Played through enough of this to give a reasonable impression now (about 3-4 hours).
From what I can tell, aside from two namco cameos, this game features entirely original characters, you don't need to have a good mecha knowledge to appreciate it.
It's a fairly standard RPG with an especially lightweight plot involving wars between worlds and crystals showing up everywhere. You play a mercenary who keeps coming across half naked princesses on his travels.
SRT games are all about fanservice, usually appealing to mecha fans. This still has a huge amount of fanservice but it's purely centered around the female characters. There's lots of jiggling and gyrating going on in animations and character portraits and there's plenty of humour centered around this fact.
The battle system is the main highlight of the game, it centers around doing insane combos and building up the frontier gauge to perform special attacks. These special attacks are well animated and quite fun to watch (I've just got a disco one which I had to avoid laughing at on a packed train). You build up for these special attacks by doing combos that swap between characters and by cancelling moves at the right point (there's a good risk reward mechanic going on). The battle system seems simplistic at first but there's a good amount of skill and timing involved. It's just a shame it allows you to spam items removing some of the challenge.
The negatives:
The (Japanese) voices aren't subtitled! They're constantly chatting away during and after the battles and you've no clue what they're saying. It isn't just the occasional screaming out of attack names, there's a lot being said and it's a really bad oversight on Atlus' behalf.
Outside of the battles, it has the production values of an unimpressive snes game. The dungeons and world map have simplistic graphics and the music is standard SNES fare. Also doesn't help that you're often given directions of where to go next but it's a throwaway line in the middle of dialogue that you quickly forget and there are no reminded. "head to the eastern xyz shrine". Given the maze like world map, you tend to wonder around aimlessly a bit, especially given it's a portable and you're more likely to play for short bursts (then forget what you're doing when you pick it up again).
So far it's a very fun RPG that doesn't take itself too seriously.
From what I can tell, aside from two namco cameos, this game features entirely original characters, you don't need to have a good mecha knowledge to appreciate it.
It's a fairly standard RPG with an especially lightweight plot involving wars between worlds and crystals showing up everywhere. You play a mercenary who keeps coming across half naked princesses on his travels.
SRT games are all about fanservice, usually appealing to mecha fans. This still has a huge amount of fanservice but it's purely centered around the female characters. There's lots of jiggling and gyrating going on in animations and character portraits and there's plenty of humour centered around this fact.
The battle system is the main highlight of the game, it centers around doing insane combos and building up the frontier gauge to perform special attacks. These special attacks are well animated and quite fun to watch (I've just got a disco one which I had to avoid laughing at on a packed train). You build up for these special attacks by doing combos that swap between characters and by cancelling moves at the right point (there's a good risk reward mechanic going on). The battle system seems simplistic at first but there's a good amount of skill and timing involved. It's just a shame it allows you to spam items removing some of the challenge.
The negatives:
The (Japanese) voices aren't subtitled! They're constantly chatting away during and after the battles and you've no clue what they're saying. It isn't just the occasional screaming out of attack names, there's a lot being said and it's a really bad oversight on Atlus' behalf.
Outside of the battles, it has the production values of an unimpressive snes game. The dungeons and world map have simplistic graphics and the music is standard SNES fare. Also doesn't help that you're often given directions of where to go next but it's a throwaway line in the middle of dialogue that you quickly forget and there are no reminded. "head to the eastern xyz shrine". Given the maze like world map, you tend to wonder around aimlessly a bit, especially given it's a portable and you're more likely to play for short bursts (then forget what you're doing when you pick it up again).
So far it's a very fun RPG that doesn't take itself too seriously.