I got really into mecha anime during the pandemic.
It's hard to describe why a genre I’ve generally struggled with finally grabbed me when I was quarantining. The way these shows generally handles themes felt refreshing in a way. People yell at each other about philosophy and then fight about it with lasers. There’s something beautiful in that. Maybe the period of isolation also gave me the time to really understand a show like Gundam, which tends to just leave characters in these horrible cycles of history and let it play out. To a bizarre extent, mecha anime became a strange sort of comfort food.
I’m not gonna go deep into it here but the last few weeks have been pretty stressful for me. Balancing various responsibilities, upcoming semester of school, guilt over how those responsibilities took me away from loved ones, and the late discovery that the person who gave me those responsibilities lied about certain details like “payment” and “how much we can afford to give you.” So, I needed some comfort food.
Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop gets into a gun duel with Captain Harlock, while the cast of Magic Knight Rayearth become besties with the cast of Gunbuster.
That’s some FUCKING comfort food.
Super Robot Wars is not a game designed for challenge. There isn’t a lot of strategy involved. It's a game that wants you to win. It gives you dozens of different characters from different canons and shoves them together in a soup. The thrill of the game is pure “numbers go up.” I see the characters I already like and make them the most powerful one-hit kill machines there’s ever been. This is not a deep story. You want to see the robots fight.
At the same time, there’s interesting character work going on in the original storyline. The theme of the story is strangely charming: there’s nothing wrong with being a salaryman. Your protagonist is an average white collar worker who’s been put into a robot. Your character’s biggest priority is getting paid. They frequently cite off union rules and different pay regulations, fight for the rights of their fellow workers, and is generally just the perfect example of your ideal middle manager. When encountering the main villain, the protagonist basically says "I understand now. Your arrogance, your evil actions... you don't understand the consequences of things. You don't know how to be a team player or appeal to the needs of others. You've never worked in customer service!" Its an escapist character, but when I was having those financial issues in real life, having a protagonist who's entire motive is "scream about getting paid" was delightfully refreshing.
The game is also VERY bisexual. I didn’t play the male protag and I understand that it doesn’t offer much in terms of gay content there. But the entire original cast outside of the male protagonist is openly bi and crushing on the female protag. At first I thought it was one of those things where they didn’t change the dialogue for the male/female protags, but there’s long stretches of dialogue where that’s not the case. Your main love interest is depicted as someone deep into denial about how gay she is for the protagonist, insisting she’ll find a man someday. Her coworkers glance at each other and joke that “if that’s what she needs to think for now.” Your protag is infamous as the “Heartbreak Angel” for awakening new crushes in women across the workplace and turning them down. But your protag can choose to commit to the romance in the end, no judgment attached. It feels so refreshing to see a genre that usually seems to hate me openly cater to my interests.
That said, there are certain ways that the game… doesn’t understand the canons it's using. Its a big crossover game, I get it. But its frustrating at times.
(two Magic Knight Rayearth paragraphs)
Fuu Hououji is one of the funniest, weirdest, and most charming characters in manga. She looks like a typical demure bookworm, which she is, but she also just casually goes along with the darkest things you could imagine. Falling from a great height, she assures her friends that they’ll pass out long before they crash into the ground. Her superpower is insisting she’s friends with awful people until she drags them into being better. She’s a logical person, but she applies that logic to her compassion. Her image of “the worst person I could hurt” is herself, because she knows any damage to herself would hurt her loved ones. She unwittingly predicts the MKR Spoiler Plot Twist by accurately analyzing how unbalanced the core magic of the setting is, but fails to fully grasp the truth because she can’t imagine something so awful.
The game just, fundamentally, does not understand Fuu. She’s the bookworm. The game occasionally pairs her with the goofy “covert pervert” original character and kind of implies they’re the same? And I don’t want to be a purity freak, but come on man. She’s a teenage girl. Don't be weird.
(The Gundam paragraph)
The stuff with Gundam is more politically annoying. The large Gundam plotline involves a conflict between the Char’s Neo Zeon (revolutionary movement with some unfortunate fascist tendencies), Haman’s Neo Zeon (nazi fascist), and the Earth Federation (centrist fascist). A large part of Gundam fandom seems to think of the feddies as “the good guys” and waters down Char’s motives to “wants to fuck Amuro.” I mean, he does, don’t get me wrong. But I do believe he cares about forcing the Earth Federation to halt its means of oppression, even if he ultimately cares more about fighting/fucking Amuro.
But the game leans into Federation as “the good guys.” And it's ridiculous. Haman, a woman who wants to be queen of space, accurately points out that the Earth reforms the protags promote don’t offer any meaningful change to the oppressed classes in the long-term. And the only answer the game comes up with is “these things take time!” Don’t put that in your game. You're doing so well with the military industrial complex plotline, don’t go into the actual themes of gundam if you don't understand them. I see enough centrist takes in my day to day. I don't need them here.
(back on track)
All that to say, goddamn, this is the kind of licensed game I like to see. The games crossover in interesting ways, the canons play off each other well, and its just a blast of a time for the full sixty hours. There's plenty of ways to experiment with mechs and pilots and there's rewards for playing the game a second time and improving your performance. The whole game just works and it helps me understand why this franchise is popular enough to have sixty fucking entries. Its a treat! Gotta love it!
