Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier Reviewed

The story follows Haken Browning, a cowboy captain of a clan of pirates, and his sidekick Ashen, a busty, emotionless android who is replaced by a scantily-clad airhead whenever she enters her powerful “overdrive” mode.  During their travels, they befriend a harem of cartoonishly bosomed anime stereotypes.  From the cat girl to the aggressive princess, the cast is all here.  Once everyone is assembled, they set out to discover the mysterious purpose behind the magical crystals that have been taking over their world.  

The overarching story is tremendously generic, and plays out as if it were pulled directly from some Internet fan fiction.  The pot of gold lies in the writers’ awareness of just how vanilla the plot was, and adjusted the characters’ personalities accordingly.  Haken spends more time concerned with his travelling companions’ bust sizes rather than the forgettable task at hand, and the other characters give performances that are even more over the top than your average JRPG (which is saying something).  The crucial flaw in the game’s parody is that the localization feels unfinished.  Although all the text dialogue is well translated and localized, the voice dialogue remains untouched by English hands.  This becomes irritating, as the characters will converse with one another before and after every battle, and it feels as though the player is missing out on a big chunk of the story.  

Endless Frontier‘s mechanics are fairly solid and deceptively addicting.  The over world is standard JRPG fair: traverse the world map with Pokémon-inspired sprites and confront a random encounter every 10 steps, but the battle system is actually a great deal of fun.  The visuals match Haken’s predisposition with his party’s bodies, forgoing fancy graphics on the over world in favor of nice, hand drawn sprites for battles and dialogue sequences when they can be properly oogled.  Fans of previous Super Robot games will find themselves feeling like a fish out of water, as the developers, Monolith, have replaced the traditional strategic game play of previous Super Robot games with the flashier, combat-oriented battle system they engineered for NamcoXCapcom.  Attacks are dealt simply by pressing the A button and watching as a combo is carried out.  At any time during a combo, you can press the A button again to initiate another attack or have a partner attack for you, but the timing is key, as factors such as how high in the air or how many hits have been received greatly affect the amount of damage done.  The system is fast-paced and fun, which makes those random encounters bearable, however the lack of a proper tutorial makes it difficult to get into for new-comers.