Let's Play Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Part 1
Behold, the title screen! It's not much to look at. Why does it say "Taisen" instead of "Wars," you ask? Because Atlus is weeaboos, that's why. Even in Japan, despite the official title being Super Robot Taisen, I'm pretty sure it's generally been called "Wars" in additional Engrish
for forever. I am not sure why that is. But anyway, no big deal!
Obviously, I'm gonna be starting a New Game. I don't have the save file in this folder, so strictly speaking I can't Load or Continue anyway! Incidentally, the difference between those two is in where you saved--you can save properly at the base menu between stages, which is the save to which Load will take you, or stop things lazy-style in the middle of a battle and select Continue to get back to it once you're done going to the bathroom or whatever. I won't be using Continue much, as save states make it pretty superfluous.
And the first thing I see in a new game is this choice! The people have spoken in a surprising landslide; Ryusei it is.
THE SETTING
This griddy SRPG bullshit is what most of the gameplay looks like! Blue units are my mans, red are enemies. Yellow are alternatingly allied units and the third party in a three-way battle, depending on what the game feels like, but there are no yellow units here anyway. As you can see, the thing in the center (it's a battleship/carrier) and its buddy down and to the right are surrounded. And as some HIGH-BUDGET SPECIAL EFFECTS on the tiny blurry sprites (the camera even shakes!) demonstrate, the ship is under fire.
Name: Daitetsu Minase
Personality: Gruff (Good-hearted)
Label: Old Captain Guy
Combat Role: Battleship/Carrier Captain (Carriers deploy on every map if you have them, and their being shot down is always a losing condition.)
Comments: Daitetsu's usefulness is pretty irrelevant, as I have to use him anyway. Not gonna lie, in general I'm not crazy about battleships' usefulness. They can't hit anything by default and are mainly best left out of the action, despite having bigass weapons.
Name: Sean Webley
Personality: Flirtatious (Semi-classy)
Label: Dirty Old Man
Combat Role: XO (XOs are basically just copilots for captains, useful only for Spirits.)
Comments: Sean's usefulness is even less of an issue than Daitetsu's.
Dialogue! I will transcribe select bits of dialogue, summarize 90% of it (this game is insanely tl;dr), and in some cases make it up entirely! All actual quotes will be in italics in the unlikely event you can't tell the game's sense of humor from mine on your own. Sean talks about how fucked they are and Daitetsu namedrops something called "Giganscudo"--probably that other blue guy-- which according to Sean is equally fucked.
ALIENS
Just when we reached the outer rim of the solar system...
Thanks for the exposition on why we're out here, Captain.
Exposition is just another word for dialogue in this game, XO.
We desperately need to abscond.
Shouldn't we be perfectly capable of winning this fight? I mean, we have two decent units against a few of the weakest enemies in the game...
Shut up and abscond!
All hands, abscond like the wind!
TITLE CARD
Name: Elzam v. Branstein
Personality: Fabulous (Weird)
Label: Best Pilot In The Game
Combat Role: Being untouchable
Comments: I won't actually be keeping Elzam immediately after this chapter, but I'll get him back eventually, and thank God for that. The game just decided to do Ryusei's prologuey bit in style.
A change of scenery! To elsewhere in space. So really it's largely the same scenery. Elzam and this generic NPC talk about the boring military exercise they are doing until they namedrop the mecha Elzam is test-piloting: the Gespenst Mk. II! Gespensts are pretty much the standard starter machines in this game, and I'll be stuck with them main characterwise for the early part. In response, Elzam namedrops one Colonel Kar-Wai as being responsible for recent upgrades to the Gespenst's design. Kar-Wai will not be relevant in any way to anything in this game definitely.
I like horses. You know, not in a furry way, just in the way that I base much of my personality around it. Stop judging me!
can do, Major.
Kirk is an important enough character to have a name and a character design, but not important enough for a fancy character intro. Deal with it.
Some more of the space aliens that were blowing up Daitetsu and Sean teleport in, surprising the shit out of everybody! Only about five of them, but this scene has a shittier mecha and a shittier carrier than the last one, so this doesn't look good.
Unless someone threw out a bunch of giant, teleporting, metallic toy beetles or something.
They futz around about the whole "alien" thing before it becomes apparent that some fighting needs to be done.
They find out the hard way!
Elzam wants to fight back! The problem, as Generic Guy and Kirk point out, is that the Gespenst is only equipped for a random test flight in supposedly-alienless space. It has no weapons.
[BGM: Trombe!]
ASIDE FROM ITS MOTHERFUCKING FISTS
Kirk begrudgingly approves this dangerously hardcore battle strategy as part of the test drive! He also mentions an organization called EOTI, who we will learn more about shortly.
Trombe is the name of Elzam's favorite horse as well as his theme song. He also calls absolutely every mech he pilots for any period of time Trombe, because ridiculously rich and talented people get an unlimited pass on eccentric bullshit.
And now I finally have control! Time to battle some dudes. Move is self-explanatory; Spirit Commands are little one-turn-only cheat codes/buffs pilots can cast by expending their Spirit Points; Status I will now check out.
Oh, explaining the menus. Do I have to?
Do a thorough job, young man. Even if you ignore most of this information when playing through normally. You're not actually very good at this game.
Okay, okay. Beam Coat is a special ability/equipment thing on the Gespenst; HP, EN, and LVL should be self-explanatory; Need is the amount of experience Elzam needs to level up, Beat is his all-time number of enemy kills (many pilots come with a few freebies on the understanding that they are an ace pilot), I... think Sup is the number of times he can Support an ally, and Will is a game mechanic used mainly to restrict what weapons/attacks you can use early in the battle. They all have Will requirements, and each pilot gains Will based on various events like dodging enemy attacks, landing their own, etc.
