The one and only Super Robot Wars game for the Nintendo 64. This game's claims to fame are its 3D backdrops and deep scenario-branching system.
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Totally hooked on SRW even after playing through the F series, I immediately went out and found the next one released back then. Going to the N64, I knew that at least load times would be markedly faster, but I also figured there’d be more changes to come. Almost all the SRW games up until that point had been made not by Banpresto, but by Winky Soft. This was the first one by the new dedicated 3rd party, AI, and their approach to the series is decidedly different than their predecessors. Once again, this game doesn’t record playtime, so I can only guess how long I actually spent playing it over the 2 weeks it took me to beat this, but I reckon about 60 to 70 hours. I played through the original Japanese version on real hardware using a real robot start (to provide a bit of a change from last time).
SRW 64 takes a markedly different approach to the writing in its story than F/F Final did. Where that game was more hopping between the biggest bits of each of the myriad of stories represented in its narrative and had a much more fun and lighthearted tone, this game goes for a much more serious presentation to its story. The overall tone is much darker and more serious, but I don’t think it really works all that well. Partly because I think a good deal of the fun in SRW is in those more lighthearted and silly fan service moments where characters from different series get to bounce off each other in new and interesting ways, but it also has to do with how the story is constructed on a more fundamental level. SRW 64 exhaustively plays out the story of nearly every series represented in it, and this means there’s a TON of time dedicated to exposition exposition exposition. There were a small handful of silly moments that made me laugh, but most of my time with the story in this game was just sorta waiting for the next mission to start ^^;.
Mechanically, this is still very much the same SRW that we used to have (with discrete pilots and mechs, individually upgraded weapons and units, convoluted secret unit recruitment, anytime quicksaving, and no permadeath), but with a few new and important changes and spins on things. Most notable among outright new things is the paired unit system, where pilots who like each other (or sometimes just one pilot who likes another) will get a 30% bonus to attack and defense when standing within two tiles of each other. There aren’t many units who fall into these categories, but damn do they hit like a truck when they do. This also works really well with the general rebalancing that super robots and real robots have gotten in the favor of the former, so dodge tanks don’t dominate your strategy nearly as much as they used to, and the changes to enemy AI to make it actually take dodge chance into effect also makes dodge tanks nowhere near as invincible as they used to be.
The last most notable change comes from beginning to shift towards more varied mission objectives and shorter missions. You still can’t skip fight animations, and loading animations are indeed cartridge-fast, but missions in general don’t last nearly as long as there aren’t nearly as many units to kill. While F Final started towards more varied objective types, 64 goes even further, and it makes for a much more polished experience.
Presentation-wise, the game still looks nice, but it’s definitely a step down from the games available on CD-based consoles. No CD storage means no voice acting, and while there wasn’t exactly more than a handful of voiced story lines in previous games, you will notice the silence of battle barks very quickly, and it makes for a very uncanny experience. The renditions of the anime themes in this also aren’t terribly good arrangements either. Part of that might be due to being balanced for TV speakers rather than the headphones I usually use (as I found to be the case for at least one or two songs), but even with that, neither the audio or the visuals can really stand up to the earlier SRW offerings on CD-based consoles. That’s not to say this game is ugly or sounds awful, as it looks and sounds just fine, but it’s to drive home that the N64 was really not blowing anyone away with the SRW offering it got compared to what was available anywhere else.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I would put this even more hesitantly recommended than the F series of games on the Saturn and PS1. Even though there are a lot of factors that add general quality to the gameplay, the presentation is just as if not stronger than the draw of the mechanics in these games, to me at least, and the lackluster presentation really hurts this entry for me. Of course, this IS the N64, so RPG offerings of any stripe are slim pickings, so being a pretty decent one is something to be proud of, and if you can read Japanese and want to add a quite solid SRPG to your N64 library, this is a pretty good choice, but in the larger spectrum of SRW games, this one fails to impress where it really matters most in an era with a lot of steep competition on other consoles.
SRW 64 takes a markedly different approach to the writing in its story than F/F Final did. Where that game was more hopping between the biggest bits of each of the myriad of stories represented in its narrative and had a much more fun and lighthearted tone, this game goes for a much more serious presentation to its story. The overall tone is much darker and more serious, but I don’t think it really works all that well. Partly because I think a good deal of the fun in SRW is in those more lighthearted and silly fan service moments where characters from different series get to bounce off each other in new and interesting ways, but it also has to do with how the story is constructed on a more fundamental level. SRW 64 exhaustively plays out the story of nearly every series represented in it, and this means there’s a TON of time dedicated to exposition exposition exposition. There were a small handful of silly moments that made me laugh, but most of my time with the story in this game was just sorta waiting for the next mission to start ^^;.
Mechanically, this is still very much the same SRW that we used to have (with discrete pilots and mechs, individually upgraded weapons and units, convoluted secret unit recruitment, anytime quicksaving, and no permadeath), but with a few new and important changes and spins on things. Most notable among outright new things is the paired unit system, where pilots who like each other (or sometimes just one pilot who likes another) will get a 30% bonus to attack and defense when standing within two tiles of each other. There aren’t many units who fall into these categories, but damn do they hit like a truck when they do. This also works really well with the general rebalancing that super robots and real robots have gotten in the favor of the former, so dodge tanks don’t dominate your strategy nearly as much as they used to, and the changes to enemy AI to make it actually take dodge chance into effect also makes dodge tanks nowhere near as invincible as they used to be.
The last most notable change comes from beginning to shift towards more varied mission objectives and shorter missions. You still can’t skip fight animations, and loading animations are indeed cartridge-fast, but missions in general don’t last nearly as long as there aren’t nearly as many units to kill. While F Final started towards more varied objective types, 64 goes even further, and it makes for a much more polished experience.
Presentation-wise, the game still looks nice, but it’s definitely a step down from the games available on CD-based consoles. No CD storage means no voice acting, and while there wasn’t exactly more than a handful of voiced story lines in previous games, you will notice the silence of battle barks very quickly, and it makes for a very uncanny experience. The renditions of the anime themes in this also aren’t terribly good arrangements either. Part of that might be due to being balanced for TV speakers rather than the headphones I usually use (as I found to be the case for at least one or two songs), but even with that, neither the audio or the visuals can really stand up to the earlier SRW offerings on CD-based consoles. That’s not to say this game is ugly or sounds awful, as it looks and sounds just fine, but it’s to drive home that the N64 was really not blowing anyone away with the SRW offering it got compared to what was available anywhere else.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I would put this even more hesitantly recommended than the F series of games on the Saturn and PS1. Even though there are a lot of factors that add general quality to the gameplay, the presentation is just as if not stronger than the draw of the mechanics in these games, to me at least, and the lackluster presentation really hurts this entry for me. Of course, this IS the N64, so RPG offerings of any stripe are slim pickings, so being a pretty decent one is something to be proud of, and if you can read Japanese and want to add a quite solid SRPG to your N64 library, this is a pretty good choice, but in the larger spectrum of SRW games, this one fails to impress where it really matters most in an era with a lot of steep competition on other consoles.