Super Robot Wars 30 Is Too Long
Much as I love it, I can't be the only one thinking...
I’m a believer in quality over quantity in video games. Give me a solid, thoroughly packed, well paced 20- or 40-hour RPG over Skyrim pretty much every time. For me, the worst sin a game can commit is to make me spend low-quality time: mindless labor, mobile game busywork, time I want back afterwards. Grind is fine if I’m enjoying the thing I’m doing repeatedly (see Monster Hunter). But if I’m not having a good time and I still feel like I “need” to suffer through it, that’s a problem, not “value”.
Super Robot Wars has been one of my favorite series for years; I like to call it “my Smash Brothers” for crossing over characters from all over robot and sci-fi anime. Every year or two I buy the games on launch and sit down for a tight 40-hour strategy RPG campaign with all my favorite anime robots. On Hard mode, the difficulty curve is just right.
By map 50 or so, when I’ve already beaten God and am likely dealing with some force that’s two or three power level magnitudes above God— like Ultra-God, or something— it’s really satisfying to unleash my fully evolved robot team on a tough final boss.
But I must report, from the 100-hour mark, that Super Robot Wars 30 is too long.
As a 30th-anniversary title that pulls out all the stops, I kind of expected this from SRW30. This is a video game series known for excess, in celebration of a genre known for its excess. In the last mission I played, a robot was so depressed that he wasn’t as powerful as his friends that he transformed into a giant gun that his friends could pick up and fire. Excess is what we do here.
The problem with Super Robot Wars 30 is not that it’s 100-plus hours long. The problem is that it’s a 100-plus hour game on the back of a 40-hour game system.
SRW games up until this point have had linear campaigns with branching paths: in a play through you will maybe play 40-50 maps. The experience and power curves are designed for this length, followed by a New Game+ loop if you want to unleash your over-powered end-game team on some grunts who don’t stand a chance.
SRW30 mixes up the mission flow, and that part is good. Players fly their battleship around the universe and take on whatever missions they like in whatever order they like. Some maps advance the game’s main plot, and others zoom in on smaller conflicts from the source anime series.
Players in a hurry can do only the core plot missions, but if you’re the kind of person who buys Super Robot Wars, you probably want to play a scenario where Gundam’s Amuro Ray, Getter Robo’s Ryoma Nagare, Mazinger Z’s Koji Kabuto, and Gaogaigar’s Guy Shishio reflect on their time as old war buddies. You probably want to see the cast of Majestic Prince and Heavy Metal L-Gaim have a cook-off judged by the dead-tongued Van from GunXSword. I mean, that’s the good stuff.
So I’m playing all of the story missions. There are also secret loot-hunting missions buried around the map, a number of optional tests of skill, and some extra maps meant for experience grinding. I’m not playing any of that stuff because this game is already so long. I’ve already got so much experience and so much money, because among other things, I have an effectively infinite supply of experience and money doublers.
The issue in Super Robot Wars 30 is that you get too powerful, way before the end of the game. I am at a point where five or six of my units are powerful enough that they can destroy the entire enemy opposition by themselves in two turns. On Super Expert mode.
Previous SRW games in this line were breakable, if you tried. Exploitable skills and gear existed, and you could set up some really terrifying builds if you looked into it. That’s the charm of micro-managing your team, mission after mission. But in SRW30, everything is just broken. Upgrade stats are through the roof, pilots can easily just have all the skills at once, gear is stuff like “never get hit” or “energy refills every turn”.
It’s as though about 50 hours in, the game ended and I started playing “New Game Plus.” Because that’s what the system of SRW30 is built on, the same power curve as the last three games in the series (SRWV, X, and T). Except this time I’m beating more enemies and thus getting more experience and money than that system ever accounted for.
My robot army was never meant to get this strong. The last few SRWs end with the team at level 70: I just got my first pilot to 200. The enemies scale up to their experience level, but my robots outdo them in all kinds of other ways. They just don’t have any kind of chance against a robot that does 30,000 damage every time it hits and can move five times in a turn. Bosses? Do you mean those guys I have to hit three times instead of one?
There’s never going to be a challenge again, which is a problem when I’m not even through with the story. Maps have officially become boring. Strategy RPGs inherently call for tactics, but I’ve rendered tactics moot with overwhelming power. With that gone, the only meat I get to chew on comes in the form of raising up underpowered units (every grunt in V Gundam survives here) and watching the consistently amazing battle scenes.
Once I finish with Super Robot Wars 30, I’m probably going to go all the way back to something like 3rd Super Robot Wars or Masou Kishin on the SNES, with its unfair difficulty and merciless AI. I need an antidote to all this power.