Gameplay: Great
Story: Great though it's too long.
Controls: Great
Graphics: Great, some of the combat animations are recycled but it's still great.
Length: TOO LONG!!!
Characters: Great. A lot of legacy characters have returned.
Mechanics: The return of Supporters are great, but there's just too many. lol
Best Girl: Mitsuba Greyvalley
Story: Great though it's too long.
Controls: Great
Graphics: Great, some of the combat animations are recycled but it's still great.
Length: TOO LONG!!!
Characters: Great. A lot of legacy characters have returned.
Mechanics: The return of Supporters are great, but there's just too many. lol
Best Girl: Mitsuba Greyvalley
There's clearly a bit of thought put into this that isn't put into a lot of the modern srws but it just doesn't fully connect in a way that makes it feel like a waste of time.
VOTOMS... save me..
VOTOMS
Save me VOTOMS
VOTOMS
Save me VOTOMS
My introduction to Super Robot Wars. It's a solid game. One of the craziest cast lists in the series in terms of licensed entries. Pretty good OG characters. The non-linear mission order combined with the massive amount of missions makes the story a bit weak compared to other games in the series.
This review contains spoilers
unironically the hypest gameplay moment was beating the final boss by refreshing CHOUDENJIII SPIN like five times in one turn. was great. highly recommend. also theres really good character interactions and stuff
My first SRW game and I utterly adore it. Took me months to finish because I was pausing it left and right to watch every new show (or manga with getter) as soon as it’s characters appeared. Because of this I feel so connected to this game and I’ll always be greatful to it for that (I’ve started V and I’m already watching all of Yamato so another 6 month grind time 🔥)
The first Super Robot Wars title to get a release outside of Japan and Korea in about 19 years, and unfortunately probably the worst one in some time with the most paid DLC. For the 30th anniversary the main included series are pretty disappointing with a lot of fairly weak side characters and mechs taking up a lot of space and a major problem being that almost none of the series lead to interesting enemy units, which is made even worse by the main antagonist forces being the same dull unmanned drones over and over and over again. Even the hidden characters that require you to fulfill certain conditions or to play secret stages to unlock them often come with some of the most boring units in the game. The free and paid DLC will provide a large number of additional, and often more interesting characters and mechs (as well as a few upgrades for existing characters) but the amount of DLC and the way missions are handled cause this game to long overstay its welcome with repetitive time wasting stages.
You are able to choose what missions you go on with different chapters giving you different main and side missions and a few secret missions, this wouldn't matter much until you end up with dozens of dull DLC character pick up missions and dozens of dull simulator missions you can play. The sheer number of missions and way everything is handled means that, as easy as the recent titles have been since the PS4 releases, your characters will now have such massively high levels (I finished the main game with most characters being between 150-170, about 100 levels higher than most other series end games), so many equipment options, so much money for upgrades, so much experience for pilot skills, combined with the new support system where you can choose side characters to activate useful or powerful abilities that there is no challenge at all to be found in the game. Unless you get the DLC that adds the hardest difficulty option. Enemies level up along with you but as anyone who plays the series knows your pilots strength is in their upgrades, equipped parts, and in the amount of SP they have for pilot skills. When you add in free and paid DLC units and parts, finding a difficulty with any kind of balance is going to be the most challenging feature of the game.
Unit wise, on the positive side some of the new playable series have some fun units. SSSS.GRIDMAN was a fun unit, about half of the Majestic Prince units were solid with the rest lacking attack variety. The Getter Robo Devolution, Sakura Wars, ULTRAMAN, and Iron Blooded Orphans were solid DLC adds. Heavy Metal L-Gaim has been gone for a bit and has the problem a lot of real robot series with a lot of characters do where the main unit is good and you get a couple ok other ones but most are very lacking in what they can do. Definitely don't care to see Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative again, and would have been nice to have ZZ Gundam or Unicorn taking its spot, extremely mediocre units for the series pilot and then Banagher from Unicorn shows up in a dull unit near the end of the game. Was strange for the the Victory Gundam Shrike Team to have a more central role, considering most of them died so fast they don't really have any personalities in the anime, they seemed to just really like joking that they all died in the series with frequent nods to them all still be alive or being turned down when asking other women to join their unit. Characters like the Shrike Team could be interesting if they gave the three pilots from the much larger team that you could control unique abilities that utilized the other characters in special moves or more than just one of their attack animations tied to one of the weakest unit types in the game. The main characters original unit is probably the most uninteresting that I've seen, though you are almost never forced to use the main character in battles, not even for the final stages.
