Just completed Super Robot Wars Original Generation for the Game Boy Advance, which was the first game in the OG series, setting aside the fact that the first Masou Kishin game for the Super Famicom was later retconned as part of the OG "Saga" sub-series of games.
Kyosuke's route, completed in 260 turns, earning all battle masteries and meeting all secret requirements, with no self imposed restrictions except a no save scumming rule*.
Super Robot Wars OG belongs to the sub-genre of turn based strategy I call the Japanese puzzle TBT RPG, a sub-genre which I welcome for being particularly oriented towards, and concerned with, challenge. This game in particular was challenging enough to make me abandon my first blind playthrough very late in the game after hitting a wall in the form of the game's penultimate boss. While I obtained enough battle masteries to stay in hard mode, in doing so I had not built a powerful enough party capable of dealing more damage per turn than the said boss regenerates, rendering it an impossible fight. The second time through, I employed a spreadsheet and the information I gathered the first time playing, to make sure I don't meet the same fate again. This involved planning exactly how the game's finite pool of XP, PP (Pilot Points) and money earned during stages should be distributed among my pilots and mechs, which pilots to match with which mechs, and how each mech should be loaded out.
As alluded to above, the game employs a dynamic difficulty system, where it switches from easy, to normal, to hard, depending on how many battle masteries the player has earned. Each stage has exactly one battle mastery, which is essentially a bonus objective beyond the main mission objective(s). These bonus objectives most frequently take two forms, which are also the two main forms of challenge the game presents the player:
1. Clear a stage under a certain number of turns.
2. Deliver a finishing blow to a unit which would otherwise retreat when its HP falls below a certain percentage threshold.
The latter is a check of your deployed party's highest single attack damage output, which segues into the game's third form of challenge, appearing exclusively in the latter stages (at least in hard mode):
3. Destroy a unit which regenerates an absurd amount of HP per turn.
Which is effectively a check of the (potentially sustained) amount of damage your deployed party can deal to one target during one turn. If this number is too low, the unit will literally be undefeatable and the stage unwinnable, as I found out the hard way.
On the other hand, the secret requirements are simply constraints of the form X pilot must have more than N kills or be M level or higher by the end of some stage.
Back to damage output. Single attack damage output is increased deterministically (i.e. ignoring critical chances) by:
- Attacking with the weapon which has the highest damage output, given the terrain the defending unit is positioned on, and the defending unit's special abilities (many have additional defenses against beam weapons).
- Upgrading the attacking weapon's damage throughout the course of the game.
- Increasing the attacking pilot's melee or ranged stats throughout the course of the game.
- Increasing the attacking pilot's will throughout the course of the stage (exactly how differs per pilot, but using the rouse, spirit or drive spells works for everyone)
- Decreasing the defending pilot's will using the daunt spell.
- Ensuring the attacking pilot has the *fight, attacker, or revenge skills (latter applies only to counter attacks).
- Ensuring the attacking pilot is an ace at the time they initiate the attack.
- Buffing the attacking unit with the valor or fury (situational) spells.
- Placing the attacking unit next to a supporting unit (if not going for the revenge bonus) and ensuring all of the above for the supporting unit as well.
- Ensuring the unit has the ammunition, energy and will necessary to use the weapon on the given turn.
Due to the time keeping format of the game (each unit can (usually, barring certain spells) move and therefore attack only once in their player's phase, but since the opponent's phase also consists of moving all units, one unit may be attacked, and hence itself counter attack, multiple times in one turn), a single "super" unit with high damage output could almost, in addition to meeting the second form of challenge listed earlier, also meet the first, low turn count form of challenge, thus trivializing a large part of the game.
I say almost, because the last point listed above puts a tactical constraint on this strategy, as by counter attacking frequently, the would-be super unit will run out of resources by the time they need to execute the coup de grace to earn the battle mastery.
This has a patch of sorts, which is to equip some unit with a supply module and assign them to squire duty for the super unit, though the designers were careful to ensure a naive approach here would eat into turn counts -- the supply module is not available for post move use (i.e. it must be used before the carrying unit moves), meaning to supply the super unit, the supply unit must be, at the end of the phase, next to the super unit, in order not to have to retreat the super unit, which means the supply unit will absorb at least part of the enemy aggro (often, though not always, all, as the AI tends to target supply module carrying units) and reduce the number of units killed by the super unit on the opponent's phase hence increasing the number of turns it takes to clear the stage.
Instead, the player has to adopt slightly more complex two or more super unit rotation and resupply tactics, which does indeed meet the general tactical constraints of the game. However it doesn't meet specific tactical constraints in the form of stages which impose restrictions on which pilots or mechs may (initially) be deployed, nor the constraints imposed by the (hamfisted) secret requirements (specific pilots meeting certain level or kill requirements by the end of certain stages), nor, most importantly, the cross-stage strategic constraint the third kind of challenge mentioned earlier imposes, which appears in the final stages of the game.
Moreover, playing with a small number of super units is terribly inefficient, since pilot XP gain (and maybe PP gain as well, I didn't confirm, but I suspect so) is determined in large part by the difference between the attacking pilot and the defending pilot's levels. An overleveled pilot making short work of large swaths of low level enemy units simply lowers the total XP available to distribute amongst your pilots throughout the course of the game -- there's no grinding in Super Robot Wars OG without forfeiting battle masteries, so the XP and money pool is limited when playing for all battle masteries.
