Super Robot Wars, a crash course (2025)

Super Robot Wars is a long running series of strategy RPGs focusing on giant piloted robots; most of the entries in the series are crossovers between numerous anime. Story is a major focus in the games as they combine their own original content with adaptations of their licensed material. Visuals and sound are also prominent as the series attempts to recreate memorable moments.

The purpose of this thread is to make you into an expert on the series even if you've never heard of it before.

Now, it's important to bear in mind that I'm going to be talking out of my ass a lot here. This isn't because I'm trying to fool you or because I'm not engaged with the material. It's because this series is enormous. If you really want to go deep into Super Robot Wars rabbit hole beyond just being a casual fan you may never see the light of day ever again.

To illustrate that point, let's look at some numbers. I'll be describing the "main continuity" of the series as I think it's generally perceived later, but looking at the subseries that forms the main continuity and accounting for everything that connects to it, my original count ended up at 29 games that are linked by story. But that's including games that aren't Super Robot Wars and simply tie in to the story, and it's also ignoring standalone games; the answer to a very difficult question than "how many Super Robot Wars games are there". Instead looking at the Super Robot Wars series only but ignoring spinoffs that deviate from the formula and straightforward remakes, my count landed us on 47 games. That's a fairly strict count; I'm not even considering the unusual first game. What if I don't have those exclusions, grabbing the spinoffs that are more like Pokémon or Valkyrie Profile than a traditional Super Robot Wars? By my count, we've now gone up to 73 games. But we can go further still. Super Robot Wars is also closely related to other games like Super Tokusatsu Wars or Real Robot Regiment, even other series like The Great Battle and Another Century's Episode. If we decide to put those together, my count brings us to 124. The thing is, when I initially gave a tally of games that were tied into the series' main storyline, that includes games that are in this last count but none of the stricter ones. And I still haven't even brought up the idea of watching the anime that crosses over in this series.

If your head is spinning right now, that's totally understandable. Thankfully, you don't need to go anywhere near this far to enjoy the games. Many Super Robot Wars are either self-contained stories or part of smaller storylines, so there are many points that you can jump in without fear. But you hopefully you get the idea that despite largely only having official releases in Japan, this is not a small series by most measures, and there's a significant amount of history to find here.

Let's begin with the gameplay. The Super Robot Wars series has a pretty consistent formula, although it naturally plays with it from game to game. While the series is not foremost known for its gameplay, there is some depth under the hood if you want to think about how to max out the strength of your forces.

The basic gameplay is most likely influenced by early Fire Emblem, and may feel somewhat familiar to fans of that series. The player goes through a set of scenarios wherein their forces fight against enemies, potentially with complications added as the stage's scenario progresses. Players, enemies, and other parties can move all of their units and attack once per turn. When attacked, a unit can respond with a counterattack, defend to reduce damage, or evade to reduce enemy accuracy.

One major difference between the two series is that Super Robot Wars has no concept of character classes. Instead, units tend to fall under two loosely defined archetypes mapping up to the robot anime genres that were popularized in the seventies and eighties respectively as seen below. These classifications have since become popular shorthand for these two genres even outside of the Super Robot Wars series.

Super Robot: Superhero styled robots. Typically has a larger size ranking, having strong defenses but little dodging ability. They often have very powerful attacks, which are regulated by Energy costs, a basic stat that is also consumed by movement. Their most powerful attacks often have high Will requirements, requiring the battle to progress before they're enabled.​

​

Real Robot: Military styled robots. Typically has a smaller size ranking, having high dodging ability but weak defenses. Their strongest attacks typically have a long range, and are regulated by each having their own limited ammunition. May be unable to use many of their stronger ranged attacks after movement.​

But these aren't hard and fast rules. Units in Super Robot Wars are more mechanically individual than most Fire Emblem units, many being totally unique from enemy units. Rather than weapons being equippable items, most Super Robot Wars games give units their own preset attack lists, with different attacks providing different damage values according to the terrain that the opponent is in, as well as having other particular attributes like accuracy and ammunition. Naturally, units drawn from different anime will bring with them abilities that may be unique to their source material, such as Ideon's abilities fluctuating based on its Ide Gauge or the Aestivalis series needing to be close to the Nadesico battleship in order to use their full abilities.

