Enjoying SRW Alpha so much, I didn’t waste any time getting to its sequel, which is not just also made by the same team at Banpresto, but it also is the last SRW game to be released on the original PlayStation. It understood it to use largely the same engine and a lot of assets from Alpha 1, so I didn’t think it could be that different, but I was ready to be wowed either way. I played through it on my PS2 in Japanese, and it once again doesn’t have a play time counter, so I’m gonna once again give a conservative guess of at least 50 hours for how long it took me to beat.

This is a fairly immediate sequel to Alpha, and it deals with the calamity unleashed by defeating the bad guys in the true ending of that game, namely the giant dimensional destruction wave slowly approaching Earth from out around Neptune. With the timer ticking slowly down, the Earth’s agencies and governments desperately try to get Project Aegis ready in time to protect the Earth and its surrounding space from the wave, but attacks and intervention from the Titans (yup, them lads from Zeta Gundam) causes things to go wrong, and a huge explosion ends up launching our heroes countless thousands of years into the future to a world slowly clawing back from the calamity they clearly failed to prevent. They must now battle the new forces of evil while trying to find some way of getting home, if such a thing even exists.

Despite the “gaiden” in the title, this is a pretty direct bit of story between Alpha 1 and 2, and is for all intents and purposes the real SRW Alpha 2, but that’s just splitting hairs :b. They decided to cut down the included series a bit from Alpha, and that choice combined with the base premise means most of the story is spent focusing on adapting three of the four new franchises to the series: Combat Mecha Xabungle, Gundam X, and Turn A Gundam, and they do a bang-up job of it! This is the first game in the series I’ve played where I’ve actually seen one of the animes in the source material (Turn A), and they do a great job of adapting it and meshing it with the other stories while also giving many of our heroes from the past some great story beats as well. This game definitely does a lot to show that less absolutely can be more in a crossover title like this, and combined with the almost total lack of Banpresto original characters (this game even foregoes a player avatar character) and great as ever fun, silly crossover indulgences, this is easily my favorite writing I’ve seen in the series so far.

The gameplay is very similar to Alpha (so I won’t belabor repeating all of that game’s mechanics here), but the changes here are once again very significant in how they shake things up. First of all is how the Skill Point system has been altered. The optional objectives are still unfortunately secret, but they determine not just whether or not you get certain secret characters and what ending missions you get, but they also actually live up to their Japanese name of “Difficulty Points” and dynamically determine the difficulty of the game. If you have below a certain (secret) threshold, you’re on easy. If you’re above that, you’re on normal, and if you’re above the upper threshold, you’re on hard. The difficulties don’t change THAT much, sans how tough bosses are, adding a few more or less normal enemies, and the ending you get (and that hard ending, the true ending, that I got is DAMN hard), but it’s another really smart refinement in letting the player make things just as hard as they want them to be (outside of the objectives still being secret, though at least they’re a lot easier to guess this time around).

The other changes are a little more minor but still important in their own ways. The least important of those is the bazaar that the Xabungle crew’s blue stones can be used to trade in. You can get new mechs and equippable items and sell old (sellable) ones, and while stuff from there is usually pretty not worth it, there are sometimes very beefy mechs for sale, and often very well worth it equippable items as well. Sure, you can only get blue stones when you’re fighting Xabungle enemies, but it’s a neat addition to the game’s economy on top of how grabbable crates on the map containing goodies of money, blue stones, or equippable items (something last seen in Super Robot Wars 4 on the SNES) have been readded to the game.

The most important minor change has to do with how this is the first game to remove the ability to individually upgrade weapons on mechs. Now all weapons are upgraded at once, and they’re pretty minor upgrades given how much money you’re spending on them, and I’d say it borders on almost never being worth it compared to just upgrading armor or agility with that money. This may not seem to be an important thing on the surface, but it very drastically changes how you gotta play the game if you’re a series veteran more used to trying for the harder objectives in the older games.

On the more positive side, this makes option objectives like Skill Points almost always somehow possible, since you can really be only so strong by a certain point, the game is generally well balanced enough that they’re always possible if you plan accordingly. On the less positive side, this breaks the back of how you used to be able to make heavy hitters, and some units (my old favorite of the Dancouga in particular ;w;) being far worse than they used to be on account of how it is now effectively impossible to just dump a lot of cash into a big unit’s scariest moves and let them go to town on the enemy. Units are now more than ever just as powerful as they are, with the most important determinant of that strength being what level they are compared to their opponent. It’s far from a problem, even in a more distanced subjective sense, but it’s absolutely a big change for how you have to play the games and use your money from this point on in the series.

As far as presentation goes, this is more or less on par with Alpha in most ways. On a note I was very personally happy with, the karaoke mode has never looked better, and between having battle animations during them (something Alpha’s karaoke mode omits most likely due to how long it takes to load them, if I had to guess) and the timing on the lyrics is, no matter how weird it is to say, the best karaoke mode in the games to date XD. Aside from that, the game generally just has a fair bit more music, with different units from the same series often getting different tracks from that series to help break up the tunes you’re hearing a bit.

The maps are still isometric, but there is a lot less map reuse in this one (which might be down to overall less missions and route splits than Alpha 1 had), which is nice to see, and units actually turn the direction they’re moving when moved instead of just hovering around like a chess piece like they did in Alpha (though there is still nothing mechanically determined by what direction they face). Battle animations are still very pretty, and while a lot of Alpha’s rougher models have been given new designs entirely, the battle animations look again better than ever. This also welcomely comes hand-in-hand with significantly shorter loading times compared to Alpha (5 or 6 seconds compared to 10+ seconds), though the game’s framerate even in maps takes a very significant hit. I didn’t hit any of them personally, but the game’s worse performance does come with an increased risk of the game crashing because of too many enemies on a couple of maps.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Alpha was pretty damn good, but I was blown away by just what an improvement Alpha Gaiden turned out to be. It’s a wonderful swansong for SRW on the PS1 and is, again, from the writing to the mechanics, easily the best game in the series up to that point. The best part about recommending this game is that it actually has an unofficial fan translation you can play it in! It’s not the best work I’ve ever seen (of the small amount I have seen), but it’s really great to be able to recommend a game so highly that the audience that reads these reviews actually has a good chance to play themselves for once x3