Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Review

Platform: Game Boy Advance

Super Robot Wars is a long-standing series in which all the mechs from your favorite anime come together for one massive battle royal. Sounds like fun, right? Well, what would happen if you took out all the well-known mecha and people and replaced them with an original cast? It becomes shit, that’s what. Honestly, when I first saw a video of SRW: OG, it reminded me ever so slightly of Fire Emblem, except with robots. While I always had an inkling of interest for the series, I had never been able to acquire any of the games, international copyright being the bitch that it is. When I first got OG, I ignored the “original” bit and just shoved it into my Game Boy Advance SP. First, I was greeted with that stupid Banpresto logo. Despising pre-game logos, I pressed “a” in hopes of skipping it. No? Alright, then. What about “b”? Start? Select? R? L? It turns out that the damn thing is unskippable. Quite unfortunate, really, considering how I’d be seeing a lot more of it over the next few days.

Jumping right into the game, I was offered a choice between two protagonists: a generic stern-looking hunk of a man and a goofy-looking kid whose face just screams “asshole”. Not being in the mood to play a school comedy/story about an average guy who needs to awaken his inner Amuro Ray and save the world (aka Gundam ZZ), I picked the former. At this point, I would normally explain the plot in graphic detail, but this time, two words will suffice: shit happens. What plot? I don’t see a plot. The game spends an ungodly long time before and after each mission throwing random terms and what barely constitutes character development at you. This game’s dialogue is the text equivalent of Xenosaga’s endless, torturous cutscenes. Thus, I did what any good reviewer would do and pressed “b” really fucking fast in hopes of getting to the next battle before I died of boredom.

The first few battles progressed swimmingly. Every time you attack someone, there’s a percentage of how likely you are to hit them and how likely they are to hit back. Up until my first real boss enemy, that percentage stayed at a healthy 80% vs 30%. Once I tried to fight the bastard, however, it was 0% vs 100%. From that moment on, fighting a boss meant using special abilities that gave me 100% accuracy and 100% dodge over and over and over and over and over . . . I guess that’s sort of like how things are in Super Robot shows, but it doesn’t make for a very fun game. As you play through the game, you gain more and more useless allies and fugly mechs. I know what you’re thinking. “They can’t be that bad, right?” No. They really are. Fortunately, there is one exception to this: the beauty I put up at the start of the review. Regardless, the game consists of running around with your 2-3 strongest guys (the ones you actually bother to put money into) while the rest of your useless team gets raped by enemy grunts, which are horribly overpowered, by the way. Take whatever stats your allies have and add a zero to the end of that and you have your enemies. It should be noted that you usually have a defensive target in the form of your battleship, which has massive amounts of health and weaponry. Unfortunately, your ship can’t hit jack shit. You’ll have a nice 0% accuracy to look at whenever you try.

While I would have liked to wail on this turd a bit longer, I’ve run out of things to say. Yes, that’s all there is to Super Robot Wars: Original Generation. Normally, this would be understandable since the main appeal of the series was getting to see Mazinger Z fire a rocket punch up a Gundam’s exit hole, but you don’t get that here. Instead, you just get a sub-generic plot, a generic cast, generic music, and an overall generic game. This title is a piece of shit and I wouldn’t bother with it. Go get a rom of one of the real SRW games instead, not this emasculated excuse of one.

Rating: 1/5