For a pretty long time now I've been meaning to put together my thoughts on Super Robot Wars 30, so here goes. I bought the game and all of its DLCs off a Steam Sale, and I've done a story-complete playthrough once. It's the first International era SRW I've played, and my primary impression was that it's an SRW blighted by some very common illnesses of modern gaming. Let's remember that these games are fundamentally 1) linear 2) story & character driven 3) turn-based 4) single player experiences. Despite this, SRW 30 features a busywork-laden semi-open world and has a heavy focus on DLC content, which includes a lot of new characters and a lengthy epilogue story. As you might guess, this combination makes for a wobbly marriage.
The thing with Super Robot Wars is that people love the franchise because it's an IP mash-up fever dream that is somehow real and official. To put it bluntly, it gets a lot of passes by the virtue of simply existing because its existence is a miracle of the universe. But here's some tough love from a fan: It's a kusoge-adjacent franchise. There's a decent core of a tactical RPG there, but I don't think it's ever been truly polished to a mirror sheen. The early games tended to be ball-bustingly Nintendo hard due to their archaic game mechanics, and the new games are so easy they trivialize themselves.
The difficulty really is the main problem, and I say this as a non-gamer who has mainly just played a handful of SRWs over the decades. With 30, balancing and balance playtesting seem to have been completely ignored in the development process. Knowing that these games are notoriously easy, I chose to play it on Expert difficulty. Now, to give credit where credit is due, this entry at least features a normal difficulty selector instead of the confounding mastery point system which turned game difficulty into a craftable resource. However, choosing Expert difficulty was a mistake, as it seems to simply apply a blanket stat buff on all enemies. They hit really hard, which is good, as hard-hitting enemies force the player to expend their resources, and the tactical gameplay aspect of SRW is based first and foremost on resource management rather than unit placement. But what is less cool is that alongside damage rates, the enemy accuracy also gets buffed something fierce, to the point that dodging is just straight out of the question. The only characters who consistently had worthwhile natural dodge rates were Amuro and Ernie and maybe the Ultramen on a good day, and everyone else played like a super robot, i.e. tanking shots to the face. It was pretty wild playing an SRW game where the mainstay spirit command "focus" is completely useless because it does dick all against the supernaturally accurate enemies. So the entire real robot half of the mecha formula goes down the toilet, making the gameplay feel horrifyingly samey and sloggy.
Nobody being able to dodge things caused some fucky moments during scripted sequences where you're supposed to survive some turns with only one or two units before reinforcements arrive. There's a boring filler mission where Quattro visits Axis alone and gets jumped by a Zanscare squad, and the idea is that you're supposed to thin their ranks by using the Hyaku-Shiki Kai's map attack. I'm sure it works like intended on Normal and Easy difficulties, but on Expert you'll have to run away like a headless chicken, which is just fantastically non-heroic. Similarly, by going into some filler content rabbit holes you can unlock your OG character's sibling, and they have an entire post-game story arc to themselves, which is nice. Too bad they're also alone and facing a small army of level-matched super mooks, and both siblings pilot Huckebeins, which are real robot Gundam clones that can't tank hits. I did some testing, and this seems to be the only part of the game that is intended to be balls hard even on Normal difficulty, and on Expert this bonus content is nigh unplayable without major min-maxing and item abuse. While I aimed for 100% story completion, by this point I had already clocked in over 300 hours with the game, so when it started asking for more grinding during post-game, I just skipped this piece of side content and I watched a playthrough of it on Youtube.
Despite dodging now being a non-mechanic, outside of a handful of scripted moments the game was still pathetically easy, and there are multiple reasons behind that. I can't personally verify this, but I've read 30 simply copies its player powerscaling math from the previous International era titles, but because 30 is a grievously overlong game and the scaling hasn't been adjusted accordingly, the player team hits godlike levels way before the story is even starting to wrap up. The DLC units come with strong items and free money, so that's a big buff early on. A lot of the difficulty bleeds out from thousands of cuts caused by well-meaning quality of life updates that the series has accumulated over the years. This might be a hot take, but I actually appreciate the ability to cast spirit commands on enemy turns. It helps to avoid cheap game overs from unpredictable enemy turn enemy spawns, but this ability is not balanced like the last resort life-saver it should be. There should be a penalty for taking this way out. Perhaps the spirits could be twice as expensive when not cast on your own turn or something. Similarly, let's consider the supporter mechanic. It turns select non-combat NPCs that you have hanging around on your capital ships into cheerleaders that can affect the outcome of battles by granting more buffs to your combatants; a great idea, and anime-accurate to boot. The problem is, the enemies have nothing comparable in their arsenal.
The biggest offender causing the game to be so morbidly easy is its terrible mission variety. It is just bafflingly awful. This game has hundreds of different missions, and almost all of them boil down to "kill all hostiles". When your team starts to get good at the whole killing thing, the game should start throwing curveballs and demanding more. Some big bosses come with scripted blanket debuffs, but even basic things like time limits, area or NPC defense requirements, unlimited mook waves, actual area hazards and cruel and esoteric traps are seldom if ever used, even though they are exactly the sort of things that can still offer challenge even when your guys have become deadly. Furthermore, since it's an open world game of sorts, there are no route splits so you'll always have access to all of your dudes, so you never have to break your doomstack apart. I can't understand why the difficulty situation has to be like this. You'd think a turn-based game would be easier to balance than a twitchy shooter or a Souls clone. It ruins my power fantasy when there's no pushback.
There are other things that reek kusoge-adjacent as well. Asset recycling has always been one of the franchise's biggest sins, and these days it's supposedly exacerbated by the difficulty of developing HD sprite graphics. As a result, the individual games rarely feel like these big and fresh events because even the cast lists are so recycled. The recent SRW Y announcement felt like a joke with its roster reveal. But the recycling problem affects even unassuming game assets like the static backgrounds in the visual novel talking scenes. The same cityscapes are reused over and over again all across the solar system, and the biggest howler is Mars having Earth's night sky graphics with the full moon and everything.
