So. 無限のフロンティアスーパーロボト大戦OGサーガ (mugen no frontier super robot taisen OG saga: Endless Frontier: super robot wars OG (original generation) saga) is out today for the japanese Nintendo DS. I’ve played it a bit and my initial impression is disappointment as usual. I have to blame a lot of this on the limitations of the Nintendo DS hardware but as far as visuals go the developer Monolith Soft (best known for the Xenosaga series which had fair visuals but other issues were abound) really does kind of suck with sprite graphics. Namco X Capcom on PS2 had some damned ugly battle sprites at times, I’m particularly reminded of Ryu and Ken’s combination attack where they appear to have pig faces in their end pose. Monolith Soft sucking at sprites raises the question of why they’re making such games but that doesn’t really matter. The early game play is fair but I find the interface uninspiring. The plot is wonky SF crap like most of the SRW series but with even more emphasis on the comedic than usual and a sort of Leiji Matsumoto esque romantic retro sf feel (generally the SRW OG games are hard SF). That said what saves the game from being a step above trash (it’s still better than a lot of DS games though) are the amusing characters and their interactions. Since the characters are intentionally based off of other original banpresto characters in various ways and those characters are basically at best homages to mecha character stereotypes I can’t really give points for originality but the whole thing works in a way that amuses me.
And that’s the whole point of playing a game; to be amused. I should really figure out how to use the ; properly. Anyway the game is easy, the visuals are questionable, the gameplay is a step above uninspired and repetitive (which is a big step up for the boring and repetitive srw series), the characters are unoriginal, the plot is uninspired rehash, and the dialogue is great in a slapstick absurd kind of way. So make of that what you will. In the end I’d say if you’re a fan of monolith soft, banpresto, the japanese language, or the srw series then it’s worth picking up but other than that you’d have to be a really hardcore handheld rpg fan for it to be worth a purchase.
To float back to something I recall mentioning recently about the DS, this is a good example of how even when it seems like the dual screens are being well utilized there’s almost no reason why the same things wouldn’t work on a single full sized screen that was split however. In fact if developers made more use of the right analog sticks on PS(whatever) games there would be almost no limit besides human attention which is quite a bottleneck indeed. whatever.
Just in case anyone has the wrong idea I am talking about a Japanese video game that’s in japanese here. I do not know if the game will be released outside of japan or not, and I also don’t know if the game will be released in a different language. There are often “asian” versions of SRW games but I’ve never been clear exactly what those are and they’re just japanese games with at best a little printout in other languages what the controls are. There is a certain potential that the game will be released in america since the two GBA OG games were, although the PS2 OG games have not been and possibly will not be, but a European release seems extremely unlikely to me even if there is an american release. I would say a large obstacle to the potential release outside of japan aside from the small prospective client base (most people who want srw games outside of japan buy them in japanese anyway and probably will not buy the same game twice, or they just pirate them and wouldn’t buy a commercial version anyway) would be how japanese the humor in the games are, revolving mostly around language that isn’t translatable. Like the way Lamia talks which I personally can not explain. There is also voice in mugen no frontier and there definitely isn’t enough room on a DS cartridge for dual language but the dubbing would be terrible. I think it’s the copious amount of voice in the PS OG games that kept them from an american release more than anything. I always think that otaku will just want the original japanese anyway but if you’re limiting yourself to the otaku fanbase then it’s hard to make money.
Well I’ll write more about the game some other time. If for no other reason than I’m possibly the only one using the tag “mugen no frontier”.