Besides robots, Super Robot Wars also has pilots. Passively, pilots add their own stats to the unit and unlock an assortment of skills providing some kind of specific mechanical benefit, like being able to counterattack before an opponent's attack. However, another prominent feature of the game is Spirit Commands - essentially, spells. As they largely represent the pilot's mental capabilities and how they're capable of pushing themselves to the limit under pressure, they tend to be brief boosts meant for when you need a little more oomph, and the Spirit Commands the character possesses are generally in line with their personality. For units that have multiple pilots, each pilot has their own Spirit Command set and Spirit Points with which to use them, giving these units significantly more utility than they would have otherwise.

Similar to Fire Emblem, composition of your team is a big part of where the strategy lies. After every battle, players have the opportunity to upgrade and customize their units. Upgrading is fairly straightforward, giving you the ability to invest into the attributes of your favourite units to make them better. Units can generally be customized by equipping option parts - these not only offer stat boosts, but many can grant new abilities, such as allowing the unit to fly or giving them a defensive barrier.

But the games often feature a lot more to personalize the experience beyond just character upgrades. While aesthetic features like changing the main character's name and remapping the music are present in many games, some of the heavier features are unlockable secrets, branching story paths, and dynamic difficulty. Dynamic difficulty in particular is handled in a peculiar way; stages allow you to earn Skill Points by completing optional missions. While certain mission rewards are influenced by Skill Points, gaining them also changes the game's difficulty level.

Speaking of difficulty, the basic challenges may be one of the areas that players might find weakest. With game's subject matter demanding extremely powerful characters, there's often little to do to create challenges except create bosses with jacked up health and attack power, forcing the players to drain their resources to bring it down. Against normal enemies, the player usually tears through the hordes with little effort. This may be the standard to avoid threatening players who just want to mash through the gameplay and enjoy the story; similarly, the punishment for losing a unit in battle is generally just a small reduction in the cash you receive for upgrading units, so the games aren't very threatening most of the time.

Licensed games commonly reproduce the stories of their source material. Crossover games often come up with an original story to justify characters coming together. Super Robot Wars instead goes for a hybrid approach. The main character and main enemies are typically original, but the crossover content simply exists naturally in their world instead of being artificially pulled in by some story contrivance. Their stories are reproduced, but they may be woven together, or they may take different directions as they are altered by new inclusions from other series. Typically, the presence of an all-star team of heroes pushes things into a more hopeful, positive direction, but bad endings aren't unknown either.

While the series' writing has naturally not always been at the same level it is now, here's a small example to give you an idea of how the world is organically connected. In Super Robot Wars DD, we're introduced early on to Akira Fudou and Miki Makimura as they're attending their high school, bullied by their schoolmate Boss. Boss is beaten away by another schoolmate, Kouji Kabuto, who Miki wishes Akira was more like.

In fact, while Kouji and Boss come from the Mazinkaiser anime, Akira and Miki come from the Devilman manga. In the original Devilman, Miki was disappointed with her childhood friend Akira's passive behaviour and wanted him to become more assertive. Here, Kouji's more typical heroic tough guy behaviour serves as an example of what she's looking for, while also showcasing Kouji's friendly rivalry with Boss. The Super Robot Wars games feature Star Wars-esque opening crawls that further smooths out the crossover by introducing us to the state of a particular game's amalgamated world.

Super Robot series and Real Robot series are two different genres which trend towards different stories. The generic Super Robot series depicts a heroic battle against an evil overlord and their legion of monsters. The generic Real Robot series depicts a battle between two morally nebulous military or paramilitary forces. Of course, there's variation within the genres as well. The early Super Robot series Getter Robo is a striking example. The television series introduced Hayato Jin as a cool, stoic loner who won't join any of his school sports teams despite being able to best any of them. The manga, beginning only a few days later, introduced Hayato Jin as an unhinged terrorist mutilating people with his sharpened fingernails. Super Robot Wars has featured various adaptations of Getter Robo which may draw from either.

As such, the Super Robot Wars series also has to manage these disparate elements, tones, and varied power levels while maintaining something comprehensible and fun. The original stories partly serve to sort this out, serving the central pillar around which everything else is arranged. But in fact, some of the most memorable moments result from the collisions between these aspects. For example, infamous coward Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion discovers a heroic side as he's influenced by his traditionally heroic allies, while superpowered arch-criminal Shocking Alberto from Giant Robo fights the Godzilla-sized Angel Sachiel to a draw without even needing a giant robot to pilot.

If I've done my job right, hopefully you have a strong idea of what Super Robot Wars games are. You can pick just about any one off of the shelf and feel reasonably confident that you know what to expect and that you have the understanding you need to succeed. But what if that's not good enough for you? What if you're in a life or death situation and the only thing that can save you is your knowledge of Super Robot Wars? No, what you need is to be an expert. And to do that, you need to go into specifics, not just vague discussion of an abstract game.