Not a bad playthrough if focused on the main missions but long overstays its welcome if you are playing with all the DLC like I did or if you are doing the side simulator missions (which for the most part I did not do as there wouldn't be a narrative interest or challenge to them). The story itself can manage to be surprisingly decent in some of the SRW titles where the series they bring together work well to focus on a certain type of narrative, this one mostly lacks that but does allow for some amusing moments at least. Hoping they don't go this choose your own mission route again and go back to the old style of mission progression, and that if we keep doing DLC missions they do that in the more recent game way where you have set units at a set level and are just playing for story and maybe part rewards instead of causing unbalance.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1544220076089323521
You are able to choose what missions you go on with different chapters giving you different main and side missions and a few secret missions, this wouldn't matter much until you end up with dozens of dull DLC character pick up missions and dozens of dull simulator missions you can play. The sheer number of missions and way everything is handled means that, as easy as the recent titles have been since the PS4 releases, your characters will now have such massively high levels (I finished the main game with most characters being between 150-170, about 100 levels higher than most other series end games), so many equipment options, so much money for upgrades, so much experience for pilot skills, combined with the new support system where you can choose side characters to activate useful or powerful abilities that there is no challenge at all to be found in the game. Unless you get the DLC that adds the hardest difficulty option. Enemies level up along with you but as anyone who plays the series knows your pilots strength is in their upgrades, equipped parts, and in the amount of SP they have for pilot skills. When you add in free and paid DLC units and parts, finding a difficulty with any kind of balance is going to be the most challenging feature of the game.
Unit wise, on the positive side some of the new playable series have some fun units. SSSS.GRIDMAN was a fun unit, about half of the Majestic Prince units were solid with the rest lacking attack variety. The Getter Robo Devolution, Sakura Wars, ULTRAMAN, and Iron Blooded Orphans were solid DLC adds. Heavy Metal L-Gaim has been gone for a bit and has the problem a lot of real robot series with a lot of characters do where the main unit is good and you get a couple ok other ones but most are very lacking in what they can do. Definitely don't care to see Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative again, and would have been nice to have ZZ Gundam or Unicorn taking its spot, extremely mediocre units for the series pilot and then Banagher from Unicorn shows up in a dull unit near the end of the game. Was strange for the the Victory Gundam Shrike Team to have a more central role, considering most of them died so fast they don't really have any personalities in the anime, they seemed to just really like joking that they all died in the series with frequent nods to them all still be alive or being turned down when asking other women to join their unit. Characters like the Shrike Team could be interesting if they gave the three pilots from the much larger team that you could control unique abilities that utilized the other characters in special moves or more than just one of their attack animations tied to one of the weakest unit types in the game. The main characters original unit is probably the most uninteresting that I've seen, though you are almost never forced to use the main character in battles, not even for the final stages.
Not a bad playthrough if focused on the main missions but long overstays its welcome if you are playing with all the DLC like I did or if you are doing the side simulator missions (which for the most part I did not do as there wouldn't be a narrative interest or challenge to them). The story itself can manage to be surprisingly decent in some of the SRW titles where the series they bring together work well to focus on a certain type of narrative, this one mostly lacks that but does allow for some amusing moments at least. Hoping they don't go this choose your own mission route again and go back to the old style of mission progression, and that if we keep doing DLC missions they do that in the more recent game way where you have set units at a set level and are just playing for story and maybe part rewards instead of causing unbalance.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1544220076089323521
GOLDION
FINGER!!!!!
FINGER!!!!!
Getter Robo is in the game
This review contains spoilers
There will most certainly be an Expansion Story like for T so yeah, for now this is the score.
