The last SRW game I was able to get to this year, and one I originally never intended to actually get to! A is the 2nd game in the series developed by AI, the same guys who made the N64 SRW I played much earlier in the year and really didn't care for. I also disliked their mid-2000's GameCube game so much that I barely made it a stage into that one, so I'd quite comfortably written off their entire line of games as just so inferior to the Banpresto and WinkySoft ones that I've played that I'd never play them. My friend recently tried out the PSP remake of A, however, and found it so tough and miserable that I just had to give the GBA original a look and see how it compared to the PSP version and just the games in general. I played the game in Japanese and it took me nearly a month to beat, as is usual for these games, so I reckon it took me about 70 or 80 hours or so (as this is yet another game to add to the pile of ones that don't count playtime at all XP).

The story of A is a bit of a weird one for a SRW game. While a lot of the SRW games by the year 2001 (as this is a super early GBA game) had multiple protagonists, or at least multiple avatars you could pick from, as well as a super robot or real robot for them, this one gives you multiples of both. You can pick a male or female character, and both of them can pick from two choices of real or super robot. The story is also relatively different for each character (with the unpicked one appearing as an antagonist with a personality quite different from their player character version), and I picked Lamia in a super robot for this one.

There are a few new additions to the series in this game as far as represented licenses go, but the most noticeable one by far is Martian Successor Nadesico. This is written by a different guy than the N64 game was, but while this game solves the issue of being quite so humorless and boring with its writing, it sadly does not solve the problem of just how much bloat there is in the text (and the quite significant number of Nadesico characters present really don't help with that). It's not so much that the dialogue is bad or unnatural, so much as there's just too much of it. They could really have used an editor poking them in the shoulder to just get to the point faster, because some of the between-mission VN-style story bits can drag on for absolutely ages (and I'm talking like 15 or 25 minutes of reading in some cases, and that isn't entirely just because I can't read Japanese as fast as I can read English XP). Overall I quite liked the writing as a whole, but that feeling of "god damn, please wrap this up a little faster" definitely dragged everything down in a way I really wasn't too hot with.

Mechanically, it's a fair bit of stuff back from the N64 game with some new odd bits thrown in here and there. The overall regular features of a SRW game from this time are still here as usual. FE-type SRPG gameplay with pilots who level up independent from money-upgraded mechs, some pilots can swap mechs, and individually upgradable weapons with cash (as while Banpresto dropped that feature, AI hung onto it for quite some time). All that goodness. There are some things a little odd for this point in the series though. Enemies with just absolutely bullshit levels of abilities like endure or parry, something that Banpresto had chucked in the can several years earlier, are here in spades and suuuuper annoying from the game's midpoint. The lack of the ability to skip attack animations is also very heavily mourned, at least by me Xp. Thankfully, this game is at least without really unfair reinforcements messing things up for you all the time at least.

There's also the odd and unique feature of this game using shields not as an chance-activated skill like parry, but as an extra health bar of sorts that depletes before your actual health. Not a bad feature per se, but not exactly a good one either, and I'm glad it's gone after this. Another interesting note is that with the way this game does its random seeds, save-loading for better results is actually impossible, as even on real hardware, loading your quicksave will get you the exact same result if you just do the same thing again. Combo-attacks that can be done when certain units are adjacent are also back from the N64 game, and it's gonna be your main method of dealing out punishment for most of the game, particularly if you're trying to take down bosses who retreat once they get past a certain limit of HP. Overall, the level design is pretty darn good, but there just aren't a lot of them. The story is only 39 missions long, and there are very few route splits, and when there are, they're generally quite short. The total mission count is also quite low as a result of this, but that's pretty easy to overlook for what's effectively a GBA launch title (and just how long the cutscenes are make up for the playtime of that lack of missions pretty well too ;b).

Aesthetically, the game looks really nice for a game for being SUCH an early GBA game. Animations aren't exactly as nice as the PS1 games coming out around that time, but it's still close enough to be very impressive for what little memory they're working with. That said, there are a few very odd and conspicuous color choices that are just obviously wrong, and I can only really chalk them up to some color limitation. It's not a big problem, but things like the captain of the Nadesico's hair being light purple instead of the royal blue it is in the show are pretty big things that are very hard to miss, so it felt work mentioning. Music is pretty good too, but it's very GBA. It's a pretty steep downgrade from the CD-based games of the time, but it's also pretty hard to meaningfully complain about that. It is just a GBA after all, and they're still pretty darn good versions of these songs for the tools they're working with. The most uncanny part of it all is just how much of this game's sound font sound so much like the one that GameFreak would use for the 3rd gen Pokemon games a couple years later, so it's very odd and amusing hearing the Getter Robo theme played with such similar sounding "instruments" at least XD

Verdict: Recommended. It's not a masterwork, and doesn't really hold a candle to anything Banpresto was doing at the time, but it's still remarkable a step up enough from the N64 title that it's made me very interested in playing AI's other portable titles. It's a damn impressive little adventure for such an early GBA game, and you'd almost never guess how early it was if there weren't another like five GBA SRW games after it XD. If you can read Japanese and want some good SRW action on the go, this is a choice that's tough but not too tough that you'll probably have a pretty darn good time with ^w^