Let's start with the companies involved. The main name that you'll hear in conjunction with Super Robot Wars is Banpresto. Banpresto is very similar to Bandai, who was an owner and has since fully absorbed them; they were a toy company using games as part of a larger strategy that crossed different kinds of media. Winkysoft is a developer they worked with early on, a company that often worked on licensed games and which has unfortunately gone bankrupt in more recent years. Of the human names involved, the most prominent is Takanobu Terada, who has served as producer for much of the series and sometimes also as a writer, joining fairly early on after leaving his bug testing role at Nintendo. The character designer Sachiko Kouno is also a pretty consistent contributor, although she works in the greater animation field as well as on Super Robot Wars.

In 1989, a software developer called Copeland was renamed Banpresto after it was partially acquired by Bandai and a new president from Bandai was installed in the company. Among their first video games, Banpresto created SD Battle Sumo: Heisei Heroes Tournament (SD Battle Oozumou Heisei Hero Basho), a crossover game featuring characters and giant robots from Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Gundam and Super Sentai. There were also some original characters by way of Banpres Kid and Great Kaminarimon. All of the characters were rendered in super deformed style, helping to gloss over their vast size differences in their source material.

This game came to be the foundation for the Compatiheroes series, a loose collection of similar crossover games with no consistent gameplay between them. Many of them of them were sports titles and many feel like they're imitations of other games at the time. Some of the other genres tackled by the Compatiheroes series include pinball, RPG, racing, fighting, and pachinko. Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and Gundam in particular are the mainstays of the series, with other franchises popping in on occasion as a fourth inclusion. While we don't see much more of Banpres Kid, we're already seeing original characters taking a prominent role in crossover games at this point.

Following SD Battle Sumo, Banpresto then produced a platformer game, SD Hero Full Decisive Battle: Defeat It! The Army of Evil (SD Hero Soukessen: Taose! Aku no Gundan). Featuring Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Gundam, and Metal Heroes, this game introduced a story where the evil Dark Brain captures the engineer Emi and the gachapon machine that she creates SD heroes with. This game gave rise to the The Great Battle sub-series, consisting largely of more core gaming genres like platformers and beat-em-ups, while also having a recurring story of Dark Brain's attacks against SD Nation. The following game introduced an ally named Roar, who continued on from there to become a standard playable hero in the series.

If this makes you interested in Compatiheroes or The Great Battle, I feel that I should warn you that the games actually aren't all that great. A lot of them feel like they're inferior imitations of other games, or that they're difficult largely because they're a bit clunky. The biggest sin, though, is that they just don't use the licenses very well. If someone was to bring the idea to us of Godzilla playing soccer and baseball with Kamen Rider – as we'd see in Battle Soccer: Field of Champions (Battle Soccer: Field no Hasha) and Battle Baseball – it sounds like a fun time mainly because we imagine them using their unique abilities. You imagine that maybe Kamen Rider #1 would be scoring goals by delivering a Rider Kick to the ball, or that Godzilla would be blasting it away with its Atomic Breath so that no one can intercept it. That isn't found here; the characters tend to act like interchangeable heroes in both gameplay and story. One positive is that a lot of them have 2 player modes which would probably make the experience a lot more fun.

Super Robot Wars got its start in 1991, not too long after the Compatiheroes series did, and was probably viewed originally as being within the same general initiative of creating various crossover games. Shedding the live action superheroes, this game instead featured the robots from the Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Gundam anime series as they fought against the evil robots led by the monster Gilgilgan, originally from the 1975 animated short crossover movie Great Mazinger Vs. Getter Robo. This game was developed by Winkysoft rather than being handled internally by Banpresto, and the gameplay may have been inspired by the original Fire Emblem, which was released only the previous year.

Original characters were not featured in this game. Neither were pilots, as the robots were all presented as intelligent beings here similar to what Gundam had been doing in their SD Gundam spinoff line; early Super Robot Wars games accordingly depicted Gundams as having pupils in their eyes according with the SD Gundam art style. There was also almost no story to speak of at that point. While the gameplay was similar to later entries, it did have a number of drastic differences. Units did not join the party as the story proceeded, but instead the player could try to schmooze with enemies in order to lure them to their side. Spirit Commands were present, but randomly selected rather than being particular to a character. The player also got to pick a leader unit who had to survive, similar to the Lords in Fire Emblem.