The isometric combat arenas look like featureless shit from the PS2 era, and even they get reused many times over different missions. The canned battle animations do have flair, but I hate how the modern visual style of SRW seems to be running away from the bold super deformed style of old. Why should manly badass robots look like cute chibis, one might ask, but the answer is simple: it gives the otherwise incoherent IP potpourri a consistent visual identity so it doesn't
look like Mugen. Personally, I also think it helps to heighten the inherent absurdity of the crossover concept. A new dynamic entry system has been introduced in the battle scenes where some units start their animation from a non-static position, which is theoretically intriguing but completely half-baked at this stage. And since the mechs are less stylized, inconsistencies between them in model and animation quality are more pronounced.
Sometimes the kusoge flavoring is there in the very programming. For example, the hit percentage indicator has received a very nice quality of life update in that it now tells if the next attack is going to down the target. This is a godsend in the modern era when almost all bosses tend to have high levels of prevail, making killshot estimations very difficult. However, in true shovelware fashion, this simple feature is borked. There's a smaller number below the hit percentage showing critical hit chance,
but this indicator does not tell if it's a lethal crit, and this has led to many a surprise kill. How did the playtesting process miss such an oversight that affects every attack made?
In summary, as a game, Super Robot Wars 30 is a bit of a shit, but these things shouldn't be considered primarily as games but rather fanservice delivery systems anyway. So, how's the fanservice then? Unfortunately, the crossover story falls squarely into the "nothing special" category. The series roster doesn't lead into any particularly strong synergies, and the different villains don't do anything interesting together, so your dudes are just traveling around and slapping down individual baddie factions and lugging around an entire game roster's worth of DLC tourists who literally crawled out of plot holes. Of course, the nondescript story might be a result of the game's open-world structure which necessitates that important plot developments remain on hold until the player chooses to enter a key mission node. In fact, gigantic chunks of the story are completely skippable if all you do is go from a key mission to key mission. I guess doing that would make the game significantly more challenging levelling-wise, but it feels such an anti-SRW thing to do. As fun as the big moments are, a major part of the appeal has always been the downtime between the missions when the characters just get to hang out and eat and train and banter. It's an all you can eat shawarma buffet with The Avengers, and even with a lackluster overall story, the moment-to-moment character stuff is often magical. This is a very flawed game franchise, but its biggest strength is that it understands this character appeal. When a character becomes an ace pilot in 30, you receive a trivial monetary reward, but the real reward is a small ace dialogue between the character and the chosen original protagonist. And every unit's main pilot gets one, even the lowliest of Gundam grunts. Even when SRW writing is nothing special, it often features dedication that's not found in the other aspects of the whole.
And even in a lesser SRW game sometimes the elements just align well and result in good individual stages, and I'm going to list some of my faves:
- The
Magic Knight Rayearth finale, wherein the game grudgingly grants the player a proper multi-stage boss fight because the source material necessitates it.
- The Kailash Geary thunder run, a massive breakthrough battle fought under a time limit. What do you know, some actual mission design resulting in some actual stakes.
- Deep Recon: another mission design high point, this time a mostly legit escort mission. Almost shits itself though because some brain genius decided the player shouldn't be able to repair the units that need to be guarded.
- The Alien Barak surprise on the Andes, basically a super mook boss fight with an exceptionally pretty battle background.
- The Cybertruck clusterfuck in Athens would have been a fun stage against a proper miniboss swarm... until the minibosses get cold feet and just run away.
And the crown jewel, perhaps the best-written level of them all, even if it does take place on a nondescript lawn: the combined
J-Decker/Rayearth II finale. Sometimes the synergy is there. Just full of bonkers crossover twists, and since the enemies' microchip shenanigans sap your morale, it isn't a total curbstomp battle either. It's the sort of level that reminds a jaded fan why this series can be so damn cool sometimes.
As a side note,
Knights and Magic gets done dirty in this game, despite it being a debuting series. I'm not saying the anime was anything to write home about, but at least its finale took place amidst some very handsome-looking fantasy vistas with moonlit castles. In SRW 30, the Knights and Magic finale takes place above a parking lot in Detroit. And no, it's not a parking lot flanked by a Medieval Times and two White Castles. That would have been a hoot actually.
Another dumb thing is Banagher. He joins the crew very late, and he's the worst-written part of the entire game. He acts weird and creepy and never mellows out, and he has a really embarrassing-looking character sprite because he never removes his pilot suit and helmet. He makes the Bettermen look comparatively chill. A small but tragic character writing misfire.
The big question then: is the game worth your time and money? If you take advantage of sales, it probably is worth your money, but considering its ginormous length and repetitive nature, it being worth your time depends on, as always, how much you enjoy the featured IPs. When I originally started to write up my thoughts about the game, I would've said its biggest draw is featuring the sequel story to both
GaoGaiGar Final and
Betterman, but looks like the manga has finally been fully translated recently, so that is obviously the better way to experience that miracle long in the making. If you just want to play an English-translated Super Robot Wars game to experience a cultural thing, the far superior option is the fan-translated Super Robot Wars W on Nintendo DS. It has a story with great roster synergy, a bold structure with an intermission and a time skip, and a coherent crossover world with no lazy dimensional shenanigans. And like a 30-year-old niche nerd franchise should, it relies heavily on beautifully esoteric source materials like
Gundam Seed Astray and
Detonator Orgun (!). It's still easy, but it's SRW firing on all cylinders and focusing on its core competencies. It's good stuff.
