Super Robot Taisen: Mugen no Frontier: Original Generation Saga (a.k.a.: Super Robot Wars: Endless Frontier OG Saga, which is still a damned mouthful.) (NDS)
2008 The Eight Headed Beast Called Bandai (with some help from Namco)

The Short Version: It’s a Super Robot Wars game without Super Robots or a Warsy strategy RPG format. And KOS-MOS is in it! So basically, uh. WTF, man?

The Long Version: Actually, Endless Frontier is a happy accidental offspring from the long-running SRW franchise. You see, Japan is a country steeped in ancient tradition. From traditional wooden penis festivals to awesomely brutal ritual suicides, the Japanese just love to hone and perfect the things their ancestors did, in between aggressively assimilating things that were hip in other countries 10-20 years ago. Though of late, with the anime boom in the United States, that trend is starting to reverse itself in a situation that will lead to a Japanese master race using the peasant populous of the rest of the planet as pawns in a global re-enactment of fuedal-era territory battle, and we’re going to love every minute of it.

Another tradition is the JRPG Series Template. It’s basically the slower paced, Eastern version of the annual Sports Franchise Expansion Pack we get over here. With more hair gel. And amnesia. And more “PWIP PWIP” noises in the menus. Super Robot Wars is one long-running series of games that even as a fan of them I can’t figure out WHY THE HELL they’re popular. In terms of gameplay, the basic flow of the games runs the same on the PS2 as it did on the NES and Game Boy’s original installments. The two chief draws of the series are the lovingly detailed sprite animations for each attack, and seeing all your favorite super robots in a massive crossover setting. Well, if you’re Japanese. Here, all we got were the OG games, due to a wonderful web of licensing issues that would make the series too expensive to possibly be profitable here. Said OG titles, the “Original Generation”, use only characters that were created specifically for SRW, conveniently making for tighter, (mostly) more coherent storylines, and allowing them to be published without getting sued up the ass. The format, of course, remains the same- one of the driest SRPG engines around. You buff/debuff, move units, select ‘Attack’, and watch the animation play.

Endless Frontier is kind of a freak occurence in two levels- for one, the familiar grid dotted with robot heads is gone, replaced with… a JRPG ‘overworld’ with random encounter battles. The battle system is based around a sort of crazy air-juggling, tag team combo system, but remains effectively turn based. Sound confusing? It’s not. It’s the same ‘guys take turns whacking each other’ scheme all these games use, except you have multiple chances to attack, and timing them just so keeps the enemy helplessly airborne for lengthy, damaging combo chains. It’s a lot like Final Fantasy mixed with a fighting game, which makes it ‘interesting,’ rather than… ‘Final Fantasy.’ Secondly, the setting is wildly different- rather than die hard sci-fi as usual, EF uses sort of a post-apocolyptic SF/Fantasy universe. It starts in a Westerny land, that’s linked to other goofy theme worlds via portals. And rather than using the rich, existing OG cast, all the characters are sort of ‘hybrids’ of them- Kaguya Nanbu combines the surname and highlights of Kyosuke, the bubbliness of his lover Excellen, and the BIG-ASS SWORD of his former CO Sanger Zonvolt.

And did I mention they’re not piloting robots? Why they couldn’t drop the name is beyond me.

The overworld graphics might be a turn-off for some. I’ve seen better sprite work on the Super NES, and a strange amount of the dungeon crawls is dedicated to smashing random rocks lying around, concealing treasure. This is made up for in battle, which is pretty much par for the SRW course. It’s hard to say how many frames of animation in the game went into elaborate gun twirling attacks, or breast jiggling. You see, all the characters are fighting on foot, and all, and the character designer only knew two body types for women- ‘Loli,’ and ‘Porn Star.’ (No loli porn stars, sickos.) That out of the way, I love the ensamble of fighters available- the heroes from Namco X Capcom, Harken Browning (a dark-clothed cowboy sort), Aschen Broedel (a green-haired, bipolar android), Kaguya (huge-busted, sword wielding Japanesey princess- and she’s the token ‘healer!) and Suzuka, an oni chick who controls a small robot MADE OF GUNS with fan dancing. As referenced before, the lot of the cast are mostly drawn from references to the Original Original Generation cast, which makes a lot of it fun in an in-jokey kind of way. It’d work well as a stand alone game just fine, too.

But bizarre changes of scenario and format aside, SRTMmFOG is- shock- fun. And kind of addicting. I was stumped for shit to write about, honestly, but it dawned on me I’d been playing the stupid game instead of updating or drawing a comic buffer. There’s your endorsement right there. And guess what, it’s apparently being lined up for a US release.