The Super Robot Taisen series is one of those uniquely Japanese series that've been around forever in Japan, but are virtually unknown Stateside. In fact, besides this title, I can only think of two other Super Robot Taisen titles to be released in this market, both of which were GBA titles released a couple months after the DS hit streets in the US.
The point of the series is much like Namco vs. Capcom, another Japan-only title: an independent series with some original characters, but with prominent characters from other series making cameos or acting as playable characters. In this case it's Reiji and Xiaomu, the main characters from Namco vs. Capcom, and KOS-MOS from Namco-Bandai's Xenosaga. Reiji and Xaiomu haven't appeared in any games to be released in the US, but KOS-MOS was in the Xenosaga trilogy, itself a prequel to Xenogears (my favorite-ever videogame, incidentally).
Previous Super Robot Taisen titles have been standard 2-D strategy games with heavy JRPG elements, but this breaks with that tradition. Instead, it is a sort of hybrid between your everyday turn-based JRPG and rhythm games. When you attack, you launch your opponent into the air and try to keep him in the air with subsequent attacks. The more hits, the better, and if you have a teammate on your side you can tag him or her in when you're done. It's a difficult system to explain, but remarkably intuitive to use. More importantly, it is an absolute blast to play -- I've played for about 16 hours so far and I haven't even started to grow bored with it.
Other than that, Super Robot Taisen plays like a standard JRPG. There's magic, items, shops, a world map, and so on and so forth. You dungeon crawl, fight bosses, and do all the stereotypical JRPG stuff. Which is fine by me; my love for JRPGs of all shapes and sizes is quite well-known.Graphically, Super Robot Taisen isn't anything to write home about. Indeed, they are just unsophisticated enough to suggest to me that this was originally a GBA game, a notion that is supported by the complete absence of touch screen support. The world map/dungeon exploration graphics are simple in the extreme, though there is much more detail in the battle screens, which are reminiscent of higher-end graphics from the SNES era.
While I'm talking about the graphics I'll broach the subject of the, erm, well-endowed nature of the game's numerous females. It's anime-styled, so this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. They do take it to a ludicrous degree, however: busty main characters, busty non-player characters, even busty shopkeepers.
But unlike with Tecmo games, you don't really feel creepy about the whole thing. The Dead or Alive series is technically great, but you always do feel somewhat skeevy when you sit down to play it. Super Robot Taisen isn't anything close to the technical achievement that the Dead or Alive games are, nor is the gameplay as deep. However, the localization staff did a great job with the translation -- the comical proportions of many of the women in Super Robot Taisen are generally a source of jokes instead of perversity. In fact, the localization work is so good that if I were still as deeply into anime as I were in high school, I'm sure I'd find the game to be fall-down hilarious. But I'm not, so I don't; it doesn't mean that I don't respect the effort, however.
Yet the excellent translation doesn't really make the story serviceable. Indeed, even though the story seems relatively straightforward, there are so many different characters, factions and worlds that it just becomes a mess of terminology. For example, there are no less than three different terms for one object in the game, all used with varying degrees of frequency. This is not uncommon for these very cultish Japanese games that depend on the gamer being at least somewhat familiar with other games in the series, even if those games have unrelated stories. The problem is that us Americans rarely get many (if any) of those titles.
Ultimately, Super Robot Taisen is not a great game. It's not even the greatest game I'm playing right now. It'll be lucky to acheive low-end cult status for even a year or two, let alone to be remembered in the US by anything other than a few incredibly hardcore portable gaming fanatics in five years or so. If you can accept that it'll never win any game of the year awards and just embrace it for what it is, you'll find yourself an incredibly fun little way to kill some time on train rides and the like. Just don't take it seriously. But then, I doubt you'll be able to.
