Super Robot Taisen, as the name implies, is usually a series about Super Robots fighting each other. Normally in a turn-based strategy style of play, with long and badass attack animations for certain super attacks (it’s rare for attacks to last less than a minute). Well, this time the DS gets a new entry to the series, and strangely it barely has any robots (and the robots that are there aren’t really “super”, there’s barely bigger than the humanoid characters), and instead of a turn-based strategy game, it’s a turn-based action-rpg. Quite different from the usual games in the series.

This is also my first Super Robot Taisen game, so I really have no experience with the series other than watching attack animations on Youtube.

So read on to see how the latest Super Robot Taisen game is, even if it doesn’t have super robots!

Looks and Sounds

The graphics are a bit all over the place. There’s actually 4 types of sprites for every character (and Haken gets a fifth one). The world map sprites are small and not detailed, but still recognizable. The Dungeon map sprites are a bit taller and a bit more detailed. The conversation sprites are great, very detailed, and take up about half the screen. The battle sprites are slightly deformed versions(a bit Chibi) of the conversation sprites, and they’re very detailed and very well animated. The final type of sprite most characters get is a highly detailed sprite for special skills and super special attacks, which are very well animated, most of the time (one of Suzuka’s animations is a bit weird…), but only appear on the screen for a second. Overall though the character sprites and attack animations are very good. Don’t expect really long animations as you get in normal SRT games, but they’re some cool looking ones still.
The rest of the graphics are basic. The areas look generic but not too bad and… that’s about it!

The sound is pretty good. You probably won’t see yourself humming the game’s tunes at work/school, but the music is still pretty fun to listen to most of the time, with each character getting his/her own theme. Though the big part of the sound in the game is the voice acting… and it’s actually not too great for 1 reason: it’s only ever used in battle. The voice acting itself is quite good (but it’s japanese only, and since it’s in battle, unless you know japanese, you never know what they’re saying), but it gets repetitive and almost annoying.

Story
Well, I have no idea where this takes place in the series, since this is my first SRT game, so I’ll try to just talk about what we see in this game.
So there’s multiple worlds, with gates in each of them to go to a few others. The worlds of Elfetale and Formido Heim have been at war for 10 years, and that war ended 3 years ago. There are, of course, remnants to the war. Robots are going around being evil, crystals that controls people’s sense are appearing everywhere, and overall the war is still screwing around with people.

Enter Haken, some random bounty hunter, and his robot buddy Aschen. After finding a princess in a spaceship, he is tasked to bring her back for her bounty, as well as finding the mech nicknamed Phantom who is wrecking havok everywhere. On the way he gets joined by the princess, a demon princess, 2 weirdos from a world outside the onces you can visit(both of them come from Namco VS Capcom) and KOS-MOS from Xenosaga.  In their quest they learn various things about the war, try to find ways to counter the power of the crystals appearing everywhere, and try to get everyone back to their respective worlds.

The story is very basic and quite generic, but it does the job well enough.

The characters are also relatively bland and generic. Each of them are some kind of cliché. Haken is a playboy, Aschen is the random android with great analysis powers and dual personality, Kaguya is the big boobed princess, Suzuka is the small breasted demon princess(and during battles she just dances while her robot does all the work, what a bitch), Xiaomu is… just a fox-girl, Reiji is some random dude with no personality and KOS-MOS is not very different than in the Xenosaga games. Their interactions are kinda fun, but it all boils to sex innuendos or people insulting/making fun of/being jealous of Kaguya for her big boobs.

It’s entertaining, as long as you like that kind of humor. Otherwise it gets annoying after just about 3 conversations.

Gameplay
FIGHTING
The battle system here is pretty much a turn-based/action hybrid.  Each character takes a turn to attack, mostly depending on their speed stat.
Each time a character gets a turn, there’s a few things you can do. First up, you have skills called Spirits which have a variety of effects. They can boost stats, heal your HP or your party’s HP, heal statues effects, lower enemy stats and give effects like breaking a shield on the first hit or not missing any attacks. Each spirit has an SP cost to it, and you can use as many as you want during your turn until you decide to attack.

You can also use items before attacking. Items have various effects. Healing, SP recovery, status effect healing, COM bar replenishing and Frontier Gauge boosting. You can use as many items you want before attacking, but those take some of your COM bar, so if you want to attack you better not waste all of your COM bar for items.