Special note also needs to be made for the three franchises featured in this game. Similar to the Compatiheroes series regularly featuring Ultraman, Super Sentai, and Gundam, the Super Robot Wars series regularly features Mazinger, Getter Robo, and again Gundam. Although Super Robot Wars has treated their original trio as less essential over time, it's also vastly expanded on the number of franchises included in its average game whereas the Compatiheroes only occasionally would feature a guest outside of the main three. This leads to the Super Robot Wars trio getting a certain prestige above the other mecha series included. This prestige is further tied to their cultural influence; Mazinger Z created the Super Robot genre, Getter Robo created transforming robots, and Mobile Suit Gundam created the Real Robot genre.

For whatever reason, this particular game managed to get a sequel. And for whatever reason, this game - 2nd Super Robot Wars - was made not as a straightforward sequel, but as a paradigm shift that established the series as what it is now. Rather than a game focusing on sentient robot characters against a crossover movie enemy, it took the characters directly from the various anime and set them against a new threat original to the game. Instead of choosing an arbitrary unit that has to survive the battle, the player now has a battleship to protect. The original game had already represented the robots with their unique attacks, but now we also get to see the unique personalities of the characters in story events and flavour text: for example, the American Jack King of Getter Robo fame yells out "Jesus" and "son of a bitch" whenever he takes damage, definitely not something you'd see from a typical hero in a Famicom game.

The game's story revolves around the Divine Crusaders, an international paramilitary group established by a man named Bian Zoldark. The heroes board the battleship White Base from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series and lead the battle. When Bian is fatally wounded at the end of the game, he praises the heroes and warns of upcoming danger. This and other hints build into several connected sequels with the Earth now threatened by a number of extraterrestrial invasions seeking to pacify the human race. The Divine Crusaders continue to live on after Bian's death, but grow detached from their original purpose with the passage of time, co-opted by other political interests. The games in this storyline are often known as the "classic series" or "Divine Crusaders series". These sequels also games further added more and more anime series and their stories.

While later entries introduced customizable main characters and a choice between a Super or Real starring machine, special attention should be paid to Masaki Andoh and his Cybuster, the first original hero and mech introduced in 2nd Super Robot Wars. They managed to get several games of their own including one crossover and one non-crossover on the Super Famicom that built up their own universe. Essentially, Masaki is a teenage orphan from Japan who is summoned to a magical world located inside of the Earth, the world of La Gias, to serve as a pilot for one of four divine mechs - surface worlders having more magical ability than the people of La Gias itself and being favoured for the role. His ventures to the surface world in the main series are often driven by his attempts to hunt down his rival; the powerful Shu Shirakawa, a mysterious and morally ambiguous figure who seems to view Masaki as nothing but a quaint, insignificant distraction from a larger scheme. The Cybuster story draws inspiration from the anime series Aura Battler Dunbine and Hades Project Zeorymer, the former so much so that there was a persistent rumour that it was only introduced as a replacement for Dunbine due to licensing issues - although that's been officially denied in recent years.

Masaki and the Cybuster also had some presence outside of the Super Robot Wars franchise itself. They made a guest appearance in Hero Battle Chronicle: Project Olympus (Hero Senki: Project Olympus), an RPG in the broader Compatiheroes series which also introduced Masaki's two cat familiars. There was a Cybuster anime, apparently not particularly good, which inexplicably focused on the Cybuster being inherited by some new dude from the Divine Crusaders. There was also a particular obscure spinoff, True Elemental Lord Panzer Warfare (Shin Masou Kishin Panzer Warfare) which once again dropped the original lore in favour of yet another separate story with a separate set of characters in the same mecha.

The Divine Crusaders storyline was originally meant to end with 4th Super Robot Wars on the Super Famicom. According to the Japanese Wikipedia - which does have some misinformation, I should warn - this changed when SEGA acquired the rights to make Neon Genesis Evangelion's games shortly after that series ended. They approached Banpresto, asking to port 4th Super Robot Wars to the Sega Saturn with the addition of Evangelion. Neon Genesis Evangelion being the weird thing that it is, Banpresto decided instead that it would be easier to remake 4th Super Robot Wars entirely as a two-part saga, giving us both Super Robot Wars F and Super Robot Wars F Final (Super Robot Taisen F Kanketsu Hen). Adding not only Evangelion but its major inspiration, Space Runaway Ideon, this was a grand finale where mankind faced multiple apocalypse scenarios - and due to branching story paths, could be lost to them.