Sasuga SRW30, here's to your game format to be used in future titles, cheers
Sasuga SRW30, here's to your game format to be used in future titles, cheers
sheeeeeeeesh
After 30 years it’s finally here. The first ever mainline Super Robot Wars game to be localized in the west. The legendary playground of giants has long been known as the meeting place of the titans of mecha anime, and 30 is no exception.
Of course since the draw of SRW is the crossover aspect, i figure it’s best to get the gameplay out of the way as soon as possible. The game starts rather slowly but does a good a job of letting you learn on your own, as opposed to being too handholdy. SRW is one of those japanese games that usually relies on overwhelmingly the player with as many options as they can, and trying to keep a consistent stream of new options all opening up until the end of the game. By the time you fully understand what you’re working with the credits are already rolling, that’s SRW.
What SRW ALSO is, is a strategy game, not the best, not the worst. I’d say that, on normal difficulty atleast, the game’s combat can be quite dull. There is a certain level of tedium that comes from doing 30 hours worth of maps that have little variation in them, even the variety in ememies is quite pithy. What i did find pretty engaging is just how many different factors can go into a unit being good, that makes units that feel like they’d just be disposable in other games, feel useful useful in this game. In any crossover game balance between characters is imperitive because people are going to naturally gravitate towards the characters that they know. It’s a simple game to play, but i never felt it was bad.
I feel like i have to go into detail about the presentation, because SRW 30’s is all over the place, there’s less than 0 consitency here. Most of the game is set up with a visual novel-esque interface, static portraits on static backgrounds with occasional voice acting. Sometimes it’ll try and do far more with what it has than it’s feasibly capable of doing, a lot of big storyline moments can come out feeling kind of goofy because of this, but i can’t say whether or not that’s a bad thing. The thing that really gets me is that all the characters are presented in the art styles of their original series, so you get a LOT of clashing of styles. Occasionally the game will just straight up pull clips from the original series’ represented, and that’s both cool and silly due to how low-quality those clips are, J-Decker doesn’t have a blu-ray from the looks of it.
The animations of the game are a weirdly large drawing point, i never got the hype for them but the videos of them being compiled on youtube are all the most viewed SRW videos of all time, by far, so i guess they are one of the main draws for a lot of people. It’s still incredibly impressive how many of them there are, and how they interact with each other.
What’s rare for a crossover game is the story is the draw, SRW has always been the holy grail of crossover games, it takes all these different characters and different universes and mashes them together in order to try and tell a coherent story. I think that it does exceptionally well with this because of how attatched i got to the characters i knew, the characters i knew OF, and the original characters. I love this games story.
It really is like watching 36 different shows at once, and trying to include as much as possible from so many different universes can cause some issues, namely the pacing which is admittedly bizarre in nature, stories are started, stalled, and ended with seemingly unknowable intn=entions.
Of course i watched a few of these shows in order to “prepare” for the game, and i think i can claim that this game does a great job of adding onto what i already know, making me like the characters i like more and being invested in their new relationships, as well as making me feel something for characters that i’m only just now being introduced to. Even the themes of these series’ are represented in a way so as to “harmonize” with each other. It’s genuinely very impressive, impressive enough to earn it’s spot on my Top 10 list. It’s a very simplistic game, but it has overflowing soul.
Of course since the draw of SRW is the crossover aspect, i figure it’s best to get the gameplay out of the way as soon as possible. The game starts rather slowly but does a good a job of letting you learn on your own, as opposed to being too handholdy. SRW is one of those japanese games that usually relies on overwhelmingly the player with as many options as they can, and trying to keep a consistent stream of new options all opening up until the end of the game. By the time you fully understand what you’re working with the credits are already rolling, that’s SRW.
What SRW ALSO is, is a strategy game, not the best, not the worst. I’d say that, on normal difficulty atleast, the game’s combat can be quite dull. There is a certain level of tedium that comes from doing 30 hours worth of maps that have little variation in them, even the variety in ememies is quite pithy. What i did find pretty engaging is just how many different factors can go into a unit being good, that makes units that feel like they’d just be disposable in other games, feel useful useful in this game. In any crossover game balance between characters is imperitive because people are going to naturally gravitate towards the characters that they know. It’s a simple game to play, but i never felt it was bad.
