Mugen no Frontier: Super Robot Taisen OG Saga [JPN DS]

[kryss]

So far:

• It's NOT the SRW I love, but it's not bad. I hereby apologise for all the comparisions that follow after.
• Battles are turn-based in an FF kind of way but I don't find them as tedious.
• The graphics when walking around are very retro - think back to the 16bit era. Functional but hardly pretty, though still in line with standard SRW battle map images.
• The voice acting is really good and very promising for the next proper SRW on DS. If you don't understand Japanese it won't mean much to you.
• Battles are easy when you get the idea. You can attack up to 5 times per character per turn (but it's a bit more complicated than that I think), to build up the biggest combo you have to press A for the next attack just before the enemy hits the ground reeling from the last attack. My max combo so far is 40 hits.
• The special abilites have survived and can be used in a turn without affecting attacks, as can items.
• The longer the battle goes on, the more your Killer Move (必殺技) bar charges. When at MAX you can press Y to unleash the current character's killer move. This is when you have the brief up-close AMV that you see in the adverts.
• Yes, KOS-MOS from Xenosaga is in it.

Story:
As with all SRW games it's a cross-over between universes, with characters meeting even though they're from "next-door worlds" as they put it in the game. I'm hoping some mech appear soon.
More on the story in wiki.


Overall:
Provided I'm not faced with the stupid number of random battles followed by enevitable save point-less death I had to try to endure in FFIII I'll stick with this to the end. The storyline seems interesting enough and the controls aren't too taxing or too easy at the same time. It looks nice enough during battles and there's enough skin on show to keep the anime crowd happy.

[NeoStuey]

Thanks for the initial impressions Kryss.

I see Famitsu scored it 8,7,8,7 30/40 which aint too bad.

Going to see if I can get hold of a copy over the next week or so, could be good for the train.

[kryss]

Been clocking in some more time and finally got some new moves for Hagen and Ashen which are making battles a little less tedious when using the same move OVER and OVER.

http://www.suparobo.jp/srw_lineup/srw_mugen/index.html

click "Game System" then "Special Movie" to see some ridiculous combo-overkill.

Edit:
Checked the manual to find out how to character-swap mid-fight, will explain shortly. More background first.

When you meet some enemies the order of attack is decided automatically and the next 4 to attack are displayed on the bottom screen. If you have 2 characters one after the other, when the first is fighting the face of the next will be displayed in the bottom right of the top screen. At any point in the fight when "wait" is NOT displayed over their face you can press right on the D-pad to have them swap with the current fighter. This does cost their turn though.
If you do this just after the last attack of one character you can continue their combo and get even more damage in.

My best combo is now 101 hits doing a total of 19532 damage.

Further edit:

Just added Reiji and Xiaomu to my team and can now execute support attacks. Any time mid-battle you can press left on the D-pad to have the next available rear attacker come forward and execute an attack. You can do this up to twice per battle.

[kryss]

31h25m in and still enjoying it. Later boss battles are a revival fest so make sure you stock up on rerisers and golden apples. Also one of KOS-MOS's seishin commands is a revival move, another restores 50% of everyone's health. Kaguya's "ai" command is the most useful, restoring everyone to 100%.

Amending what I said in my previous post, assist attacks from rear attackers can be used twice per front attacker, so you can have two attack, change to the next character and then do another two. Remember that each attack costs 5 SP though so if the character has zero SP you can't bring in the rear attackers.

[kryss]

Completed!

JUST finished it after 46h14m, of which at least 6 hours was today.
I have to say it was absolutely fantastic, interesting storyline, varied characters, OTT voice acting as befits a SRW game, plot twists, the lot. I was thinking that it would make such a good movie, but the chances are VERY unlikely.

My best combo was 182 hits, ~82k damage.

Plot twists and spoilers:

->Open Spoiler<-

Xiaomu and Reiji talk about spanking a lot...
Harken is W00, an artificial human. Aschen is W07 btw.
Kaguya's Mother gave her lifeforce to the Fuji-Zakura (Eternal Cherry Blossom) to seal the Crossgate to their world to prevent the War affecting them.
The 10-year war was started by a King who had been taken over by something from another land and was killed by Eizeru, the guy in the Skull mask to stop the war, though no-one knew this.
The Crossgates were all created by Varlshain Rhikait (?) in his (?) efforts to get home.
After completing the game and restarting at the beginning you get to keep your money and some of your items, and you unlock the BGM sound test feature in the game options.

End of game boss

->Open Spoiler<-

Varlshain Rhikait

(left): http://img413.imageshack.us/my.php?i...mgp3024lk2.jpg

There is no reason for this NOT to get a release in English as all the characters are owned by BandaiNamco.