Another important note here is that the bulk of the XP goes to the pilot who initiates the attack which finishes off an enemy unit, not the pilot who dealt the most damage, either in previous attacks, or as a supporter in the same attack.
So what's the game?
In short, the game is all about coming up with a viable end game party build to meet the end game challenges, and then working towards it by optimizing and distributing each stage's finite number of kills, XP and PP across the units deployed for that stage (the choice of which is constrained by the story), while still meeting the constrains imposed by the battle masteries and secret requirements, and also minimizing turn counts (which is effectively your score, and prominently displayed by the game on the intermission and data screens), which primarily involves carefully deciding which moves to make and which order to make them in.
In my experience this required attentive planning
1. across stages, to make sure the good enough units would be available at each stage while meeting secret requirements
2. per stage, to devise a stage strategy which would clear the stage while meeting the battle mastery constraint and also minimzing turn count,
3. per turn, to make sure my deployed party was eliminating enemy units fast enough, that it had enough resources (mainly in the form of spell points) for the next turn(s), that my higher level pilots weren't eating away the stage's XP pool to the detriment of the party as a whole across stages.
I found this planning to be very enjoyable and mentally engaging. I particularly enjoyed how much unit positioning matters due to the support system -- adjacent units can add an attack to an attacking unit during the player's phase, or block an enemy's attack during the computer's phase, but different units can do so different numbers of times per phase, which led me to add a higher level concept of formations to my thinking about unit positioning e.g. I had a debuffing formation for sustained energy drains and armor breaks, and two flexible attack formations based around two different support units (one of which involved a combination attack, which is a gimmick two particular pilots can perform).
Briefly, on what exactly is a unit? A unit is the combination of a pilot, a mech, any special parts equipped, and any free weapons equipped ("free" as some weapons are fixed to the mech, while others are "free" to be equipped on whichever mech the player desires).
A pilot consists of the six basic stats, which grow with level according to the pilot's growth rates, and may also be raised by the player by expending PP which pilots earn along with XP by killing enemies. A pilot also has 6 spells they may cast (fixed per pilot, gained by level) and up to 6 skills, a number of which are innate (differing per pilot) and the rest player purchased, again for PP.
Mechs have a size, movement range, HP, EN (energy, expended by some attacks), mobility and armor, a fixed attack set, a weapon carry limit, a number of part slots, and perhaps some fixed set of (defensive) special abilities.
Parts either give bonuses to mech stats (e.g. higher movement range, or more armor), confer special abilities to the unit, adjust hit rates or critical rates, or are one time, in-stage consumables.
I forgot to mention that all three of pilots, mechs and weapons have terrain ratings for the four types of terrain -- ground, water, air and space. The word terrain may mislead here, as the same map tile may count as either air, or ground or water, based on the occupying unit's mode -- is it flying or not. Space tiles, at least, are always space tiles. Both the mech and the pilot's terrain ratings are used when defending, while only the weapon's terrain rating (and not the pilot's) is used when attacking.
Interface-wise my greatest complaint aside from the understandably cramped menus (it is a GBA game), is the lack of a pre-battle expected outcome report widget (see my footnote at the end), which necessitates using external tools or saving and reloading given how important ordering attacks is in the game.
Super Robot Wars OG has great battle music and OK menu and map music. Annoyingly, you only get to hear the battle music if you elect not to skip battle animations, though happily battle music does continue to loop a few times during the rest of the phase afterwards, temporarily replacing the two or three repetitive looping background tracks that usually play. Overall, I recommend the game's sound track.
The game is visually very clear and each attack animation is fun to watch, and even though I could skip them, and 99% of the time I did, I sometimes deliberately didn't, mostly due to the fact that battle animations functioned as kind of jukebox as explained above.
I like the setting a lot, the plot less so, partly because it's conveyed poorly. I like almost all of the characters, though almost all only ironically. Excellen and Leona are my waifus. You can skip through all the game's text segments at blazing speed almost as if it wasn't there at all which is highly welcome, especially when replaying.
Finally, the game was remade along with its sequel for the Playstation 2 as Super Robot Wars Original Generations, though I've not played this version, I can confirm that its sound track has amazing arrangements of the tracks from the GBA game.
I recommend Super Robot Wars OG for anyone who likes the Japanese puzzle TBT RPG subgenre (perhaps I should use the acronym JPTBTRPG and see if it ever catches on). Even though there were 29 previous TBT entries in the Super Robot Wars series before OG 1, and the rule set is obviously highly refined in the iterative sense, it feels as though it could use some consolidation. I'm interested to see how the designers changed the rules in OG 2, alpha 3, and Z which were the last games made exclusively by the same team (Banpresoft before they became B. B. Studio). I'm also, of course, interested in the OGs remake from a different team (TOSE) and the games which branched off from there. I will be playing those some time in the future and sharing my thoughts then.
*I never bothered to create a damage calculator so I did save and reload to see how much damage different units would deal to a target when ordering attacks mattered, as it very often did.
I never thought an Ogre Battle-like would sell well.
