Continuing my current Super Robot Wars obsession, I moved on to the next game in the Alpha series, and Banpresto’s first proper PS2 game in the series (with Impact technically coming out before this, but that game both not being by Banpresto and also primarily reusing assets from Alpha Gaiden rather than ones made for the PS2). Given that this game is the first one to use the new squad system, I knew I’d be in for a bit of a learning curve, but it all ultimately grew on me in the end. These games still don’t count playtime, so I can only guess at how long it actually took me to beat this over the weeks I was playing it, but it was easily 80~90 hours if not longer to beat the game on real hardware (and I’ve also begun to suspect that other games I’ve played in the series have been closer to that mark as well).

This game picks up two years after the end of Alpha Gaiden, with the world relatively peaceful in the intervening years but things slowly getting more turbulent as they lead to the new oodles of returning old threats and brand new threats facing Earth. The new additions to the larger franchise in this game are Brain Powerd as well as Steel Jeeg and GaoGaiGar, while we also have some old favorites like Tosho Daimos and Go Shogun joining the fray as well (though my beloved Dancouga is left absent from this story TwT).

This story goes back to including more Banpresto original characters as well as a player main character after having virtually none of either in Alpha Gaiden, so I was a bit nervous about how this game would be written, but I was very pleasantly surprised with what I found here. Banpresto has gotten a LOT better at writing both their original characters as well as their protagonists since Alpha 1, and from the licenced characters to the original plot and themes, I really liked the story here. Perhaps the other protagonists have stories a bit worse or a bit better, but I really enjoyed playing through the male super robot pilot’s route~.

The gameplay is mostly very familiar to past SRW games. You have a Fire Emblem-style tactics game with separate units and pilots, spirit abilities that each pilot can cast as spells, mechs upgradable with money, support attacks and defense, items to find and equip, and a difficulty point system with optional objectives you can complete to dynamically change the difficulty (and that’s all they do in this game, as they don’t affect secret stages, endings, or units in any way this time around). There are a couple of more minor changes, as the bazaar to buy and sell items and mechs that Alpha Gaiden had is gone, the UI in general has gotten a really serious usability improvement, numbers in general have changed (all around values are like 1.5 to 2 times higher), and you can now use the new resource of Pilot Points to directly give pilots new passives, better terrain affinities, and better stats (and completing difficulty point objectives give everyone in the army a +5 bonus to their Pilot Points). But the most major and obvious addition is the squad system, and it is by this squad system that your enjoyment of Alpha 2 will live or die.

Likely as an effort to allow you to use more of the massive cast of the game without having you actually manage 30~40 individual units on each map, Alpha 2 introduces a system that still has you controlling 10~15 units (depending on the map), but each of these units is a squad composed of 1 to 4 individual mechs. Each mech has a new Cost stat, and each squad can either have a maximum of 4 units or a maximum of 5 cost. You can change who the head of a squad is mid-mission, but not who is within a squad. Once the mission starts, a squad is a squad, but thankfully you almost always have a pre-deployment secondary intermission prep phase, so you can alter squads or item distributions as needed depending on how the mission has gone up to that point. Only the unit at the head of the squad can attack, but there are new mechanics to help make more sense of having squads of units instead of individuals.

For starters, all weapons now have the factor of being either single-target or ALL target, as well as being able to be fired as support weapons. A single-target move will hit the guy at the head of the enemy squad, and it can also be backed up by support attacks by other squad members (though for these intra-squad supports, they’re weakened versions of those attacks). Additionally, while members within your squad can potentially take a hit for you just like adjacent units could in prior games, if you have support attacks, those defenders will only defend against those supports, and the leader of their squad is still hit by your leader’s attack. Finally, while an ALL-target attack can’t be blocked against, it also can’t have support attacks help it out either. This change to single vs ALL attacks also means that MAP attacks are significantly rarer than they were in past games, and those that are here tend are often comparatively weaker attacks than they used to be.

While the squad system isn’t bad per se, as once you get past the learning curve, it’s a pretty simple system, I found it really fails to meaningfully justify its inclusion. As just mentioned, it’s ultimately a pretty simple system. It doesn’t really do anything to change the flow of battle because it’s so limited in how it’s implemented. It comes off as more of a side-grade than an upgrade, and while that sort of thing isn’t often a problem, it’s a problem here in how it adds SO much time to your playtime in terms of micromanaging ALL of these units. Now instead of a core of 15 or 20 units you’ll always use, now you’ve gotta manage 40+ units to outfit your 12~15 main squads worth of units. That includes everything from balancing who gets what item and who gets money to get upgraded to the much more clunky and menu-heavy task of arduously popping a whole squad’s worth of spirit abilities, one at a time, EVERY turn before they attack.

Presentation-wise, this game is NUTS compared to what came before it. Putting Alpha Gaiden and Alpha 2 side by side, it’s not hard to see why people were so damn hyped for the PlayStation 2. While I’ll always mourn my beloved karaoke mode which stopped appearing in these games at the start of the PS2 generation, everything in Alpha 2, from the music to especially the animations, is a whole new heckin’ world of flash and detail from what came before. The old animations were pretty impressive compared to the non-animations from before, but now we’ve gone from good animations to nearing the point where it’s like watching an anime scene for each attack. I know that later games, including this game’s own sequel, push that boundary even further, but god damn is the level of detail the PS2 allowed for impressive and a hell of a way to kick off the console generation.

Verdict: Recommended. As much as I moaned and complained (rightfully so) about the squad system both in this review and to any friend that would listen while I was playing through the game, Alpha 2 is still a damn good SRW game. It’s SUCH a shame the squad system is as rough as it is, because every other facet of this game, from the presentation to the writing to the mission design, is SO well polished, it’d easily be the best one yet if it didn’t have that self-placed stone around its own neck. Still, this is an excellent SRW game, and if the time commitment involved in dealing with the squad system doesn’t put you off of it, it’s a worthy successor to Alpha Gaiden and well worth playing if you can read Japanese~.