I feel like i have to go into detail about the presentation, because SRW 30’s is all over the place, there’s less than 0 consitency here. Most of the game is set up with a visual novel-esque interface, static portraits on static backgrounds with occasional voice acting. Sometimes it’ll try and do far more with what it has than it’s feasibly capable of doing, a lot of big storyline moments can come out feeling kind of goofy because of this, but i can’t say whether or not that’s a bad thing. The thing that really gets me is that all the characters are presented in the art styles of their original series, so you get a LOT of clashing of styles. Occasionally the game will just straight up pull clips from the original series’ represented, and that’s both cool and silly due to how low-quality those clips are, J-Decker doesn’t have a blu-ray from the looks of it.
The animations of the game are a weirdly large drawing point, i never got the hype for them but the videos of them being compiled on youtube are all the most viewed SRW videos of all time, by far, so i guess they are one of the main draws for a lot of people. It’s still incredibly impressive how many of them there are, and how they interact with each other.
What’s rare for a crossover game is the story is the draw, SRW has always been the holy grail of crossover games, it takes all these different characters and different universes and mashes them together in order to try and tell a coherent story. I think that it does exceptionally well with this because of how attatched i got to the characters i knew, the characters i knew OF, and the original characters. I love this games story.
It really is like watching 36 different shows at once, and trying to include as much as possible from so many different universes can cause some issues, namely the pacing which is admittedly bizarre in nature, stories are started, stalled, and ended with seemingly unknowable intn=entions.
Of course i watched a few of these shows in order to “prepare” for the game, and i think i can claim that this game does a great job of adding onto what i already know, making me like the characters i like more and being invested in their new relationships, as well as making me feel something for characters that i’m only just now being introduced to. Even the themes of these series’ are represented in a way so as to “harmonize” with each other. It’s genuinely very impressive, impressive enough to earn it’s spot on my Top 10 list. It’s a very simplistic game, but it has overflowing soul.
sorry i adore this game so much??? i'm glazing so hard i'm normal about mecha stuff i swear i swear i'm normal
Has a LOT of content and is pretty solid. It also attempts to alleviate the 2 attack Robot Wars trend that has been bucking the series as of late.
However, the animations are lackluster and all over the place. Still, I must recognize the game for what it is, and I would have rated this 2 and a half if it were up to me, but it does have enough content to make it a solid recommend.
However, the animations are lackluster and all over the place. Still, I must recognize the game for what it is, and I would have rated this 2 and a half if it were up to me, but it does have enough content to make it a solid recommend.
This was my first SRW and it did not disappoint. The attack animations are extremely good and pleasing to look at. The mission structure is good but does get repetitive near the end. The game consisted of a very appealing roster and even got me to check out some anime like Gun X Sword and Majestic Prince. The OCs are also pretty cool, though I think the Huckebein 30th left a lot to be desired, even then it's still really cool.
Top animazioni, musiche e serie incluse.
Storia ok ma scritta bene.
Ottimo punto d'ingresso per chi non ha mai toccato un srw.
Storia ok ma scritta bene.
Ottimo punto d'ingresso per chi non ha mai toccato un srw.
alouette pommier and akane shinjo are in the same room
This game has the best turn-based combat of any game I've played because it lets me skip the animations so I can just get through each turn and onto the next one without seeing the same animations and hearing the same voice lines a million times. Also it has Sakura Wars characters in it.
it gets bonus points for doing a combined setting where everything pre-existed again instead of doing the "oh no all these unconnected series fell out of conveniently placed holes in space/time" thing they've been doing since Z2/L... and then the dlc dropped and lmao... but man...
