Okay so here's the thing: Fire Emblem is already out, and it basically embarrasses the first Super Robot Wars game in almost every possible respect.

In some ways, this is an unfair comparison. The first Super Robot Wars game is on the Game Boy. It absolutely does not have the cartridge space to compete with a Famicom game as enormous as the first Fire Emblem. What it did have, or should have had, was control of its numbers. As a tactics game, Super Robot Taisen is very sloppy, and feels uncomfortably close to the Digimon Wonderswan games with their slow, basic slugfests. Attacks are all very similar and really only consist of damage, range, and accuracy. There are no situations analogous to one-shotting a Pegasus Knight with a single arrow, so there isn't really anything to watch out for. The battle is absolutely not going to turn on a dime if you find an opening or let your guard down. EXP comes at such a trickle that the player almost feels forced to pool it all into a single super-unit who then walks all over the rest of the game. Permadeath exists, as well as an RNG-based recruitment method to replenish your troops, but actually using these seems impractical. The odds are too low to justify spending the turns on recruiting some mook who will just be another mouth to feed precious EXP to. The underwhelming nature of these mechanics stings all the more in the near-total absence of story, another problem that is drastically more prevalent here than in any Fire Emblem.

Super Robot Taisen is in an awkward position. As a Game Boy game, it was perhaps always doomed to be a lesser experience that is trying its best to offset the distance between it and it's console competitor with the novelty of portability. Were I a mecha-anime watching child in the back seat of the family minivan in the early 90's (I was more of a monster-anime watching child in the LATE 90's) I would have played this without complaint, never finished it, and thought about it very infrequently. It would have been a somewhat cool but mostly unremarkable thing, like that GBC Yu-gi-oh game that still hangs out in my GBA travel pouch, sitting untouched as I instead repeatedly call upon the classics.

Interested in Star Control but haven't played it yet?
Maybe you’ve seen the franchise cited as an influence on Fallout or Mass Effect or Stellaris and want to see what it’s all about?

Check out this Prep Kit! It's got
- a two part game strategy column written by designer Paul Reiche for Computer Gaming World
- the game’s original pitch document (it was planned to be a modem game, on-line in 1990!)
- development sketchbooks FILLED with ideas and doodles from the team
- GDC 2015 ‘Classic Game Postmortem’
- …and way more!

I’ve compiled everything in one place to help take you back to 1990 and get you in that Launch Day mindset! Can you believe this is from the same Toys For Bob that came up with Skylanders? Check it out -

https://goatedquest.blogspot.com/2024/06/071-star-control-prep-kit.html

Let me help make every game you play feel brand new, no matter how old