Oh yeah

I now serve two masters. Or aka, I been accepted by the UIC History's department as a grad student. Seriously, by the time I leave UIC, I'm just going to a little train of letters behind my name, which isn't a bad thing.

Lets play! Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 1

Given that there is a new meme for games of playing a game and taking screen shots, I figured I would slowy work on the two Super Robot Wars games that have been translated into English by the fine company of Atlus.

Anyway Super Robot Wars originally was a Japanese crossover game of various mecha anime in a tactical RPG system. Its one of the better selling games over there, and its still going strong with recent production of an anime tv series and a OVA. The writers are quite good, and they in the various games managed to do a good job of tying all the plots together and often made original characters to help better tie things. Eventually they created so many original characters that they could make up their own universe and this what they did with the OG timeline. And the OG games are probably going to be the only ones released in the US due to various copyright issuses that Japanese don't quite have to deal with.

Anyway for this game it follows the current standard SRW tropes of having super deformed mechs. It confronts you straight up with the most important choice you can make of determine who your main character should be. The choices are Kyosuke of the ATX team, or Ryusei of the SRX team. Both picks have their plus and minuses (the main plot difference is that the ATX team is fighting in space against the UCC while the SRX team fights the DC on the Earth), and to be told the first game is more of the SRX team story then it is of the ATX team, as the second game is heavily ATX focused.

But I like Kyosuke better, so I'm going to play him.

Thus without further ado.


Space! The final frontier. Men have finnaly built a spaceship to propel them to the outer edge of the system.

That doesn't look good ;(

Captain Daitetsu, he's the platonic idea of a anime space captain. He's pretty cool and ends up captaining the Hagane, which of course awesome looking sort of retro spacebattleship.

Sean Webbly, his XO, he's an ladies man.

Gigansucdo is the other blue object on the screen. Its a Super Robot, Earth's first actually, designed to be an anti-battleship unit.














By mid-game the enemies on the screen would be chaff for your weaker pilots, so yes we make them pay.






Pay attection to that, its important plot expostion, and Bian Zoldark is arugably the most important NPC of the game

Anyway the first mission premission plot appears. I had some screenshots but things got messed up so lets just cut here to Kyosuke talking with his current boss, Lt Colonel Hans.... Viper. Yes he is a villian.




Kyosuke: A test pilot who has experince in crashlandings and the devil's own luck is understandable wary of piloting a machine that is infamous for crashing. Of course this makes Col Hans angry.


















Its not quite clear why he does this. Or what he thinks he is going to get from trying to mess around with Mao Inc.




Irm. He's a quasi-miltary test pilot, son of a the main weapon designers at the very important resarch lab that makes the mecha, and sort of a Mao industries guy.








Haha, you're so predictably evil Hans
Here is a bit of a disjointed battle sequence due to the screen shot, but this shows the beginning menu. Notice the improbabilities of hitting? Attacking is simple, you fire your weapon and hope you don't get shot when they fire back at you. Defending is more complicated, you can counter attack, you can defend to mitigate damage that hits you, or you can attempt to dodge and lower the probability of getting hit.



Notice the tile map? Friendly units blue, and you can move around on it, various features give bonsus to hit rates, repair HP and energy.

Anyway when you do a high powered attack, often the pilot's face will appear followed by the attack.


An powerfu beam attack hits. Notice the bars up on the top? The top bar is HP, and bottom is energy. Energy is used for onboard energy weapon systems, flying, and shields. Important bosses often have shields, so you have to drain their energy before you can start hurting them.






After you defeat an enemy, you get money and XP. Pilot points are used to improve your pilot, money is used to buy upgrades or repairs to your units, and XP increases the pilot lvl automatically improving your pilot.

Here is the spirit command screen. As you gain in level you get to unlock more spirit commands, which help you. There SP bar is like MP, and probably the most oft used command is focus and flash. Focus decreases the enemy hit rate while increasing your own, and flash gives you an single perfect dodge on the next attack. You can only do spirit commands when its your turn to move the unit.

I used focused in this battle, and notice how the probabty of hitting is different then from before?

Battle Mastery's are important, basically they are bonus goals. If you achieve several of them you can unlock hidden units, items, as well as make the game more difficult.
















Who didn't see this coming? The unstable robot plane crashing?!






Ring Mao is Irm's former girlfriend, and CEO of Mao. This is why Irm gets so pissed off.












And when you do a mission you are brought to this screen. Here you can upgrade the base unit, the weapons on the unit, change pilots of different units or upgrade them, save your game and then move on to the next level.

Whew. This was alot of work for a comparatively short mission, but admittedly the main holdup was not playing through, but the uploading of the pictures.

Anyway if anybody has suggestions of how to go, let me know. Also as a warning I'm not that good at this game, so I might give myself a bit of advantage if I get stuck.