Imagine Justice League, now imagine if all the heroes piloted giant robots that were powered by FIGHTING SPIRIT, the pilots were HOT BLOODED, sexual innuendo's were spoken every 30 seconds, and rule of cool was in full affect. Now add in some anime, crossovers, excellent writing, mind screw, boobs, robot girls,
lasers, heroic speeches and enough awesome that it breaks the laws of physics...twice.
If that's not good enough:
Here's TV Tropes for more details on the series.
Which bring us to Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Saga: Endless Frontier.
Original Generation refers to the original characters developed for the SRW series as oppose to ones coming from anime and such (Think Gundamn, Evangelion, and Getter Robo). As Such there are tons of throwbacks to the OG characters from the past series. Naturally, this causes problems for those of us not living in Japan.
But you won't need to know all there is about Endless Frontier to enjoy it.
Endless Frontier is a Turn-Based Action RPG hybrid with enough innuendo, hilarity and fun the guarantee that the 45 hours you spend playing it will be downright enjoyable. It was published by Atlus (who are well known for loving the hell out of their US and European fanbase) and developed by Banpresto and Monolith Soft. One of the perks of being published by Atlus is that the games comes with (as Atlus customs) a free mini soundtrack featuring some the downright AWESOME music the game has to offer. Came out back in 2009 and is available at Amazon now for a good $30. Pretty damn worth it to try it out.
Here's the Trope Page
PLOT WHAT PLOT!?
Aschen: she knows how to get everyone's attention.
Since I'm terrible at synopsis that don't spoil too much, here's a short what you need to know via TV Tropes
Jiggle physics now with 30% more sword to the face!
Kaguya, wrecking everyone's shit while making hookers blush.
The Overview
Battles use random encounters just like in the good ol' (or not) SNES and PS1 days. Luckily, unlike the SNES and PS1 days, the encounter rate is ungodly high and filled with goddamn bats. They're also turn-based much like the Xenosaga games. The bottom screen shows you who;'s about to go next. While in battle You have your standard HP for health and SP for spirit commands (A SRW Staple) which control healing abilities and the like. You also COM(command %) that controls your actual actions minus guarding. Attacking an enemy, using items and special attacks all consume COM. Some even require SP along with it (also know as the SCREW YOU attacks). When your turn comes up 50% of you com out of 100% gets restored. There are SP skills to increase the threshold temporarily and restore it, but items are far more affective at restoring COM. The game hates you with SP though. Items restore poultry amounts. Like 90 out of 500 poultry. Some items restore it fully, but good luck finding and/or buying them. This is mostly due to the fact that you can put tons of buffs on the party and debuffs on the enemy so long as you have the COM and SP. The character's turn is only skipped if they defend or attack. But don't think this makes the game easy. It's fucking required if you wanna get by in this game.
Battles follow the flow of
character turn ->staus buffs/debuffs/ select enemy/attack/end turn.
Simple right? Wrong
Attacking is action oriented and based on juggling the enemy in the air for as long as possible. Depending on how much COM you have you can chain attacks for the maximum of 5 or minimum of 1. But it doesn't stop there. With a touch of the D-pad you can call in a reserve character to continue attacking the enemy to extend your damage (can be done twice and later up to 3 times in one turn), or swap out to the next party member if their turn is after yours at any time for even MORE damage. And guess what? They too can call in 2 assists of their own to keep the enemy in the air and ruin it's day. It's entirely possible for your entire party to dish out all of their attacks and wipe out an any in the most one sided way possible. Coordinating your attacks, and proper timing is a great way to maximize your damage output.
This is the bulk of Endless Frontier. The combine is simply sublime and fun as all hell. It's smooth, simple, deep, and rewarding that every battle is fun and sweet. Also a 100% flee rate from mooks. That's always a welcome addition. Like I said this game is Nintendo Hard so don't expect the enemies to take it easy on you. Regular mooks can have HP to the 10s of thousands and bosses go in 100s of thousands. And they can totally ruin your day if you're not careful. Tough but fair is best way to describe it.
Witness its glory
There is only one issue. Forced Evasion. What it does is when a enemy comes close to the ground or touches it, FE kicks ends and nullifies ALL the attacks that you dish out afterwards. You turn ends with that last attack and the enemy gets a chance to counter. This wouldn't be so bad, if some enemies couldn't wreck your shit with said counter attacks. Every attack counts as making an enemy juggle, and since this is what you should be doing in battle it comes off as justifiable for balance sake. Too bad you can't do it. It's for enemies only, and bosses just love to get out of your combo's this way. heavy enemies are especially a pain as the likeliness of FE kicking it is ruffly 85% should it even look like they are about to touch the ground.
