, drooling at how flashy the combat effects were and lamenting the fact that I'd never be able to play it in that form. To add salt to the wound, two more games came out for that same series that of course were only ever available in English.
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| Arado Balanga from SRW Original Generations for PS2 |
Fortunately, there's a pretty amazing community of fans for the Super Robot Wars series. As a result, several games from the main series are available to play in English with the help of fan translations. I've now gotten to experience what it's like to play through a "normal" Super Robot Wars game in which you control a series of mecha pulled straight from anime. I haven't watched a lot of them, to be fair, but it's still a really cool thing, and it made me want to actually give some of them a try. It's also interesting to see how tastes and art styles have changed over time, because these games are very faithful about preserving the art style of the original work, which can be pretty disconcerting since there are characters from 1970s animation interacting with characters from modern, currently-running series.
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| Masaki Andoh from SRW Alpha Gaiden for PS1 |
The first fan-translated Super Robot Wars game I ever tried was Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, a PlayStation game that was originally released in 2001. It was made available thanks to the hard work of the long-running translation group Aeon Genesis. I can't emphasize enough just how much work it must be to effectively translate a game like this, because it has a considerable amount of text. All of the games in this series do, because there are so many ridiculously convoluted plot threads that have roots from different anime series--and that's not counting all of the threats that are built into the Super Robot Wars universe. After all, there must be a reason why all of these disparate groups come together, right?
Realistically, Alpha Gaiden came out only one year before Original Generation, which I really loved, but it turned out to be quite a bit different from what I was expecting. The perspective swapped from 2D topdown ala Fire Emblem to isometric, and despite being on a more powerful console, the graphics seemed to lack fidelity in comparison to the Game Boy Advance games. It did give me some good context on what to expect from the rest of the series, though. I originally started it in 2009, but didn't revisit it until about five years later. What really made me want to try more of the series was Super Robot Wars J, another GBA game that plays very similarly to Original Generation but without the "original characters only" stipulation.
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| Sousuke Sagara from Full Metal Panic! in Super Robot Wars J |
SRW J was a really good game for me to try to get a grasp on exactly how the overall series worked, because although I haven't watched a lot of anime, this particular game does feature some characters with which I'm familiar. And that's pretty exciting! The only characters I recognized from the game come from the series Full Metal Panic, which is an anime that I actually enjoy a lot. It made me want to watch some of the other series featured in the game, like Brain Powerd, Martian Successor Nadesico, and Gundam Seed. Getting that extra sense of satisfaction from interacting with characters you're familiar with from other media is part of what makes the series really interesting, and I wanted to see what that was like. I wasn't able to make it through any of those series, but just watching a little bit of them made the game more interesting.
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| Kamille Bidan from Zeta Gundam in SRW Alpha Gaiden |
SRW J was very similar in terms of graphical style and gameplay to the Original Generation games that I liked so much, so it was really easy for me to get into it right out of the gate. I liked it a lot and really wanted to experience more traditional games from the series--so I remembered that I'd started Alpha Gaiden ages ago and decided to revisit it. I buckled down and played through it. It took me a month and a half and I played it quite a bit. That is a really long, slow-paced game. I can totally understand why I had a hard time engaging with it initially. I was also familiar with basically none of the series involved, except for the ones it shared with the aforementioned J. I did like that it featured some appearances from characters that later starred in Original Generation, but most didn't have access to the same awesome robots that they got later, so it just wasn't the same.
Fast-forward to four years later, and I decided to finally pick up Moon Dwellers. I'd heard about it for awhile but was turned off by the fact that the only commercially available translation was almost universally considered low quality. Not only that, but the English release of the game is still an imported title from the Southeast Asia region. Having played the game now, it is a bummer to see just how poor the translation is. It's far from unplayable, but the translation is very stiff and literal. None of these familiar characters have the personalities I remember and I essentially have no
connection to the characters that are new to me.
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| Calvina and Touya, protagonists of SRW OG: The Moon Dwellers |
Having said that, though, the game itself is a lot of fun! And I was really excited to finally get the opportunity to play a Super Robot Wars game with more modern, fluidly animated 2D artwork. It's really a joy to witness all of the ridiculous animations. It was what I was hoping to do all those years ago when I was pining over the PS2 Original Generations game--but amped up to an even higher level. The translation's not great, but the gameplay is as strong as ever, even if I don't necessarily love the twin squad mechanics.
Because there are so many playable characters in Moon Dwellers, it would have been impossible to field them all in one mission. As a result, the game employs a mechanic in which two robots (and their pilots) can occupy one unit in a sort of squad. As a result, when you have sixteen slots provided to you in a mission, what that really means is that you can bring a whopping thirty-two mecha to the fight. This gets really intense to micromanage, especially when you consider that each of the machines at your disposal has the potential for multiple pilots, different loadouts, and different forms. Each of these pilots of these mecha also level up, acquire new skills, and are subject to minor customization. It ends up being pretty exhausting to deal with, especially in some of the later missions.
Even so, it's worth it not only for the strategy and fun, but to see ridiculous animations like these.
I really love the series because it is absolutely bonkers, has a lot of depth, is frequently ridiculously hard, and is a joy to watch. I look forward to playing even more games in the series if I can ever save up enough money to import the newer titles. After writing this up, I'm thinking that'll happen sooner rather than later.
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