Going by The Magic Box, both of these games sold about half a million games on Saturn each, and a little bit more when they were ported to the PlayStation. At this point, it's probably fair to say that the Super Robot Wars series stood on its own as a recognizable face in the Japanese gaming scene.

When the Divine Crusaders storyline appeared to be over with 4th Super Robot Wars, the games still continued. Concluding the storyline naturally left the series in uncharted waters, as did Banpresto's gradual move towards developing the games internally rather than publishing Winkysoft's titles. It's at this point standalone Super Robot Wars games began being created - games which had entirely self-contained stories instead of building up a larger one. Standalone Super Robot Wars games have continued to be produced to the present day, and with the passage of time they've been more a feature of Nintendo systems, particularly Nintendo handhelds. The storyline games subsequently became more exclusive to PlayStation, presumably because PlayStation systems have historically allowed for greater graphics and are more suitable for higher budget entries.

But come the year 2000, the series begun creating longer storylines again. The first of them, the Compact 2 trilogy, released on the original monochrome Bandai Wonderswan over just under a year - naturally, with Bandai being one of the owners of Gundam, it made for a pretty solid platform for robot games. Super Robot Wars Compact 2 - Part 1: Turmoil on Earth Chapter (Super Robot Taisen Compact 2 Dai-1-Bu: Chijou Gekidou Hen), Super Robot Wars Compact 2 - Part 2: Space Quake Chapter (Super Robot Taisen Compact 2 Dai-2-Bu: Uchuu Gekishin Hen), and Super Robot Wars Compact 2 - Part 3: Decisive Battle of the Milky Way Chapter (Super Robot Taisen Compact 2 Dai-3-Bu: Ginga Kessen Hen) all tell the story of two lovers, Kyousuke Nambu and Excellen Browning, who end up facing the Einst, a plant-like hivemind which predates humanity and adopts the role of governing the universe's progression. This trilogy was later remade on the PlayStation 2 as Super Robot Wars Impact.

A few months later in 2000, another series was established via Super Robot Wars Alpha on the PlayStation. This story focused on humanity's battle with the Ze Balmary Empire, a militaristic interstellar empire which enslaves other planets so to enlist their populations into the perpetuation of the war machine. This particular series may be particularly notable for its degree of non-linearity; while many Super Robot Wars games may offer different stories depending on if you pick the male or female protagonist or if choose between the Super or Real Robot route. The Alpha series generally features four playable characters to choose between, each with their own stories. The original Super Robot Wars Alpha in particular has eight characters. While Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden has no choice between playable characters, it still has branching story paths with multiple endings - another standard of this series.

As far as I'm aware, the Alpha series as well as Impact were the height of the popularity of the series. Going by numbers in Japanltdrank, which may be outdated, the original Super Robot Wars Alpha on the PlayStation is the best selling game on the series at over seven hundred thousand units sold. It was also voted as being among the top 100 games of all time by Famitsu readers in 2006. Beyond that, the original Super Robot Wars Alpha received an interesting Dreamcast remake that replaced the sprite-based graphics with 3D models.

In 2002, another Super Robot Wars storyline began via Super Robot Wars: Original Generation for the Gameboy Advance. This subseries is particularly notable for several reasons. After over a decade of gaming history, the Super Robot Wars series had developed enough of its own characters and storylines that it could create a crossover of its own content without needing the inclusion of anime series. While there are original additions to the game as well - including some substitutes for vital story components like Gundam's political layout - it largely consists of characters and stories from the previous Super Robot Wars and, to a lesser extent, Compatiheroes games written together to form a new whole. In the same way the series inclusions in older Super Robot Wars games sought to excite a mecha anime fan, the inclusions here seek to get a hardcore Super Robot Wars fan excited. As this series lacks the legal complications of the others, it's also the first to be officially released in English, as Atlus localized the Gameboy Advance games.

This particular series also seems to have taken the position of being the primary Super Robot Wars universe, and I think it's most likely perceived that way by both the fans and developers in general. There are two elements of this. One is that the Original Generation series is the longest running, perhaps with no intention of ending at all. The other is that it's the hub through which crossovers within the series connect; there are occasionally connections between games beyond just particular self-contained series and they tend to go through Original Generation, turning the Super Robot Wars franchise into a much more massive story.

