Super Robot Wars 30 review: So much stuff, it runs out of game

Let it be said before we start that I’m a huge fanboy for the Super Robot Wars strategy-RPG series. I love the gameplay— simple enough to be immediately approachable, deep enough to pose a real challenge. I love the crossover story that mixes heroes from decades’ worth of different robot anime series. And of course I love the series’ trademark incredible robot attack animations, raw displays of 2D spectacle like nothing else in video games.

When one of these games comes out, I set aside three weeks or a month to give it a run. That didn’t work this time, because the game took me five months and 122 hours to get through. This of course includes periods of burnout: I didn’t think I could burn out on Super Robot Wars, but here we are.

As a 30th anniversary title, Super Robot Wars 30 has it all; it’s twice as big as even the largest games in the series. As an introduction to Western gamers, it’s much like Yakuza 0: a game so massive as to set an impossibly high expectation for future titles.

But size is SRW30’s problem as much as its asset. Take for example the massive robot garage: like other series titles, SRW30 has over a hundred robots and pilots in your army to micro-manage and customize to the slightest detail.

And of course it’s fun to build teams based on particular series, or make minor characters into the aces of your squad. But keeping track of a hundred-plus RPG characters— keeping them leveled, rotating them in and out, equipping their gear— leads to a hell of a lot of upkeep, more time than I’ve ever spent just doing setup in a SRW before.

I love to micro-manage robots and pilots, but I was worn out by the sheer amount of stuff to worry about here. Constantly managing such a gigantic inventory had me thinking about all of the ways this game’s UI could have been cleaner and easier to use. Finding a particular unit or item among lists of hundreds is frequently a needle-in-haystack situation.

Unlike other SRW titles, 30 features a non-linear progression and allows players to choose their next mission, zooming through the most essential main story missions if they want, or allowing them to take up copious side quests for power-up items.

This approach is in theory a good move for the series: it allows players to play as much or as little as they have time for. But my problem with the game was that it kept going long past the point where I was still having fun.

Story and character lineup

SRW30 builds a foundation on the classic characters that launched the original Super Robot Wars games: Mazinger Z, Getter Robo, and Gundam. The protagonists of these series are presented as your squad’s old war heroes, and they’re embedded deep in the narrative. Combattler V, a regular in early titles but not so common in more recent games, makes a welcome return despite having literally zero involvement in the storyline.

SRW does keep up with the times even as robot anime series are relatively rare; this time they’ve rounded up some fun choices. SSSS.Gridman (a brilliant series, highly recommended) is the major new series that isn’t quite robot anime. From the story scenes to loving animation of Gridman’s every power and form, the game does it justice in every department. By comparison, Knight’s and Magic and Majestic Prince — along with many of the returning series—  are pretty much just along for the ride. They’re largely irrelevant to the story, but the units are fun to use and unconventional; I mean, a giant robot centaur? Don’t mind if I do!

One really interesting story element this time is that SRW gets to cover a story that hasn’t been animated yet. The novel and manga Gaogaigar Vs. Betterman: The Conquering King is the long-awaited sequel to 2000’s Gaogaigar Final, and it takes place on such a massive scale that a video game might be the only space that can adapt it. Needless to say, the GGG gang encounter an unfathomable foe and answer back with courage and power beyond imagination. It was a real treat to see this one play out.

The game’s original story— which you don’t get so much as an inkling of until about 30 hours in— concerns a race of space arbitrators who menace humanity with fiendish... uh… moral philosophy problems. Mysterious protagonist, shady past, hidden power: even if you’ve never played a SRW you’ve heard all this before. In series tradition, the protagonist can be a boy or a girl. I chose the girl, Az Sainklaus: she’s kind of mousy and mopey. Her brother Edge seemed like a bit of a tool, but he did have a better theme song.

Of course, the best part of SRW’s story is watching characters we already know interact with each other. One of the most amusing, completely irrelevant, subplots in this game is watching the wild middle-aged pilots of Getter Robo unwillingly form a sincere father-daughter relationship with Rayearth’s middle-school-age Magic Knights. Knight’s and Magic’s Ernie finds himself in robot heaven and can’t stop gushing about the experience. There’s a cook-off, a beach episode, a cross-dressing team-up. All the best anime stuff, really.

The game length and my experience

So of course, I don’t want to miss any story in a SRW game. I played every single story-related mission, including the jokey DLC asides.

