I originally bought Super Robot Wars F to bond with a friend who loved mecha anime over spring break. Little did I know that I’d end up loving it so much that I’d wind up playing a ton ton more of them XD. Now this is two games being reviewed at once primarily because these are actually really one game whose two halves were released about 5 or 6 months apart. You import your save from F into F Final, and you pick up right back where you left off. Now they are technically both stand alone, but starting with F Final would be the equivalent of starting 25 episodes into a 50 episode show, as it does not do anything to catch you up to the pretty involved story you’ve missed up to that point. Now these games don’t save how long your playtime is, and they’re so long that I can really only guess at how long it took me to beat them, but a likely low-ball estimate is that F (which is like 35 missions) took me around 60 hours to beat, and F Final which is more like 40 missions) took around 80 hours to beat. I played the Japanese versions of them on real hardware using a super robot start.

Before getting into the story, it’ll probably help if I first explain what Super Robot Wars even is. SRW is basically a Super Smash Bros for mecha anime, but it’s a strategy RPG instead of a fighting game. The story of F/F Final is a remake of the last part of the first sub-series of games known as the Divine Crusaders (the primary antagonists) series. The principle players are the main casts of Getter Robo, Mazinger Z, the U.C. Gundam characters, and a big smattering of others too (from Aura Battler Dunbine to Neon Genesis Evangelion). The actual plot is packed with characters, and much like the game itself, is largely here for the spectacle and the fan service. But it’s pretty entertainingly written fan service, I will say. Everyone is introduced and fleshed out just enough that even a mecha anime newbie like myself found a lot to enjoy in how the game is written, and it serves the purpose it was written for very well. I imagine knowing the series present makes it even better, but even only having base summaries provided by my friend was more than enough to let me get a lot of fun out of the writing in this game.

Mechanically, this is an SRPG that will be very familiar to anyone who has played a Fire Emblem game. It’s a top-down SRPG where you move units around a map to complete an objective, so the base moving and attacking was super easy to figure out. Though even with the surface level stuff being so similar, the details past the exterior made for an experience I ended up enjoying a lot more than I generally do with FE games. For example, you can not only design your player avatar at the start for a different first 5 missions or so, and there are various route splits later on to give you some more variety in how you’ll experience the story.

Going onward, characters and the mechs they pilot are different entities. Granted you don’t usually have much of a reason to swap people out of the mech they came with (as it’s most often what they’re best suited for), pilots level up with experience gained in battle while mechs can be upgraded with money. Speaking of money, that’s also how this game changes another thing that often irks me about most FE games: no permadeath. Instead, when a unit dies in battle, unless it’s a critical unit tied to your failure condition (much like a lord in FE), you’ll get them back at the end of the mission after paying a repair fee to get them back into fighting shape. It means that losing units is still something you don’t want, as you can’t grind for resources and money is a limited resource, but losing a unit near the end of the battle is a much easier thing to stomach than in an FE game from the same era.

Money is also how you upgrade your mechs’ weapons, as they simply have respective bespoke weapons that use either ammo that must be refilled at a ship or from a refueling unit, or a general energy pool that’s refilled very similarly. No swapping swords or weapons like that. Even though it can take a bit of experimenting to figure out what weapons are worth upgrading and for whom, it’s a pretty simple system at the end of the day. What you can swap around are equippable items that mechs can equip to buff their armor, accuracy, HP, etc. They’re pretty straightforward, but they also provide invaluable buffs, and who gets what is a very important choice.

Going back to what makes pilots special compared to their mechs, each pilot has a total of four spirit moves they can learn as they level up in addition to passives respective to each unit. The latter involve things like getting better parry chance (ability to nullify damage from an incoming physical projectile or sword), shield chance (ability to halve damage from an incoming attack), or simply how good a NewType you are (which is a general upgrade that gives buffs to accuracy and evasion). The former are activatable abilities that cost a certain amount of spirit points that refill at the end of every mission. Wisely spending your spirit points will likely be the difference between life and death, as a 100% chance to dodge the next attack, a full HP restore, and more such things are invaluable for just about every unit. The last thing about pilots is their willpower stat, which starts at 100 and goes up for every unit the party kills, every unit they kill, and every time they take a hit. Willpower can be anywhere from 50 to 150, and it acts as a flat multiplier on your stats, so a character with 120 willpower will have 120% stats. Unfortunately, willpower is a good segue to the fairly significant list of issues the game has that are symptomatic of both the era’s notions of game design and the technology it was built on.