How quickly an individual pilot gains Will and whether or not a mech really needs much more than the starting point of 100 varies, and factors heavily into how useful a unit is. It's also relatively complicated and boring, so I'll only really bring it up in regards to the few people that tend to give me trouble with Will. Elzam, being good at everything, is not one of those people. Will also technically raises stats a bit as it increases, but I don't know the deep magic behind RPG number crunching. I don't even know what Type is, aside from the fact that the Gespenst is Ground and Water and that it's irrelevant as balls. Unit menu!
Most of the info here is recycled from the last screen, but we see some of the Gespenst's base stats here. I kind of forgot that each subsection of the status menus has two pages while recording this part, so WHOOPS YOU ONLY GET TO SEE HALF FOR ELZAM RIGHT NOW
This is Elzam's pilot stats! Again, a lot of the information we've already seen, and I'll get into his Spirits shortly. The stats stand for Melee Attack, Ranged Attack, Some Bullshit, Defense, Hit/Accuracy, and Evade. Accuracy and Evasion are pretty much Elzam's main things. Pilot Points I cheated the fuck out of and will use to buy him a couple of skills, but mainly just the one. This will come much later, when I have Elzam at a base.
2200 is pretty low for a weapon's power. It requires no particular amount of Will and spends no energy, and like a mecha itself, attacks are graded for how well it works in various terrains. Since generic melee bullshit has an A in Space, conditions are more or less ideal.
Now for an interesting menu: Elzam's Spirit Commands! Each pilot has a different assortment of the big list of Spirits at different SP costs--Elzam's are ridiculously low due to his having a skill that reduces them. Focus's effect you can see here; Accel increases his movement range by three for a turn; Sense actually casts two lesser Spirits at once: Strike, which gives the caster 100% accuracy on all attacks for one turn, and Alert, which gives them 100% evasion on the next attack aimed at them. For this early on, Elzam's Spirits are ridiculously good! They're also totally unnecessary here, but I'll cast Focus for shits and giggles. But enough fucking around.
CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGE
I can't actually get in range to attack any of the enemies (the Gespenst's unarmed attack has a range of one) this turn without casting Accel, but this is the first chapter so I'm too lazy to go back and do that. Let's see them come to me.
Units that have used up all their actions for the turn are gray. Observe my totally cheatified money and END TURN
Elzam is attacked, and we meet the battle menu! The enemy is using a ranged attack, so Elzam is helpless to counter. On the other hand, it is literally impossible for this attack to hit.
WE GET IT, THEY'RE FROM SPACE
Battle sprites time!
Enemy stats and machine on the left, allied on the right. Also, apparently these guys are unmanned drones, so I won't be getting any battle banter out of them.
The bug unanimatedly shoots some circley lasers, and Elzam unanimatedly sidesteps it without giving even trace amounts of a fuck.
I remember how I learned my dodging skills. Trombe and I were playing polo; me on another horse, Trombe on yet another horse...
Shut up and keep being awesome.
Another futile attack, and another unnecessary expository comment from Elzam.
Yeah, pretty much.
My turn! Now I can go on the offensive with the Gespenst's incredibly shitty punchweapon.
Note that using Focus last turn was the difference between Elzam having a 1% chance of being hit and a 0% chance. Anyway, these mook bugs officially have names: Megillots. Now I feel comfortable explaining a little something. As much as the point of this stage is that Elzam is awesome...
Megillots on their own are staggeringly shitty enemies! The Gespenst was supposed to be totally defenseless but Elzam can almost OHKO these things by smacking them with its forearm. If a good robot is whatever the nicest MP3 player you can find is called, a Megillot is worse than one of those 2GB ones you see for ten dollars at the dollar store. They will gradually go from early-game enemies to what the game throws at me when I need a break from targets that aren't made of tinfoil.
A futile counterattack!
On the enemy's turn, the one I attacked attacks Elzam again at melee range.
A poor decision on its part. First kill of the game! Another one moves into melee range for absolutely no reason! The AI isn't very smart.
After that, it's back to the old ranged attack song and dance. Spoilers: Elzam doesn't get hit.
If you want to know what the fuck he's talking about, bad news: I screencapped this only because I have no idea.
The localization is less than ideal at times. A natural consequence of the absolutely ridiculous amount of talking we all do.
Whatever, my turn!
FATALITY
Note that the amount of damage Elzam does is gradually increasing, probably due to his Will. Dodge dodge dodge.
Sometimes the emulator randomly decides not to show the actual laser part of Ring Laser. It's one of the very few graphical glitches I've encountered with VBA.
MOVIN' UP IN THE WORLD OF DAMAGE-DEALING. More dodging and a third kill... if Elzam's machine were carrying basically any kind of gun in the game, this would have lasted one turn.
SO CLOSE TO A ONE-HIT KILL COME ON YOU CAN DO IT. I should address the fact that Elzam has criticaled basically every attack; he does that, because crit rate is based on how awesome you are, and Elzam is so fucking awesome.
Not that I'm not flattered, but you're getting bored, aren't you?
Another frame of the exploding animation, for your viewing pleasure.
I'll take that as a yes.
YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
Also, that about wraps these fuckers up.
Scripted event time!
Things the classy rich fabulous ace pilot has done so far in this game:
--Snark
--Talk about horses
--Punch five giant alien bug robots to death
--Literally wrestle a sixth into submission
What?!?
Dr. Bian needs to analyze it back at EOTI.
Elzam closes the first stage out talking about Daitetsu and Sean's first contact back in that first cutscene, which was apparently several years ago now, and ominously hints at the significance of humanity encountering hostile space robots.
Sure, it sounds obvious when you say it like that, but...
NEXT UP: We actually meet the main character you guys chose!