With the Original Generation series collecting the content from the other games, it may have you envisioning the other games being quickly hammered out as a prototype for their appearance in the series proper. But that isn't necessarily how it happens; for a simple example, Super Robot Wars OG: The Moon Dwellers for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 is primarily based on Super Robot Wars J, which released on the Gameboy Advance over ten years earlier. In fact, working on already established content often enables the Original Generation series to be a slow burn as it builds connections and slowly paces out the interwoven storylines. The series sometimes even manipulates the player's knowledge of the stories, teasing them about stories that they know are coming or creating surprise by breaking from the original plotline. Using a more detailed example, the original Super Robot Wars Alpha introduced the character of Ingram Plissken, whose story was then concluded five years later in 3rd Super Robot Wars Alpha as the now disembodied Ingram possessed a Balmarian soldier named Ayin Barshem, developing a new combined identity as Cobray Gordan. Ingram Plissken and his story was then introduced again in the first Super Robot Wars Original Generation game, but after fourteen years, we've only seen Ayin Barshem, that Balmarian soldier, in that canon - we expect that the transformation to Cobray Gordon must be inevitable, but it still hasn't actually happened.

The first two Original Generation games on the Gameboy Advance also received a number of animated adaptations. The story of Super Robot Wars Original Generation was adapted as Super Robot Wars OG: Divine Wars. The sequel, Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2, was adapted as Super Robot Wars OG: The Inspector. Additionally, Super Robot Wars Original Generation: The Animation served as a sequel to the games.

Directly related to this series is Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier; a pair of RPGs by Monolith Soft of Xenoblade Chronicles fame. These were not strategy games focusing on mecha pilots as one would expect from a Super Robot Wars game, but action RPGs with a battle system based around juggling the enemy for greater damage. Smaller autonomous mecha appeared as enemies and summons. The game world seems a little more fantastical, featuring a number of animal-like races. But the major points in the story connect straightforwardly to the Original Generation series; many of the entities in this game require knowledge of Original Generation 2 in particular to fully understand. Notably, while the concept of the Original Generation series may seem to be "Super Robot Wars without the crossovers", this game actually does have crossovers. Specially, it features characters from Monolith Soft's earlier games, Xenosaga and Namco X Capcom. In fact, these games also serve as sequels to Namco X Capcom, so Project X Zone is subsequently a sequel to these. Former Banpresto staff worked on Namco X Capcom, which may have led to interest in connecting the two crossovers.

I wouldn't be able to bring up Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier without also bringing up that I personally have a strong dislike of the games. While the battle system is fun, the art is good, and the story connections to the Original Generation storyline are interesting, the script of the games consists primarily of jokes about breast size. The main character in particular seems to define his party members primarily by their breasts. While the Super Robot Wars series as a whole is hardly free of fanservice elements, Endless Frontier in particular is such a constant barrage that it really just feels like they view their audience as utterly juvenile, souring the good qualities that the game has.

The OG Saga label was also given later to the Lord of the Elemental (Masou Kishin) games by Winkysoft, but rather than being an offshoot of the Original Generation series, it's actually a revival and continuation of the Super Robot Wars Gaiden: Lord of the Elemental (Masou Kishin) non-crossover spinoff game that was released for the Super Famicom in 1996. Like the first game, it further expands on the story of Masaki Andoh and the Cybuster that was introduced way back in 2nd Super Robot Wars.

The latest series began in 2008. Super Robot Wars Z's world is based on the plot of Super Dimension Century Orguss, a sister series to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. In a future where spacetime-altering weapons are the most foremost instruments of mass destruction, a particular case of misuse destabilizes the universe itself, leading the shape of the world and its history to shift unpredictably as alternate universes collapse together. A prominent link within the trilogy is Asakim Dohwin, a sinister man seeking artifacts of power. Asakim is clearly based on Masaki Andoh, the original hero of 2nd Super Robot Wars. His name is a corruption of Masaki's, his robot Shurouga has a similar moveset and is allegedly named after an abandoned idea for a dimension-hopping mecha from 2nd Super Robot Wars to serve as a counterpart of the Cybuster and Granzon. One of his attacks claims to show images of his past, which include unidentified characters and alternate versions of the Cybuster from the spinoffs. The true nature of Asakim Dohwin may remain unexplained even after the Z series was concluded in 2015.

