I bought this game specifically to play it over the course of spring break, and now that I finally had all the game’s I’d set aside to specifically play with people all done, it was time to finally tackle this oddity. Something between a remake and a port of the original SRW Alpha, I’d always been at least somewhat curious about picking this up after playing through the original Alpha on PS1 a couple years back. It was a very interesting experience, and it was also extra cool to see how so many of these series are adapted in more detail now that I’ve actually watched a fair few of the series portrayed in this game. These games never record playtime, but it took me around a week and a half to play through it, so I reckon it took me at least 80 hours if not more. I played through the game as a male real robot pilot (as I did a female super robot pilot last time), and I did the Dreamcast-exclusive ending.

With Banpresto’s first turn at the wheel of making one of these SRW games themselves instead of just publishing them, they took a big swing at adapting a ton of licenses as well as tying in most all of the original content that Winkie Soft had thought up over the previous decade. What results is a big, new adventure where your created main character fights alongside the cast of Gundam, Getter Robo, Mazinger Z, and a big pool of other robot properties to defend Earth from the Ze Balmari Empire’s first big invasion against them. The writing is just as fun and good as it was the last time I played it. It’s definitely something a lot more enjoyable and engaging if you’re already familiar with the properties being adapted (I was impressed at just how deep they dug to adapt some scenes with new characters, honestly), but it’s still great fun even if you’re not familiar with mecha shows and just like big robots and silly crossover stories (as I very much do).

The Dreamcast-exclusive content was also very interesting, and it’s really not hard to see why it was included. It ties up some loose ends in the Neon Genesis Evangelion stuff and especially gives a proper conclusion to the Giant Robo stuff that is quite unresolved in the original game’s endings (though given that the original OVA series never quite ended either, that seemed appropriate at the time). Granted, by playing their hand for tying up the NGE ends too early, they unintentionally make an explicitly non-canon ending for the game (as it makes the return to NGE stuff that Alpha 3 does impossible), but there’s also clearly a greater motive at play. Having already played Alpha Gaiden (the PS1 game that sits between Alpha 1 and 2 in the series), it was difficult to ignore all of the proper nouns from that game’s plot that they mention here. By the end, it was very clear what they were trying to do. The Dreamcast-exclusive ending effectively exists so you have a clear narrative path that circumvents the events of Alpha Gaiden being necessary. This way, a Dreamcast owner didn’t need to have played Alpha Gaiden to just pick up a PS2 and hop right into Alpha 2 without being lost. Though, as mentioned earlier, that future proofing went a little bit haywire, it’s still a really cool new version of this story’s events, and it was very cool to go back and look at all of this as someone who’s already played through all four Alpha series games before.

Mechanically, this game is more or less identical to the original Alpha (so just looking back at my review of that will give you what this game has in good detail). It’s a turn-based strategy RPG with mechs and pilots, and mechs upgrade with money while pilots level up with EXP earned in battle. A neat feature is that mech weapons still upgrade individually rather than all at once like they did from Alpha Gaiden onwards, so that was a nice surprise. The game has all manner of unlockable characters and different routes you can do, and the network of long-term unlockable characters is still a nightmare to decipher just like in the original PS1 game even using a flowchart guide like I did.

The only actual additions/changes here are a couple of new units from another Banpresto-made SRW-like game, the addition of the team move mechanic (moves that two+ mechs can do when standing adjacent to one another) that was completely absent in the original game, and some spirit abilities (personal buff/debuff spells that each pilot has six of) being changed to reflect how they’d be in the PS2 games onward rather than how they were in the original PS1 game. I’d read in several places that this version of Alpha was considered the harder of the two, but my experience absolutely did not reflect that. If anything, the changes to spirit abilities makes them even stronger than they were before (and even the nerfed ones are only very slightly worse, if worse at all), and the team moves also make certain mechs like the EVAs far more powerful than they already were. That said, I’d still say this game is only slightly easier than its PS1 counterpart, and it’s already a fairly easy game on the whole anyhow. If you’re someone who likes Advance Wars or Fire Emblem-levels of complexity but wants something more forgiving while still feeling challenging (as I am), then this title is just as great as it ever was for that.

The aesthetics are overall quite good, which is a lot more than I was expecting! The biggest and most obvious difference between this and the PS1 game is that they completely redid all of the graphics for this version of the game. Of these, the element that stands out the most is that all of the 2D fight scenes have been redone in 3D, and while I expected them to look hideous (as the later 3D SRW games often do), they actually look really good! It really goes to show what you can accomplish when you put some time and money into modeling all of this stuff, but my assumption would be that it was so much time and money that that’s precisely why they never did this again XD. Outside of the battle scenes, all of the other graphics have been spruced up too, with units now changing direction upon moving on the isometric map screens (as they do in Alpha Gaiden forward but did not in the original Alpha) and everyone getting new character graphics too for the narrative scenes between battles (the same ones they’d continue to use for them all in Alpha 2 on PS2). Most of these new 2D assets are flat-out improvements, with tons of infamously weird looking sprites made far less dorky looking (like Kouji from Mazinger or Misato from NGE), and only a few rare examples of “why is that like that?” (like how Shinji and Ritsuko from NGE only have left-facing sprites and lack right-facing ones when they had both in the PS1 game).

The music is also very good, and it’s a lot of very good versions of the songs recreated from the animes present. This also features the very last time a karaoke mode appeared in a SRW game, though this one is just like the one in the original Alpha (complete with lacking battle scenes playing during the songs, unlike all other SRW game karaoke modes). The only real audio weirdness is that this lacks some songs that the original game had in the karaoke mode, such as, despite the Macross song “My Boyfriend is a Pilot” song being in the game still, it’s curiously absent from the karaoke mode.

The only real outright negative I can give for the presentation is the loading times. The original Alpha is famous and infamous for being the first SRW game to give you any option to skip battle cutscenes in maps while also having roughly 10-second-long loading screens for the battle scenes you actually choose to watch. This Dreamcast version does absolutely nothing to improve that, sadly, and likely as a result of just how nice and pretty those 3D cutscenes look (just as was the case with the very pretty 2D cutscenes in the original), we’re still stuck with 10 to 12 second loading times for each fight animation. It certainly would’ve been nice if they’d managed to shorten them some, but at least you can still skip them <w>.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Despite all of my expectations, this is a great version of a great game. While it does have meaningfully more content and outright better graphics in some places, I’d still hesitate to call this a truly definitive version if only because, while the 3D IS good, it’s not quite so good that it makes the original beautiful PS1 version’s 2D animations obsolete. Ultimately, which one looks better is likely the thing that will dictate which version you prefer, but you frankly can’t go wrong with either. Both are fantastic ways to enter the SRW franchise and great beginnings to the Alpha series, and they’re well worth checking out if you can understand enough Japanese to play them~.