An alternative to attacking is using a special skills. Those require to use both SP and COM, and they have various effect. Attacking a bunch of enemies, randomly hurting and healing people, giving status effects to enemies are the normal effects you get here. Those are usually pretty well animated or at least kinda fun to watch.

If you don’t use a special skill, you can attack normally. Each character has a series of normal attacks to choose from. Each attack has a different COM value it uses. You have 5 slots for attacks on each character, and you can put duplicates if you want to. When you select a target and press A, you get in what I call “attack phase”. Pressing A will launch your first attack. Then each time you press A another of your attacks launch, up to 5 attacks. Basically, each attack sends your enemy in the air, so what you need to do is time your attacks so that the enemy doesn’t touch the ground. You can also start up the next attack during an attack to cancel the current one and go straight to the next. If you time your cancel properly, you get a bonus on your Frontier Gauge. For each hit you get on an enemy while he’s in the air, the chances of the next hits being a critical hit goes up a bit. Each hit you do as a chance of being critical, missing, or being guarded (and of course just hitting normally). Some enemies have “shields”, which blocks a number of your attacks, and when the shield is broken your hits start working as usual.

Of course, that’s not all there is to attack phase. In addition to attacking, you get can allies that are in the back row of your team to launch an attack while you’re attacking. After you get more than 4 members on your team, you’ll always have someone in your backup that will be ready to attack anytime you want them to. You call them by pressing left on the D-pad. Eventually you get robots in your backup team too, who level up with Haken.
There’s a similar system with front attackers too, called Chain Attack. The character’s whose turn it is next appears on the bottom-right of the screen, and you can go directly to their attack phase (skipping their preparation phase and going straight to the first attack in their attack phase) when it doesn’t say “wait” on their portrait, and pressing the right button on the D-pad switches the character you’re currently using to the next one, and the attack phase continues as usual. You can use this to maximise damage and add a ton more hits to your combo.

The last thing I need to mention here is the Frontier Gauge. It fills up as you attack and GET attacked, and it gets boosts from well-timed cancels and chain attacks and allie attacks. When the frontier gauge is full, you can press Y at any moment during your attack to stop attacking and use the character’s ultimate attack. Deals a bunch of hit and high damage, and that’s about it.

Overall, the fighting system is real fun and fast-paced, but once you’re used to the different weight class of enemies, it becomes easy to deal with just about any enemy. Boss battles are a bit different, mostly because they do a lot more damage and take a LOT more abuse. By the time you get near the end, each boss enemy(sometimes you fight multiple at a time) has a few hundreds of thousands of HP, and can 1-combo-kill your weaker characters, so they require a bit more strategy.

Everything else
The leveling is standard stuff. Get experience, level up. You can use spirits to get EXP boosts. Finishing a battle with a support attack gives a 10% boost of EXP, and finishing the battle with a special skill or ultimate attack gives a 30% boost of EXP. Characters in the back row get half the EXP, and Robots level with Haken. Stats go up automatically when you level, and your SP and HP go back to 100%.
The only other element to leveling is the equipment. Shops update their equipment at certain points of the story, and otherwise you find equipment in treasure cheats or as drops from enemies.

The only other element I need to talk about is navigation, and it’s as simple as it gets. The world map leads you to different areas, the dungeons have cheap super-easy puzzles… and that’s it.

The leveling is very basic, so if you want customization, the closest you’ll have is changing your character’s equipment. The navigation and puzzle-solving is incredibly easy and could’ve benefited from a bit more challenge.

Overall
This is a very fun game, but battles can get repetitive. When you know how to deal with each weight class with all your characters, beating them up will be very easy, and the battles don’t require a whole lot of strategy.

But still, fast and fun battle system, okay story, possibly fun characters (if you like lame sexual innuendos and big boob jokes >_>) and great animation. If you’re looking for a fun RPG on the DS, I would probably suggest some other RPGs, but if you played a lot of them already, you’re losing nothing from checking this out. And it’s from Atlus, so it’s probably gonna be rare really fast.

(wow, this was a lot longer than I thought it would be…)

jobocan Games, Handheld, Review, ds