It's hard to describe why a genre I’ve generally struggled with finally grabbed me when I was quarantining. The way these shows generally handles themes felt refreshing in a way. People yell at each other about philosophy and then fight about it with lasers. There’s something beautiful in that. Maybe the period of isolation also gave me the time to really understand a show like Gundam, which tends to just leave characters in these horrible cycles of history and let it play out. To a bizarre extent, mecha anime became a strange sort of comfort food.
I’m not gonna go deep into it here but the last few weeks have been pretty stressful for me. Balancing various responsibilities, upcoming semester of school, guilt over how those responsibilities took me away from loved ones, and the late discovery that the person who gave me those responsibilities lied about certain details like “payment” and “how much we can afford to give you.” So, I needed some comfort food.
Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop gets into a gun duel with Captain Harlock, while the cast of Magic Knight Rayearth become besties with the cast of Gunbuster.
That’s some FUCKING comfort food.
Super Robot Wars is not a game designed for challenge. There isn’t a lot of strategy involved. It's a game that wants you to win. It gives you dozens of different characters from different canons and shoves them together in a soup. The thrill of the game is pure “numbers go up.” I see the characters I already like and make them the most powerful one-hit kill machines there’s ever been. This is not a deep story. You want to see the robots fight.
At the same time, there’s interesting character work going on in the original storyline. The theme of the story is strangely charming: there’s nothing wrong with being a salaryman. Your protagonist is an average white collar worker who’s been put into a robot. Your character’s biggest priority is getting paid. They frequently cite off union rules and different pay regulations, fight for the rights of their fellow workers, and is generally just the perfect example of your ideal middle manager. When encountering the main villain, the protagonist basically says "I understand now. Your arrogance, your evil actions... you don't understand the consequences of things. You don't know how to be a team player or appeal to the needs of others. You've never worked in customer service!" Its an escapist character, but when I was having those financial issues in real life, having a protagonist who's entire motive is "scream about getting paid" was delightfully refreshing.
The game is also VERY bisexual. I didn’t play the male protag and I understand that it doesn’t offer much in terms of gay content there. But the entire original cast outside of the male protagonist is openly bi and crushing on the female protag. At first I thought it was one of those things where they didn’t change the dialogue for the male/female protags, but there’s long stretches of dialogue where that’s not the case. Your main love interest is depicted as someone deep into denial about how gay she is for the protagonist, insisting she’ll find a man someday. Her coworkers glance at each other and joke that “if that’s what she needs to think for now.” Your protag is infamous as the “Heartbreak Angel” for awakening new crushes in women across the workplace and turning them down. But your protag can choose to commit to the romance in the end, no judgment attached. It feels so refreshing to see a genre that usually seems to hate me openly cater to my interests.
That said, there are certain ways that the game… doesn’t understand the canons it's using. Its a big crossover game, I get it. But its frustrating at times.
(two Magic Knight Rayearth paragraphs)
Fuu Hououji is one of the funniest, weirdest, and most charming characters in manga. She looks like a typical demure bookworm, which she is, but she also just casually goes along with the darkest things you could imagine. Falling from a great height, she assures her friends that they’ll pass out long before they crash into the ground. Her superpower is insisting she’s friends with awful people until she drags them into being better. She’s a logical person, but she applies that logic to her compassion. Her image of “the worst person I could hurt” is herself, because she knows any damage to herself would hurt her loved ones. She unwittingly predicts the MKR Spoiler Plot Twist by accurately analyzing how unbalanced the core magic of the setting is, but fails to fully grasp the truth because she can’t imagine something so awful.
The game just, fundamentally, does not understand Fuu. She’s the bookworm. The game occasionally pairs her with the goofy “covert pervert” original character and kind of implies they’re the same? And I don’t want to be a purity freak, but come on man. She’s a teenage girl. Don't be weird.
(The Gundam paragraph)
The stuff with Gundam is more politically annoying. The large Gundam plotline involves a conflict between the Char’s Neo Zeon (revolutionary movement with some unfortunate fascist tendencies), Haman’s Neo Zeon (nazi fascist), and the Earth Federation (centrist fascist). A large part of Gundam fandom seems to think of the feddies as “the good guys” and waters down Char’s motives to “wants to fuck Amuro.” I mean, he does, don’t get me wrong. But I do believe he cares about forcing the Earth Federation to halt its means of oppression, even if he ultimately cares more about fighting/fucking Amuro.
But the game leans into Federation as “the good guys.” And it's ridiculous. Haman, a woman who wants to be queen of space, accurately points out that the Earth reforms the protags promote don’t offer any meaningful change to the oppressed classes in the long-term. And the only answer the game comes up with is “these things take time!” Don’t put that in your game. You're doing so well with the military industrial complex plotline, don’t go into the actual themes of gundam if you don't understand them. I see enough centrist takes in my day to day. I don't need them here.
(back on track)
All that to say, goddamn, this is the kind of licensed game I like to see. The games crossover in interesting ways, the canons play off each other well, and its just a blast of a time for the full sixty hours. There's plenty of ways to experiment with mechs and pilots and there's rewards for playing the game a second time and improving your performance. The whole game just works and it helps me understand why this franchise is popular enough to have sixty fucking entries. Its a treat! Gotta love it!