modern srw attack animations aren't nearly as cool as they used to be, the detail level of the sprites stops them from moving around much and 80% of it is done with cut-ins and then there's gridman who's entirely just reanimated scenes from the anime with the enemy sprite in place of the kaiju
oh also it's been infected by the "everything is an open world videogame now" thing so it's extremely open ended and things get disjointed and there's like twice as many missions as a normal one of these would have had
modern srw attack animations aren't nearly as cool as they used to be, the detail level of the sprites stops them from moving around much and 80% of it is done with cut-ins and then there's gridman who's entirely just reanimated scenes from the anime with the enemy sprite in place of the kaiju
oh also it's been infected by the "everything is an open world videogame now" thing so it's extremely open ended and things get disjointed and there's like twice as many missions as a normal one of these would have had
Way too goddamn long
goOOOOOOOldion AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARMOOOOOOOOOOR
Despite it's almost complete lack of difficulty, it's immensely addicting. It's easy to spend hours just steamrolling the hundreds of enemies and leveling up my favorite robots with a smile on my face. The attack animations are great, especially some standouts like Amuro's all-range attack and shin getter's shine spark. I quite like a lot of the theme song arrangements too, though I got pretty sick of the first 5 seconds of the majestic prince OP in the early portion of the game. The betterman theme sounds awesome shut up it doesn't sound like farts.
The story is pretty enjoyable; I love the messy combination of all the different shows' timelines and there's a lot of fun and surprisingly natural interactions between the characters. Certain series interacting more closely than others like Gun x Sword with Code Geass ends up making a lot of sense and in that respect SRW30 succeeds in probably the most important aspect of crossover games. Unfortunately I did have to skip a decent amount of Majestic Prince and Rayearth scenes since I'm watching those and don't need the spoilers. There's also a tad too much focus on J-decker for my liking but it wasn't bad. The original characters are nothing remarkable but still solid with Az and Mitsuba being cute enough and Caruleum being a surprisingly enjoyable villain/rival with a decent amount of character development. The skits are really fun too with a lot of them featuring all the manly mecha pilots talking about how much they LOVE super robot wars.
Bringing up the skits reminds me of my disappointment regarding the game's presentation. Despite being a big deal with it being the 30th anniversary and the first non-OG SRW game to get a localization and even a PC port, there's 0 voice acting outside of battles and skits. I know there's a LOT of talking but they could've at least done it for the particularly important scenes. Also while it's obviously not as important as the battle scenes, some higher quality animations for the map would do wonders in making the game not feel so cheap considering it's what you're looking at for the vast majority of gameplay. At least add some small idle animations for the sprites or walking/flying animations. Speaking of maps, the mission map is the most pointless addition in the entire game. It's nothing but tedious to traverse and I practically never used it past the first few missions aside from checking out the DBD fairy a couple times. While I'm complaining, it's pretty annoying that the game encourages you to level whoever you want but on certain stages will not only force you to deploy certain units but will also toss them into the middle of a dozen enemies for story reasons. I barely leveled Red 5 or the Rayearth units but the game loved to toss them into mobs of enemies, often right next to stage bosses.
This is all paltry compared to the biggest complaint which is the dev team's abhorrent handling of the first DLC patch which introduced a slew of crashes into the game even for non-DLC owners. The most intimidating part of the final boss was the fact that he would instantly crash the game if he used his MAP attack which really killed the moment.
Overall though, I really did have a blast with the game and I'll happily play another SRW. I just hope the devs spread out the work put into presentation and pay some more attention to their patch work.
The story is pretty enjoyable; I love the messy combination of all the different shows' timelines and there's a lot of fun and surprisingly natural interactions between the characters. Certain series interacting more closely than others like Gun x Sword with Code Geass ends up making a lot of sense and in that respect SRW30 succeeds in probably the most important aspect of crossover games. Unfortunately I did have to skip a decent amount of Majestic Prince and Rayearth scenes since I'm watching those and don't need the spoilers. There's also a tad too much focus on J-decker for my liking but it wasn't bad. The original characters are nothing remarkable but still solid with Az and Mitsuba being cute enough and Caruleum being a surprisingly enjoyable villain/rival with a decent amount of character development. The skits are really fun too with a lot of them featuring all the manly mecha pilots talking about how much they LOVE super robot wars.