But as said, this is the only issue with combat. The controls are responsive, tight, and fluid. But Forced Evasion is a great way to shake your DS like crazy.
1 of the many cool robots you'll see in the game.
Outside of of combat, you have your traditional RPG pacing. Go to town, view scene, head off to next Dungeon. As said, battles are the main attraction here. Well that and the dialogue. The game is light on big amounts of exploration and is pretty linear in general. Not that anyone's complaining mind you.
The overworld. Hellos SNES.
Visually the game looks like a really good SNES titles. The exceptions of course are the wonderful backgrounds, character portraits, and Animations during battle. Oh dear lord the battle animation. It's just drop dead gorgeous. For sprites at the least. It will wow you if nothing else.
In Conclusion
This game is wonderful! If you don't mind the linearity and light story, you'll enjoy one of the best gameplay oriented titles on the DS and a lovely introductory title to the SRW series. It has a sequel in ol' Nippon Called Super Robot Wars: OG Saga: Endless Fontier EXCEED. Needless to say, if Atlus can, they'll be more than happy to bring it stateside.
lasers, heroic speeches and enough awesome that it breaks the laws of physics...twice.
If that's not good enough:
In western terms, imagine if The Avengers (both teams of that name), the Justice League, Spider-Man, the Scoobies, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Doctor, and The Incredible Hulk teamed up with G.I. Joe, SG-1, Battlestar Galactica (the original and rebooted series), and the crew of the Serenity. Inject them with industrial levels of weapons-grade hot blood. Now imagine the threat it would take to bring them all together, and imagine them pounding it flat.This is the Super Robot Taisen (japanese for war which is ironic due to it being called Super Robot Wars in the east) series in a nutshell. The SRW series has been around since the ol' gameboy games. Specifically the first one that needed a whole pack of batteries had no color and you could probably kill someone with it if tossed hard enough. It featured quite a few mecha (giant robots duh) from popular anime's at the time along with some original one. It was awesome. So awesome that it became a cash-cow franchise. It's been around almost as long as Final Fantasy, but with one difference. Only Japan receives most of the titles. So stateside it's pretty much a niche. Since the series expanded it has been know for featuring every single japanese mecha ever. With tons of of content to pull from, dozens of sequels and spin offs, this is easily one of the funnest series ever. If you Japanese or really into importing.
Here's TV Tropes for more details on the series.
Which bring us to Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Saga: Endless Frontier.
Original Generation refers to the original characters developed for the SRW series as oppose to ones coming from anime and such (Think Gundamn, Evangelion, and Getter Robo). As Such there are tons of throwbacks to the OG characters from the past series. Naturally, this causes problems for those of us not living in Japan.
But you won't need to know all there is about Endless Frontier to enjoy it.
Endless Frontier is a Turn-Based Action RPG hybrid with enough innuendo, hilarity and fun the guarantee that the 45 hours you spend playing it will be downright enjoyable. It was published by Atlus (who are well known for loving the hell out of their US and European fanbase) and developed by Banpresto and Monolith Soft. One of the perks of being published by Atlus is that the games comes with (as Atlus customs) a free mini soundtrack featuring some the downright AWESOME music the game has to offer. Came out back in 2009 and is available at Amazon now for a good $30. Pretty damn worth it to try it out.
Here's the Trope Page
PLOT WHAT PLOT!?
Aschen: she knows how to get everyone's attention.
Since I'm terrible at synopsis that don't spoil too much, here's a short what you need to know via TV Tropes
The Endless Frontier is a collection of multiple worlds connected by dimensional portals known as "Cross Gates". In one of these worlds, Bounty Hunter and amateur ladies man Haken Browning and his Artificial Human sidekick Aschen Brodel explore the ruins of a crashed spaceship, one they were both found in when Haken was just a baby. Inside they find, much to their surprise, a rather well-stacked young woman with a big-ass sword and a tiny dress sleeping in the crew's quarters. Turns out she's Kaguya Nanbu, The Ojou of one of the Frontier's worlds. Upon finding out there's a reward for her safe return, the pair decide to accompany her home. Since this is roughly the first ten minutes of the game, things naturally start to snowball from there: strange crystals start sprouting up all over the Endless Frontier, and some very familiar-looking robots connected with a war that happened ten years ago have appeared again. Secrets, conspiracies, spankings, and lots and lots of boob jokes await.Get the idea? Despite being developed by the people who made Xenogears and Xenosaga (AKA games with 2- 6 hours worth of cut-scenes regularly) You won't have to sit through hours of text. Sure there's a bit of it, but it's displayed instantly for your skipping pleasure! Not that you'll be doing that a lot due to laughing so much. One of the great perks that comes from having Atlus localize a title is that the script and translation gets nothing less that a Grade A touch. The only hiccups come from some names which is still largely unnoticeable unless you actually played the other SRW games. In other words, most people won't notice this, and it isn't that big of an issue anyway. While the story itself isn't anything groundbreaking (due to it not taking itself all the serious) The writing more that makes up for it. Besides, the main draw of Endless frontier is the combat!
