This is a great game if you have the time and the patience for it.

User Rating: 7.8 | Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation GBA
This is a great game if you have the time and the patience for it. SRT OG is the first game in the Super Robot Wars series to be brought over to the United States. SRW is a long running series of turn based strategy rpgs in Japan known for featuring several playable characters and mecha from popular Japanese anime series such as, Gundam, Shin Getter Robo, Macross, Mazinger Z and many others. SRT OG is different because it does NOT feature any characters from anime. All characters and mecha are original creations by Banpresto. That is the reason it was brought over to the US so easily. The reason none of the other SRW games haven't been brought over here is because in the US, several different companies own the rights to each anime. For example, Bandai has Gundam, ADV has Evangelion, Getter Robo and Robotech/Macross, Geneon has New Getter Robo, and Funimation has Full Metal Panic. Even though no famous anime series are in the game there are plenty of interesting characters and cool mechs to keep you satisfied.

When you start a new game you can pick one of two different routes. You play as either Kyoske or Ryusei who will be your main character on their respective routes (but you still control all other characters and you eventually meet up halfway through). Ok here is where your patience and time are needed. Before each mission you are forced to read through tons and tons and tons of dialogue that you can't skip. It wouldn't be that big of a deal if the story was interesting, if the translation was good and if the graphics were at least eye catching. To be honest, I skipped through most of the dialogue in the whole game. I really only read the dialogue that comes up while you're in a mission.

The basic story is this: Two groups have a war with each other on earth, one side wins, then aliens show up to invade the earth and you have to fight them off. That pretty much sums it up. The dialogue is poorly translated, especially in the beginning, and the use of the text boxes is extremely poor. On average they only fit half a sentence in one dialogue box then you have to press "A" to go to the next. There's clearly plenty of room to fit more text but for whatever reason Atlus decided not to use it. This means that before every mission you'll be pressing "A" almost constantly, and the worst part is if you fail your mission you have to start over from the beginning. Not the beginning of the battle but the beginning of all the dialogue and there is no way to skip it other then pressing "A" a million times.

The graphics in most of the game are really bad. In the conversation sequences there is a static, boring background, usually of the bridge of your ship, the hanger, barracks or an office. You see a small icon of the character who is speaking on the left of the text box. There will be one text box on the top and bottom for each character speaking. The avatars do change expressions every once in a while but there are probably only 5 or so different varations of the main avatar. When you are in a mission the screen is set up in a top down grid. Similar to Fire Emblem or Advance Wars but with much worse graphics. Think NES graphics or SNES at best. Each unit is represented by the head of their mech or a miniturized image of the unit if it's a plane or tank. At first it will be hard to tell which one of your units is yours but you'll get used to it over time. The only redeeming factor of the graphics, and really the whole reason you'd probably play the game is the kick ass battle animations that you view when a unit attacks another unit. Each unit has basic attacks but the best animations are the "Supreme" attacks. These are unique to each unit. Some even have combination attacks which are very long and very cool. At first they are interesting but will get repetitive each time you see them and eventually you'll just turn them off since they take so long. So you're basically stuck with horrible graphics the whole game unless you constantly watch the animations which take a long time. If you're familiar to Fire Emblem imagine that game but without any of the animations. It'd be just the top down view with your character swinging a sword and the enemy indicating it has received damage. Pretty dull and boring.

Before you start your mission you can customize your units, their weapons, learn skills, assign pilots to different units, equip parts and weapons and save your game. The game does not have any sort of tutorial mode AT ALL. You basically have to figure out everything for yourself. And there's a TON of stuff to learn. You can try using the instruction manual but it wasn't much help to me. I'll go through the different things in the menu and tell you what they do.

First is your units. You can view info about them and see their stats, customize them or equip parts to them. The view unit option lets you see who's piloting it, what weapons are equipped and all the unit's stats. Then you can customize it using money you've earned from defeating enemies. You may upgrade the units HP, Energy, Mobiliy and Armor. Finally you can equip different parts to the unit. These include expendable items such as repair kits, and items that increase your energy, HP, armor, mobility, hit rate and success rate on different terrain types.

Next is the weapons menu. Here you can equip and customize the weapons of your mech. Not all weapons can be swapped between units but most can. You can customize the weapons using your cash to increase their damage rate. As with customizing units, the more you customize one thing, the more expensive it gets. Each weapon's efficiency various on the different terrain types. There are Air, Ground, Water, and Space. The lowest is C and highest is S. You cannot upgrade a weapons performance here but as I said earlier there are different items you can obtain that increases your performance on the terrain types.

Next you have the pilot submenu. Here you can see your stats, train your character to earn new skills or assign a pilot to a unit. You train your pilot by using Pilot Points (PP) you earn from defeating enemies. There are several skills to earn and you only have so many slots available to use. I highly recommend you learn SP Regenerate and Support. The first regenerates your SP, which is similar to magic points if you're familiar with RPGs. Support is a skill that lets you assist an adjacent ally in offence or defence. The extra support can help you kill an enemy or save a character from certain death. During the mission you use something called "Spirit" which are basically your magic spells. These are the skills you learn with your PP. The most common are Focus (increases your hit/evade rate by 30% for one turn), Alert (evades an attack for one battle) and Strike (increases hit rate to 100% for 1 turn). Others will increase your damage rate, recover HP or SP, or let you get double the exp or money in the next battle.

The next menu is where you can save your game. Pretty self explanitory. The very last option is load next map. This is what you select when you are ready for battle. You'll go through a ton of dialogue and then the mission will start. Before you start you can once again customize, equip, train and do all the things you could do in the hanger or you can just select the units you want to use and start fighting. Like I said earlier the battlefield is arranged in a grid like Fire Emblem or Advance Wars. Your units will start usually clumped together in one section and the enemy will be in a nother section usually pretty far away. When you select a unit you can move them, attack, or standby (end turn). Some units can fly so you can tell them to land to conserve energy. Others can transform into a flying ship or a land vehicle. And some can repair or resupply other units.

Each mission has a goal and a battle mastery. The goal is what you need to achieve to finish the mission and go to the next. The battle mastery is a much harder thing to do but if you complete it, it will increase the difficulty level of the game and allow you to get the various secret mechs, weapons and items in the game. You probably wont get a lot of battle masteries until you know what you're doing and that probably wont' be until the second time you've played through the game. By then you've spent 30+ hours and might be sick of it. Each mission usually sees the enemy get reinforcements and some tough boss enemy to defeat.

The game is very hard and the learning curve is insane. If you have to patience to wade thru the tons and tons of text, and tons and tons of menus, then there is a good game here that strategy fans will love. If you're more into RPGs I'd suggest you try it out first. You have to plan your attack constantly and can't just run in and kill off everything like you can in many RPGs. Mainly this is because there is really no time to level up your characters. There are no random battles to gain extra exp and money (it's too bad cause you NEED it in this game). There is a game over trick you can do though. When you get a game over the game restarts at the beginning of the mission and you keep all your money, exp and such. That's really the only way to level up your characters but it takes forever since you have to wade through all the dialogue each time and there's no way to outright skip it. There is a second SRTOG game that was released recently and that one has much better animations and cooler characters but the downside is that it's much harder then the first one. If you have trouble with this game, stay away from the second cause you'll get your a$$ handed to you.