On the other hand, I didn’t touch any of the grindy stuff, like cannon fodder stages meant for leveling weak units or hunts for “relics” that would make my units even more powerful. I don’t understand why a game this long even needs side grind missions, honestly. You don’t need to inflate a 100-hour playtime!

The game was still 122 hours long. I was so burnt out that at 100 hours I even wrote a piece for this newsletter titled simply “Super Robot Wars 30 is Too Long.” It was a plea for mercy. 22 hours later, I’m just happy to be done.

Don’t play the hard modes

(This review was written playing on Super Expert mode, the XP gain from which seems to have been the main problem. I can’t say you’ll have a better time on Normal, because I didn’t play Normal… but I suspect you will.)

The problem is that SRW30 doesn’t have the systems to back up its length. It’s built on the back of the previous trilogy of titles (V, X, and T), using their systems and character progression.

The VXT series are pretty massive games themselves, at about 40 hours a game. They all end at a nice point in the power curve. You’re really strong, but the fundamental gameplay is still challenging and tactics are still required. If you really want to be overpowered in those games, you can play again in New Game+ and build up some stupidly invincible robots. I never play New Game+ in Super Robot Wars because that stuff just bores me.

The problem is that SRW30 is a 120-hour game with the progression structure of those 40-hour games. No adjustments seem to have been made for the game’s longer duration. So by hour 50 you’re an invincible god, and by hour 100 you’re tired of being one.

It becomes apparent that the game wasn’t really designed for characters as powerful as you’ll be able to build; you’re in more of a “New Game Plus” area. Your robots’ attack power is through the roof, your pilots can have *all* of the abilities at once, you have too much SP to cast spells with, and with effectively unlimited resources, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

At a point it’s trivial for any unit to wipe out six or seven enemies by themselves in a single turn, and your big boss-killers are units that get to move as many times as they want. By the end of my run, I was finishing every map in a single turn, including the final boss and the secret “true” final boss.

This is a tactical RPG, so the total lack of need for tactics for such a huge portion of the game was akin to setting up a chess board, slowly knocking over all the opposing pieces with my king over the course of an hour, and repeating 60 times. It doesn’t help that SRW30’s maps are extremely repetitive, with the same few enemy formations appearing over and over again and no objectives other than “beat up all those robots”.

From looking at other players’ games, it appears that the culprit was the fact that I was playing on the hardest difficulty (Super Expert.) Do not do this. Do not even play on regular Expert mode. In the SRW system, you get more experience based on how high the opponent’s level is. So with very high-level opponents, your own level gets very high in turn, and you wind up breaking the game.

Burnt out on a game I love

And I hate to say all this because I really love Super Robot Wars, and I love so much of what this game does. I had a game and a half’s worth of fun among the two games’ worth of slog.

The series lineup is great! The DLC characters are inspired choices, too!

I love the way they wrote the Gundam characters this time! Gundam NT is redeemed!

The animations for SSSS.Gridman are so impressive I started to wonder if Akira Amemiya had worked on them himself!

But as a video game, SRW30 collapses under its own massiveness. As a strategy RPG, SRW30 was a numbing experience past hour 50 or so. There came a point where I was just slogging through it to get it done, to write my review for you guys, to be able to move on with my life. (Shin Megami Tensei V has been waiting months for me; I thought I’d be done by then!) I’d reach a story milestone and momentarily rejoice, and then return to the slog.

Suggestions for the future of Super Robot Wars

I don’t think I’m ever getting this, but I’d like to see SRW return to the tactical gameplay that the recent titles drop as they go on. Many of the systems in this game— particularly the EXC system and the Multi Action command— remove the whole idea of a tactical battle in favor of one strong unit crushing the entire enemy squad solo.

The maps are designed with this in mind, so you’ll deal with 30 or 40 enemy grunts in a level. So not only are the maps not very tactical, they’re also *very long*.

Perhaps this is against the spirit of the series and the will of the market, but after this one massive entry I’d like to see a smaller Super Robot Wars. Maybe 30 to 50 units in the garage rather than a hundred, 10-versus-10 battles rather than 20-versus-50 battles. Units with varied roles rather than invincible one-shot killers. Actual tactics. Something a little more like the Super Robot Wars I used to play.

Super Robot Wars 30 has already fed me the biggest possible feast, and honestly, I think I have indigestion. I’ll definitely play the next one on Normal mode.