Jiggle physics now with 30% more sword to the face!
Kaguya, wrecking everyone's shit while making hookers blush.
The Overview
Battles use random encounters just like in the good ol' (or not) SNES and PS1 days. Luckily, unlike the SNES and PS1 days, the encounter rate is ungodly high and filled with goddamn bats. They're also turn-based much like the Xenosaga games. The bottom screen shows you who;'s about to go next. While in battle You have your standard HP for health and SP for spirit commands (A SRW Staple) which control healing abilities and the like. You also COM(command %) that controls your actual actions minus guarding. Attacking an enemy, using items and special attacks all consume COM. Some even require SP along with it (also know as the SCREW YOU attacks). When your turn comes up 50% of you com out of 100% gets restored. There are SP skills to increase the threshold temporarily and restore it, but items are far more affective at restoring COM. The game hates you with SP though. Items restore poultry amounts. Like 90 out of 500 poultry. Some items restore it fully, but good luck finding and/or buying them. This is mostly due to the fact that you can put tons of buffs on the party and debuffs on the enemy so long as you have the COM and SP. The character's turn is only skipped if they defend or attack. But don't think this makes the game easy. It's fucking required if you wanna get by in this game.
Battles follow the flow of
character turn ->staus buffs/debuffs/ select enemy/attack/end turn.
Simple right? Wrong
Attacking is action oriented and based on juggling the enemy in the air for as long as possible. Depending on how much COM you have you can chain attacks for the maximum of 5 or minimum of 1. But it doesn't stop there. With a touch of the D-pad you can call in a reserve character to continue attacking the enemy to extend your damage (can be done twice and later up to 3 times in one turn), or swap out to the next party member if their turn is after yours at any time for even MORE damage. And guess what? They too can call in 2 assists of their own to keep the enemy in the air and ruin it's day. It's entirely possible for your entire party to dish out all of their attacks and wipe out an any in the most one sided way possible. Coordinating your attacks, and proper timing is a great way to maximize your damage output.
This is the bulk of Endless Frontier. The combine is simply sublime and fun as all hell. It's smooth, simple, deep, and rewarding that every battle is fun and sweet. Also a 100% flee rate from mooks. That's always a welcome addition. Like I said this game is Nintendo Hard so don't expect the enemies to take it easy on you. Regular mooks can have HP to the 10s of thousands and bosses go in 100s of thousands. And they can totally ruin your day if you're not careful. Tough but fair is best way to describe it.
Witness its glory
There is only one issue. Forced Evasion. What it does is when a enemy comes close to the ground or touches it, FE kicks ends and nullifies ALL the attacks that you dish out afterwards. You turn ends with that last attack and the enemy gets a chance to counter. This wouldn't be so bad, if some enemies couldn't wreck your shit with said counter attacks. Every attack counts as making an enemy juggle, and since this is what you should be doing in battle it comes off as justifiable for balance sake. Too bad you can't do it. It's for enemies only, and bosses just love to get out of your combo's this way. heavy enemies are especially a pain as the likeliness of FE kicking it is ruffly 85% should it even look like they are about to touch the ground.
But as said, this is the only issue with combat. The controls are responsive, tight, and fluid. But Forced Evasion is a great way to shake your DS like crazy.
1 of the many cool robots you'll see in the game.
Outside of of combat, you have your traditional RPG pacing. Go to town, view scene, head off to next Dungeon. As said, battles are the main attraction here. Well that and the dialogue. The game is light on big amounts of exploration and is pretty linear in general. Not that anyone's complaining mind you.
The overworld. Hellos SNES.
Visually the game looks like a really good SNES titles. The exceptions of course are the wonderful backgrounds, character portraits, and Animations during battle. Oh dear lord the battle animation. It's just drop dead gorgeous. For sprites at the least. It will wow you if nothing else.
In Conclusion
This game is wonderful! If you don't mind the linearity and light story, you'll enjoy one of the best gameplay oriented titles on the DS and a lovely introductory title to the SRW series. It has a sequel in ol' Nippon Called Super Robot Wars: OG Saga: Endless Fontier EXCEED. Needless to say, if Atlus can, they'll be more than happy to bring it stateside.
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