Like many other big video game series, Super Robot Wars has also tried its hand in the mobile arena. Their first attempt was Super Robot Wars X-Ω, which is actually a tower defense game. X-Ω also is notable for having a ridiculous huge amount of new collaborations including some things extremely unusual things like FLCL, Crayon Shin-chan, Sega Hard Girls, or multiple versions of The iDOLM@STER – Xenoglossia, Endless Combination Kisaragi (Mujin Gattai Kisaragi), and Cinderella Girls. Super Robot Wars DD is a newer and more traditional one, being a simplified version of the strategy game much like Fire Emblem Heroes. This one instead has prominent inter-series inactions, like Lelouch from Code Geass piloting a customized Wing Gundam Zero from Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz.

Super Robot Wars has always been a largely Japan-only series due to the licenses involved, leaving a potential legal mire. In more recent years, Super Robot Wars and other Bandai mecha games have often featured full English text translations for the Asian region. These have often been viewed as being a strategy to expand the series' reach without proper localization, instead relying on region free systems and the import market. For example, all of the Super Robot Wars games on the Switch are available if you set up a Japan-region account and can played with English text according to your system region - that's how I personally managed to get all three games. Sadly, the Steam releases in particular have IP restrictions.

At this point, you should not only have a general idea of what Super Robot Wars is, but a roadmap of the entire series. We can sit you in a room full of hardcore Super Robot Wars fans, and while you may not be able to jump into the more detailed topics, you should at least be able to probe for the context you need and so follow the whole conversation. We started off this thread talking about how there are around fifty or seventy Super Robot Wars games depending on how you count; you can now clearly see the path that got us there. According to Bandai Namco's fact book in 2020, the Super Robot Wars series shipped 19.10 from its inception in April 1991 through to March 2020 - the number should feel less shocking now that we see the size of the series.

Of course, we can still go even further. While I've been talking in terms of series and trends, these series are made of individual games, and those individual games have their own individual quirks. Consider the infamous Super Robot Wars K, one of the standalone games released for Nintendo handhelds, specifically the DS. This particular game caught heat because a few of the songs on the soundtrack were found to be plagiarized from Super Nintendo RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Lufia II: The Rise of the Sinistrals. What's more, the writing made the main character seem like a insensitive whiny jerk. I've also left out a lot of the one-off spinoffs, like the 3D fighting game Super Robot Spirits for the N64 or the Pokémon-like SupeRobo Academy (Supa Robo Gakuen) for the DS.

But we have other material to cover, so if you want to explore further, hopefully you have an idea of what you want to look for.

Being a longstanding series with a dedicated following, we see some of the influence of Super Robot Wars expanding beyond the series itself. The most prominent example is its the "Super Robot" and "Real Robot" terminology that the series uses. As discussed before, this terminology has since been adopted as a general way of referring to two distinct but related genres of mecha anime. Since the '90s, we've seen a lot of anime that both tries to emphasize their connection with one of these particular genres or play around with the knowledge of those genres. Take Dai-Guard, which is a very lighthearted and traditional Super Robot romp where we see the heroic robot taking down monsters every week - but set in the modern Japanese working world, where financial concerns are constant and the drama involves terrestrial matters such as parents who don't respect your career. Dai-Guard was first featured in 2nd Super Robot Wars: Destroy World Chapter (Dai-2-Ji Super Robot Taisen Z: Hakai Hen) in 2011 on the PlayStation Portable.

When Super Robot Wars F Final was being developed, most of the heroes from the main three series had moved on from their humble origins. Courtesy of the movie Char's Counterattack, Amuro Ray from Mobile Suit Gundam had upgraded to the RX-93 Nu Gundam, a much more agile machine which allowed Amuro to fully utilize his superhuman spatial awareness. Courtesy of the Getter Robo Go manga, the Getter Robo team had been upgraded to the Shin Getter Robo, a horrifying machine who threatened to mutate its environment and consume the very planet it was stored. But Kouji Kabuto, the original pilot from the series that created the mecha genre, had been overshadowed by decades of imitators. Even in the Mazinger franchise itself, Kouji's Mazinger Z had been shown up by more powerful successors like Great Mazinger and Grendizer. Banpresto attempted to remedy this by designing a new more powerful robot for him; Mazinkaiser was introduced in Super Robot Wars F Final as the original Mazinger Z itself being warped into a new form by Getter rays. Mazinkaiser was so well received that it received its own anime OVA and film a few years later, becoming largely the face of the Mazinger series for a time. More recently, Mazinkaiser SKL also used a version of the design. Naturally, all of these Mazinkaiser anime soon made their own appearances in Super Robot Wars.

