Review by: Brian Rowe

Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier, which I’ll graciously shorten to Super Robot from hereon, has it all, and I mean that literally. It has cowboys, demons, mecha, elves, busty damsels ripe for hentai, and more scantily clad were-animals than a furry convention. If you can name a typical feature of anime and JRPGs, Super Robot probably has it. Plot-wise, this cross-genre melting pot of an RPG is all made possible by portals through space and time known as Cross Gates, so I suppose we can add Stargate to the list of influences.

Super Robot is not a tale of brooding teenagers and tormented orphans. There is a dire tale of impending war and strange crystals enveloping entire kingdoms, but Super Robot can’t take anything seriously. Ace gunslinger, bounty hunter, and lady killer, Haken Browning, is on the case with his suspiciously sexy android, Aschen, whose outfit retracts to the bare essentials of modesty when the action heats up. Check your humility at the door, because there’s a fire-sale on boob-jokes. From jiggly to perky, voluptuous to petite, breasts and the catty girls attached to them bobble through every pixel. At one point, Aschen even remarks, “You’re becoming a master at finding half-naked princesses, Captain.”

Super Robot is one of a few games that have had me laughing out loud, but it’s more than a collection of juvenile snaps at the female anatomy. Heroes and evil-doers alike are filled with vibrant personalities, and not because of their outlandish, cosplay wardrobes. Their conversations are deftly speckled with individual attitudes and references to personal events, giving them empathic depth that no long-winded, soul-wrenching monologue can match. Don’t get me wrong. Super Robot’s storytelling has more in common with Dr. Seuss than Nick Hornby, but it’s nice to see characters that convey emotion without the gothic despair.

While comedy and bountiful breasts are head-turners, the uniquely engaging battle-system is what keeps pulling me back. Encounters are random and turn-based, but the emphasis on combos and juggling opponents in the air through real-time button-presses allows combat to tip-toe along the border of the fighting genre. Each character has a list of attacks that you order into a skillset. Some attacks have higher damage, some contribute to a gauge for powerful Overdrive attacks, and others make juggling easier. As long as you nail the timing for each attack in a skillset and keep the enemy airborne, combos can flow right into the next character while simultaneously summoning support attacks from inactive party-members.

The system is a little overwhelming at first, but it doesn’t take long for confident bravado to kick in. Unfortunately, the level of difficulty is set to super-simpleton for the first five hours, and flip-flops to soul-crushing and back on a whim. Since some enemies are heavier and harder to juggle than others, it would be nice if you could save multiple skillsets instead of cutting a combo short to tinker with the settings in mid-battle. Still, the boredom of slogging through throwaway battles is almost completely nullified by the need for constant vigilance.

Even after performing the same attack for the hundredth time, Super Robot remains easy, and sometimes, entrancing on the eyes. The overhead world is as plain as can be, but every moment of combat is an active cutscene of colorful sprites slicing, boxing, and shooting toward victory in a cyclone of anime flash and dazzle. Likewise, Super Robot doesn’t have the most logical or substantial plot, nor the smoothest difficulty-curve, but it’s always a pleasure to play.