April 1991. The Japanese game company Banpresto makes a game for the Nintendo Gameboy, with bare-bones plotline, no dialog in the slightest, and nothing but lots of Super Robots and Real Robots. The original Super Robot Wars.
Sixteen years later, in December of 2007, they produced the fourth installment in the Original Generation Universe, Super Robot Wars Original Generation Gaiden, featuring a spiraling cast of dozens, well over 100 hours of gameplay, and a story involving invasions by more than three seperate yet equally villianous groups. Walls of text are everywhere, yet the gripping nature of the plot never makes reading the lines seem tedious. Sacrifices are made, heroes become villians and vice-versa, loose ends are tied up while several more continue to dangle, and people are left wanting more. A lot more.
The series has come a long way for a franchise trapped in Japan due to licensing issues until the Original Generations series was made. Banpresto has made incredible game after incredible game, including various serieses ranging from the well-known Gundam metaseries, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Mazinger Z, and Getter Robo... as well as some lesser known anime and manga like Big O, Daitarn 3, Aura Battler Dunbine, and even the series Voltron was based on. All the while, Banpresto has included original characters time and time again, each one just as deep as the pre-existing ones, and any similarities can be chalked up to being homages rather than rip-offs.
Most of the games in the series are fairly episodic, although there have been some lengthy timelines. The "Classic Timeline" was depicted on the Super Nintendo and Sony Playstation, consisting of five seperate games, while the "Alpha Timeline" was tetrology of games on the Playstation 1 and Playstation 2. The "Compact Trilogy" was a triplet of games on the handheld Wonderswan that told an absurdly long story as well, and then there is the Original Generation story, which takes all of Banprestos original characters, and throws them together in a brand new continuity that is easy to distribute out there.
The series is a turn-based strategy game like Fire Emblem or Advanced Wars, but differs itself due to the upgradable nature of the pilots and machines both, and how various characters can pilot various machines. The gameplay is also very merciful, and losing a character merely costs you money for a repair fee at the end of a level. The non-OG games also included villians from pre-existing series, so by the end of Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, you'd fought Ideon's Buff Clan, Kotetsu Jeeg's Ryuma Empire, the Angels and SEELE from Evangelion, the SMTC from Gunbuster, and dozens more groups.
I advise you to all at least take a look into it. There's a lot of depth to this series
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperRobotWars.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Char...sCharacterSheet
Super Robot Wars, I love the series with all my heart
Jul 15 2008, 8:22 PM
