Anime Mecha fans, rejoice! Super Robot Wars V (Dubbed Super Robot Taisen V in Japan) has finally hit our shores with an English version for the VITA and PS4! This is great for all the fans who’ve been wanting to get their hands on it but couldn’t go through the painstaking process of translating each and every word throughout your journey in the game.
Following the footsteps of previous Super Robot Wars games, it involves many different mechas from various animes having their world converge through dimensional rifts following one storyline: a 100 years since the end of Char’s Rebellion (which happened in the first ever Mobile Suit Gundam movie in 1988) and Earth has been hit by a planet bomb by the Gamillians (One of the antagonists from Space Battleship Yamato) vapourizing the oceans, cities being destroyed and driving humanity underground.
The humans are left with most likely one year to live, however characters from Space Battleship Yamato and the various other mecha animes from other dimensions aren’t just gonna sit down and let that happen, hence paving the way for the story of Super Robot Wars.
As gameplay goes, SRW V is a top down tactical roleplaying game similar to Final Fantasy Tactics and Project X Zone (also by Bandai Namco), where you take turns against the enemy–moving your mechas and ships and battling with each other through various scenarios interspersed with short cut scenes of the battles, levelling up and playing different characters along the way.
Completing a scenario would require you fulfil all the objectives as well as adapt to new objectives that may appear as the scenario progresses. It is a very simple mechanic in my opinion and since it’s more turned based I think the gameplay is more suited towards a handheld like the VITA instead of the PS4 as you can play it on the go. Afrer all, there isn’t really anything real time demanding.
Story wise, the game requires a crap load of reading, driven mostly by conversation, and a few cut scenes here and there. Super Robot War V can get a little tiresome to play especially if you are not huge on mecha animes. With a boasted 50 hours of gameplay, it’s either gonna excite players or feel really draggy depending on how big a fan you are of the source material and reading very stretched out stories.
I’m really big on graphics and design of games and to me SRWV for a PS4 game is really super disappointing, you have a very powerful system to work with, but it still looks like a PS3 or even a PS2 game at times. Nothing really stand out about the design of the battlefields or characters either, especially since all the mechas are in their SD forms which means they look more Chibi (deformed designs of characters with oversized heads and much smaller bodies), which is one of my personal pet peeves when it comes to robots dealing mass destruction–they shouldn’t even look remotely ‘cute.’
Overall, the graphics and design convinces me even more that the game should’ve just stuck to a VITA release.
The only saving grace for me is that I got to see some of the Mobile Suit Gundam and Evangelion characters I grew up with, other than that this game is only suited for hardcore anime mecha fans and I would not recommend it to anyone outside of that circle. You’ll probably end up sleeping while playing it.
More over, this game should have flat out stuck with a VITA release as it presents nothing stand out on the PS4 with its high asking price. So if you’re a true blue anime mecha fan, be my guest and pick it up, if not you should probably save your money for another release in the near future.