Post subject: Super Robot Wars/Taisen W
Joined: 7/29/2010
Posts: 5
Location: Somewhere
Looking over the site, I have come to realize there isn't much mention of the Super Robot Wars series ANYWHERE. Which is a damned shame, because not only is the series extremely awesome, it seems like most of the games in it would be easy to manipulate luckwise. ...oh, you don't know what the series is? A shame, really. Super Robot Wars is a long running (since 1991!) series of games made by Banpresto about... well, robots! But not just your stock and standard robots, no, these are the famous ones, the paragons of anime! We're talking Mazinger Z, Getter Robo, pretty much everything out of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise... or, if you're feeling more modern, things like Code Geass, Gurren Lagann, and Rebuild of Evangelion. Hell, in Z2S they even brought in the one that started the genre in Tetsujin 28/Gigantor! So, you have a bunch of giant robots. What do they do? Well, they fight. So of course, these games involve fighting. But they're not your stock and standard RPGs, oh no. These are TURN BASED STRATEGY GAMES! (well, except the original, but the original was kind of meh). And they're damn good TBS games too. So, why did I start with W? Why not start with the first entry to this game, or the first entry that was in a more modern format (2), or the first that brought in X format? (4/F/Final, Alpha, Alpha Gaiden, Alpha 2 Impact, NEO, Z1, Z2H... lot of format changes over the years) Hell, why not bring in one of the games that made it here? Well, for the games that made it here, they were all OG games - meaning it's the characters who have stared in these games that were made by Banpresto, and while they're awesome, it is, in my experience, more fun to watch a VOLTEKKKKAAAAAAA! than it is to watch a Gespenst doing... whatever it is you want it to. And as for the others, well, none of them were made with exporting in mind. Yes, it's a sad story - Super Robot Wars W was intended to make its way over the Pacific. One good look at the series involved will tell you that much: All of them made it to America at some point in time, and some of them were more liked in America (King of Beasts Golion/Voltron, as we call it, was never cared about in Japan, but it made it solely into this game... Detonator Orgun probably counts for that too.) But the main series games have something else going for them - Banpresto has permission to do whatever they darn well please with the series they get, and this means that sometimes, they... CHANGE, things. Most famously, we have Bright Noa giving Shinji Ikari a well needed slap (which inevitably resulted in him turning badass. Yes, SHINJI IKARI as a badass pre-Rebuild, I know it's hard to think of), but also has allowed characters who die in canon to live sometimes (except Musashi, who's still going to die every time you see him. Poor guy.) and those bad guys who slip away getting their justice done to them. So, who can we expect to see here in this game? Well, it follows the Ardyguns, an extremely well liked group of OG characters, who go through the plot of Detonator Orgun, Full Metal Panic, The King of Braves GaoGaiGar, Martian Successor Nadesco, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Astray (with a slight smattering of the normal SEED plot, and random things from the rest of the Astray universe), Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, and Tekkaman Blade, as well as the Mazinkaiser OVA series (fun fact: Mazinkaiser actually debuted in these games BEFORE it appeared on screens!), with an assist in that plot from Getter Robo G (the first group to reach America, in the Force Five block as Starvengers), piloting Shin Getter Robo! (and by that I mean the version from Armageddon) Meanwhile, throughout all of these plots (some of which [SEED and MSN's movie, looking at you] have been made less stupid), we have a group of villains who are very much bent on humanity's destruction in the Database. Now, by the end of the game, there will be some absolutely stupid glitches to abuse, which will make the game pointless (King J-Der gets a glitch that allows for infinite turns, and so does the Valcazard.) So I can imagine that this could get ridiculous pretty quickly. And even without glitches, a lot of the late mechs can rip the game in half (Genesic GaoGaiGar... or, rather, EVERY SINGLE 3G MECH... all the Tekkamen, Mazinkaiser, the Arbalest, Shin Getter Robo, possibly Great Mazinger, the Freedom, the Justice, and the Frames from Astray. To say nothing of the overwhelming being that is the Valcazard. Still, I can see this run being good fun.
Joined: 6/4/2004
Posts: 284
You are very excited about the super robots and their warring, aren't you. It's not as cut and dry as you think, I'm afraid. The whole purpose of a "traditional" tool-assisted speedrun is to make it through the game as fast as possible. This would mean disabling the animated cutscenes, speeding through dialogue when you can't simply skip it, and basically removing everything that would make a Super Robot Taisen game worth watching. "What about a 'playaround', then? They aren't constrained to 'traditional' TAS rules, right?" First off, we're talking about a long, dialogue-heavy game, that's in a language many people cannot understand. How do you plan to get around this? Are you going to go to the trouble of overlaying a subtitled translation over the video? Secondly, who is Bright Noa? Who is Shinji Ikari? Don't you mean Tranzor Z? Who the hell are the Ardyguns? What is Shin Getter Robo? Why should we care? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think you're getting very excited about a topic that has very little potential.