Bringing up the skits reminds me of my disappointment regarding the game's presentation. Despite being a big deal with it being the 30th anniversary and the first non-OG SRW game to get a localization and even a PC port, there's 0 voice acting outside of battles and skits. I know there's a LOT of talking but they could've at least done it for the particularly important scenes. Also while it's obviously not as important as the battle scenes, some higher quality animations for the map would do wonders in making the game not feel so cheap considering it's what you're looking at for the vast majority of gameplay. At least add some small idle animations for the sprites or walking/flying animations. Speaking of maps, the mission map is the most pointless addition in the entire game. It's nothing but tedious to traverse and I practically never used it past the first few missions aside from checking out the DBD fairy a couple times. While I'm complaining, it's pretty annoying that the game encourages you to level whoever you want but on certain stages will not only force you to deploy certain units but will also toss them into the middle of a dozen enemies for story reasons. I barely leveled Red 5 or the Rayearth units but the game loved to toss them into mobs of enemies, often right next to stage bosses.
This is all paltry compared to the biggest complaint which is the dev team's abhorrent handling of the first DLC patch which introduced a slew of crashes into the game even for non-DLC owners. The most intimidating part of the final boss was the fact that he would instantly crash the game if he used his MAP attack which really killed the moment.
Overall though, I really did have a blast with the game and I'll happily play another SRW. I just hope the devs spread out the work put into presentation and pay some more attention to their patch work.
Full video review: https://youtu.be/SkRYo-hj8LY
It took literally 30 years, but we finally got a Super Robot Wars game released in the West AND on Steam. I played and enjoyed Super Robot Wars V back on my Vita a few years ago, so I was excited to jump into this one.
Gameplay/Content
Super Robot Wars 30 is a strategy RPG done in the same style as games like Disgaea or Fire Emblem. You have a bunch of units on a grid-based map and shuffle them around, issue attack commands, and generally just duke it in these large-scale turn-based tactical battles. It’s a simple concept – one that hasn’t really changed over the years – but there’s a surprising amount of depth behind it all.
Morale, spirit commands, supporters, terrain adaptivity, ex actions, weapon properties, combination attacks – there is a LOT to this game and that’s all before you even get into pilot, ship, and mech customization. Honestly, it’s a bit intimidating if you’re a newcomer. There are a ton of menus to learn, the UI is cluttered, and the game’s tutorials are not all the greatest, but if you can get over that initial hurdle, then it’s a pretty good time.
I like to think of it as a more laidback, pick up and play for short sessions kinda game. Yeah, you can grind it out for hours on end just like in a lot of other Japanese SRPGs – and there’s easily 100+ hours of content here – but this is exactly the type of game I’m looking forward to playing on my Steam Deck in a few months. The gameplay strikes this nice balance between being this big complex strategy game and just being 100% mecha fanservice.
Mecha, Animations, Quality of Life
Earlier this year the series was granted the Guinness World Record for most intellectual property licenses used in an RPG, and it shows here. Super Robot Wars 30 has units from Gridman, Majestic Prince, Mazinger, Getter Robo Armageddon, Code Geass, the Brave series, all sorts of different Gundam series, and even a couple that I – a self-proclaimed mecha fanatic – was unfamiliar with, such as 1976’s Super Electromagnetic Robot Combattler V.
These all come with their own animations, music, and battle cutscenes, one of the highlights of the Super Robot Wars experience. Seeing your little chibi mechs go all out in these short battle cutscenes is some fun stuff – but of course, they can be toggled off once you get tired of them. The game has some other nice quality of life features like this too, such as auto-battle. That said, it’s also missing some essential ones like being able to see unit health bars at all times – no idea how they missed that one.
Story
I am not going to make the case that this story is well-written or even makes sense at times, but as some other Steam users brilliantly put it – it’s like a big, mecha fanfic that just so happens to have an actual budget behind it. It’s chaotic, it’s dumb, but at the end of the day, it’s an enjoyable mashup if you’re a mecha fan.
