Sometimes I am very surprised when certain games make it outside of Japan. Sure, we live in an age where what will get localized is on the rise and what must be imported is steadily decreasing in comparison to times past (thanks to companies like Atlus and XSEED), but sometimes the choice of which games make it over still surprises me. What I mean to say is, Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier (or Sir Togsef as I like to call it) is VERY Japanese. In fact, there are even cross-over characters in it from the Japan-only Namco x Capcom.

Though a spin off of the Super Robot Wars series (most of which DID stay in Japan), the game makes several large departures from its predecessors. First off, rather than focusing on giant mechs like Gundams and Veritechs, the characters you control consist of people and people-sized androids. The second key difference is that the game is a JRPG rather than an SRPG.

The game takes place in land called “The Endless Frontier” which consists of many different worlds connected by “cross gates” scattered throughout each world. You take control of Haken Browning, a bounty hunter dressed in cowboy garb with a lot of guns, one of which acts as a giant (and deadly) swiss-army knife. The game couldn’t take itself less seriously if it tried. As more people from various worlds join your party, you’ll find that most of them are ridiculously proportioned anime girls. The game’s dialogue completely acknowledges this, constantly filling the story with comedic innuendo. It’s quite quirky and different then the average JRPG dialogue.

What this game does best is its take on turn based battles. Because it’s so “out there”, I embedded a battle explanation video at the top of the review that covers the basics. Turn order is visible (a la Final Fantasy X). At the start of your characters turn, you have 100% “COM”. Each action you take spends a section of that bar and it will be partially refilled at the start of your next turn. You can do a string of up to 5 normal attacks in a single turn. The order and type of these attacks are determined by a playlist of skills you build for each character. The key is juggle combos of all things. Each enemy has a different weight and, through timing your attacks at just the right time, you can keep your enemy in the air. If the enemy lands, they might stop your string of attacks and even counter. On top of that, the more combos you get in the air, the faster the “Frontier Gauge” fills. When this gauge is full, you can perform an extra powerful attack.

While actions like attacking and using items take sections of your COM, using spirits (read: magic) does not. You can use as many healing or other modifier spirits as you want, given you have enough Spirit Points (SP) to spend on them. The catch is that there are no spirits that will cause damage to an enemy. There are, however, skills that will spend both COM and SP that can damage or cause effects to multiple enemies, but they will end your turn.

Another thing you can spend SP on is support attacks. Once you have more than 4 characters (up to 8), you will have a back row. By hitting “left” on the d-pad amongst your regular attacks, you can call in a back row character to perform an attack at the cost of a small amount of SP. In addition to this, if one of your characters is up next, you can hit “right” on the d-pad to call in your next front row character to start their chain of attacks while keeping the enemy in the air. It all makes for a very unique and fun battle system.

Overall, I found this game to be a bit of a mixed bag. Though the tongue-in-cheek dialogue was amusing, the lack of an engaging story really hurts the drive to carry on through to the end. Thankfully, random battles feel more interesting than the average JRPG, even when they’re frequent. It also helps that the large battle sprites in the game are very visually impressive. Each attack you perform is a treat to look at and this is amplified further by seamless hand-drawn animations overlaid upon support and special attacks. Perhaps my biggest complaint with the game is that after you learn each characters’ five normal attack skills, you will probably be using the same playlist of attacks for each character for the rest of the game. Sure, you will still learn more spirits and even mentalities (modifier states that randomly take effect at the start of a character’s turn), but you no longer have the thrill of expanding your normal attack chains for the later portion of the game.

If you are looking for a new take on the old JRPG genre, but aren’t looking for any kind of serious story, SRTOGS:EF can be a fun little diversion from the norm. It’s comical enemy designs like a bipedal whale with a bazooka and a studious ogre sporting giant nerd glasses while clutching a book kept a smile on my face as I played. It’s a bit “boss battle heavy” and probably would have been better if it was about 10 hours shorter (due to the sparser leveling in the end), but all in all, it’s a charming little game given that you aren’t offended by all the gratuitus suggestive themes.

Tags: Atlus, JRPG, nintendo ds, rpg, Sir Togsef, SRTOGSEF, Super Robot Taisen OG Saga Endless Frontier, Super Robot Wars

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.