There are several two-part missions in the game, and something that isn’t really made clear to the player is that pilots who take part in the first half lose 50-ish willpower as they move to the 2nd half. You can still deploy them, but their utility will be severely harmed, and it really pays to upkeep 2 effective fighting forces that you can use for these harder 2-parters. Using a guide to keep track of when and what those are helps a lot. Using a guide is also very helpful for recruiting secret characters, as even compared to FE games, the flags you need to hit to recruit most characters are quite well hidden (sometimes impossibly well hidden) and you’d almost never accidentally stumble onto them, which I can only imagine was the intention.

Another big issue the game(s) has is balancing. Now SRW splits its units between two general descriptions: Super Robots (more like Getter Robo or Mazinger Z) and Real Robots (think more like Gundam). The former generally trend towards higher defense and attack but worse evasion and accuracy, and the latter are generally the reverse. The only issue there is that this is a game very much balanced towards one-hit kills. If you’re dealing a hit, you’re probably trying to outright kill whatever you’re firing at, and if you’re taking a hit, it’s likely gonna nearly kill you if not outright kill you (especially for the weedier Real Robots). Long story short, enemies get so hilariously tanky and evasive by even the ending of F (so well before F Final even starts), that dodge-tanks are really the only way forward. Super Robots are really only valuable as damage nuke machines, as their biggest moves are often immune to enemy beam shields or parry skills, and even then, once they run out of their 100% hit spirit moves (if they even have them), they’re basically useless. This isn’t a massive problem, per se, but it does kinda take away from the crossover fun element by so heavily gating which units are even worth using.

That said, this also factors into the game’s pretty bad enemy AI. While F generally has enemies who stand still and wait for you for a good while before charging, and F Final generally has much more aggressive enemies who charge at you much earlier, enemies will primarily shoot first and foremost towards the easiest kill they can make. At least, the easiest kill they think they can make, as they basically never factor in evasion to their priorities. This makes dodge tanks incredibly powerful as decoy units as well, as enemies will harmlessly waste tons of ammo and turns trying to hit units they literally have a 0% to hit.

The last most significant problem is moreso related to issues that tons of 32-bit era CD games ran into, and that’s luxury animations and load times. Now the presentation of the game is really nice. The fight animations aren’t really animated very much, as the mechs are more high-detailed sprites that move more like paper cut-outs than FE-style animations, and honestly their load times are super quick. The thing is though that you can’t skip these animations, and those animations and their half-second load times add up fast*. A fairly short mission in F/F Final is two hours long, with most taking more like 3~4 hours, and the longest ones took me more like 5 or 6 hours. Luckily the game has an incredibly generous and fast quicksave feature. You only have the one mid-mission save, but you can use it at any time to suspend the game or even just save/load your way to a necessary critical hit. This certainly isn’t a deal-breaker, but just how long missions take is easily the aspect of these older SRW games that makes them the most hard to recommend.

Continuing on the presentation, the game really looks quite nice. The limited animations are a bit of a bummer compared to something like Fire Emblem of the time, sure, but the big beautiful sprites and the slight animations they do have still look very nice. There’s also a lot of very fun music in the game too, as the battle music for each of the mechs is the theme song (or a famous insert song in the case of the U.C. Gundam crew) from their series. There’s even a karaoke mode in the options menu to sing along yourself if you want! The game is unfortunately a tad buggy though, as two or three times animations just didn’t actually kick me back to the map screen when they were done, and I had to load a quick save. This can be mitigated by saving early and often, of course, but it still sucks when it happens.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Honestly, I enjoyed these games quite a good deal, and if you want SRW fun on your Saturn, there’s nothing more for you than these. The biggest reason I hesitate to recommend them is just how much better SRW gets in this same generation of consoles, and that if you wanna give SRW a go these days, there are much better polished ways to do it. Still though, if you wanna give these ones a go, even as a mecha newbie, there’s a lot of fun to be had helping the Super Robots in their Super Robot War~.