With the series being as old as it is, some of the fans have grown up to become creators themselves. Presumably around 1995, a university student named Jin Haganeya was playing 4th Super Robot Wars. As the game offered the player a choice to change the name of the main character's mech, he changed it from "Grungust" to "Demonbane". Almost ten years later, he was the writer for an adult visual novel "Deus Machina Demonbane", released on PC in 2003. This game focused on the titular super robot as it fought against beings from and related to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Demonbane is famous for being perhaps the most powerful super robot in popular fiction, which is naturally necessitated by the power of the opponents it faces. Via its anime adaptation, Demonbane first appeared in Super Robot Wars UX in 2013 on the 3DS.

While Winkysoft was largely absent from the series with the conclusion of the Divine Crusaders storyline, the company did not disappear overnight. They actually made a few similar games between their departure from the series and their return to it. In 2000, they made Holy Spirit Machine Raiblade (Seireiki Raiblade) for the PlayStation. While the main character and his talking cat transparently invoke Cybuster, the game also has a major dating game component where the main character can build relationships with others, particularly the girls who can serve as co-pilot for the titular robot. Sequels were announced but never realized. In 2001, they made Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars for the Gameboy Advance, essentially a Super Robot Wars game set in the universe of Konami's PlayStation 2 action game series. In 2005, they developed New Era Brave Wars (Shin Seiki Yuusha Taisen) for the PlayStation 2, a similar game based solely on Takara's "Brave series" of super robot anime. This one was published by Atlus.

The series also inspired a number of games with a similar concept or style. In 1998, Takara developed New Generation Robot Chronicle Brave Saga (Shin Sedai Robot Senki Brave Saga) for the PlayStation, their own Super Robot Wars clone based on their Brave series. The game later got its own sequel. In 1999, the short-lived Sunrise Interactive developed the Sunrise Hero Epic (Sunrise Eiyuutan) series of crossover RPGs based of the anime by the studio Sunrise, originally for the Dreamcast - a robot from the games was featured in the Super Robot Wars Alpha remake for the Dreamcast in 2001. One game in the series, Sunrise World War, was also a strategy game. In 2002, Namco developed the video game crossover strategy game Namco Super Wars for the Wonderswan Color - funny enough, published by Bandai before the mergers between the companies. Of course, there's also the aforementioned Namco X Capcom and Project X Zone, both of which had involvement from Super Robot Wars alumni and eventually become part of that canon.

Beginning in 2005, Banpresto reached out to From Software to develop an action game in the vein of Zone of the Enders with the robot anime crossover concept. This became the Another Century's Episode series. Originally focused entirely on Real Robot series, it eventually became a more Super Robot Wars-like general crossover. Super Robot Wars Original Generation itself became included in the crossover from the fourth game, while the Original Generation series adopted some of the custom variants of the Gespenst from this series in turn.

Super Robot Wars fanart isn't hard to come by, but a unique point about it is that it lends particularly well to fan mockups. Many of the Super Robot Wars games feature a cover art depicting the SD style mecha forming a thin ring. While it isn't particularly fancy, it does immediately sell what the games contain and crossover concept, aided by the consistent Super Robot Wars logo font. You can find numerous fan rosters presented in this style, or even ideas for other crossover games. Additionally, regardless of evolution of the in-game animations, attacking in Super Robot Wars begins with the SD robots floating in from the side of the screen atop a scrolling background. The games on the Gameboy Advance, DS, and 3DS also maintained a consistent style to allow for animations to be reused. Because of this, fake screenshots are similar popular, imagining characters as inclusions in Super Robot Wars or presenting them in the same style.

There are also a few fangames that style themselves after Super Robot Wars, probably because it allows focus on character interaction. One is Battle Moon Wars, a series of fangames by a group called Werk that crosses Kara no Kyoukai, Tsukihime, Melty Blood, and Fate/stay night. Another is Fantasy Girl Wars (Gensou Shoujo Taisen), a series of games based on Touhou Project.

At this point, you're just about ready to call yourself an expert in all things Super Robot Wars. There's just one thing left to cover, and it's a pretty big one, so let's consider this extra credit. What we're going to do is familiarize ourselves a bit with the main story of the series.

This is admittedly a pretty daunting task. To be honest, I originally intended to go through all the games, taking notes, in order to have detailed summary here. It quickly became apparent that I wouldn't be able to pull it off in any reasonable amount of time. Instead, we'll just focus on mapping out the connections between the games of the series to see the breadth of the connections that have been formed through the years.

But let's not waste too much time discussing the discussion. Let's dig right in.

With that, our class is concluded. May this knowledge aid you everywhere you go.