PC Port
The game supports up to 4k resolution, but the fps is capped to 60 and battle animations are capped to just 30. Controls on a controller are fine, but the keyboard and mouse support isn’t the best. There may be mouse support in the menus, but the default keyboard bindings are not intuitive in the slightest and were ultimately why I swapped to controller. Otherwise, the port works fine – I’ve seen others report crashes and such, but I didn’t have any of that.
Overall
In spite of its issues though – Super Robot Wars 30 is still definitely worthy of recommendation. Fun gameplay with a nice sense of complexity to it, a mountain of series cameos perfect for any seasoned mecha fan, and hours upon hours of content to play through. The initial learning curve is tough and the UI may be garbage, but if you’re a mecha fan – or even just an SRPG fan – it is worth a shot.
It took literally 30 years, but we finally got a Super Robot Wars game released in the West AND on Steam. I played and enjoyed Super Robot Wars V back on my Vita a few years ago, so I was excited to jump into this one.
Gameplay/Content
Super Robot Wars 30 is a strategy RPG done in the same style as games like Disgaea or Fire Emblem. You have a bunch of units on a grid-based map and shuffle them around, issue attack commands, and generally just duke it in these large-scale turn-based tactical battles. It’s a simple concept – one that hasn’t really changed over the years – but there’s a surprising amount of depth behind it all.
Morale, spirit commands, supporters, terrain adaptivity, ex actions, weapon properties, combination attacks – there is a LOT to this game and that’s all before you even get into pilot, ship, and mech customization. Honestly, it’s a bit intimidating if you’re a newcomer. There are a ton of menus to learn, the UI is cluttered, and the game’s tutorials are not all the greatest, but if you can get over that initial hurdle, then it’s a pretty good time.
I like to think of it as a more laidback, pick up and play for short sessions kinda game. Yeah, you can grind it out for hours on end just like in a lot of other Japanese SRPGs – and there’s easily 100+ hours of content here – but this is exactly the type of game I’m looking forward to playing on my Steam Deck in a few months. The gameplay strikes this nice balance between being this big complex strategy game and just being 100% mecha fanservice.
Mecha, Animations, Quality of Life
Earlier this year the series was granted the Guinness World Record for most intellectual property licenses used in an RPG, and it shows here. Super Robot Wars 30 has units from Gridman, Majestic Prince, Mazinger, Getter Robo Armageddon, Code Geass, the Brave series, all sorts of different Gundam series, and even a couple that I – a self-proclaimed mecha fanatic – was unfamiliar with, such as 1976’s Super Electromagnetic Robot Combattler V.
These all come with their own animations, music, and battle cutscenes, one of the highlights of the Super Robot Wars experience. Seeing your little chibi mechs go all out in these short battle cutscenes is some fun stuff – but of course, they can be toggled off once you get tired of them. The game has some other nice quality of life features like this too, such as auto-battle. That said, it’s also missing some essential ones like being able to see unit health bars at all times – no idea how they missed that one.
Story
I am not going to make the case that this story is well-written or even makes sense at times, but as some other Steam users brilliantly put it – it’s like a big, mecha fanfic that just so happens to have an actual budget behind it. It’s chaotic, it’s dumb, but at the end of the day, it’s an enjoyable mashup if you’re a mecha fan.
PC Port
The game supports up to 4k resolution, but the fps is capped to 60 and battle animations are capped to just 30. Controls on a controller are fine, but the keyboard and mouse support isn’t the best. There may be mouse support in the menus, but the default keyboard bindings are not intuitive in the slightest and were ultimately why I swapped to controller. Otherwise, the port works fine – I’ve seen others report crashes and such, but I didn’t have any of that.
Overall
In spite of its issues though – Super Robot Wars 30 is still definitely worthy of recommendation. Fun gameplay with a nice sense of complexity to it, a mountain of series cameos perfect for any seasoned mecha fan, and hours upon hours of content to play through. The initial learning curve is tough and the UI may be garbage, but if you’re a mecha fan – or even just an SRPG fan – it is worth a shot.
This game has Erica from Sakura Wars, so it automatically is a top tier game