I recently finished Super Robot Wars A Portable as part of RPG Blitz.
An SRW game is always an interesting proposition for me since I love mecha anime and I love SRPG. It feels as enjoyable as playing Atelier games for me, where I can just pick up either game and start playing without thinking too much about story or nuance. As with any other typical SRW fare, the story is a melting pot of a number of Super Robot and Gundam series, while adding some original characters on top with its own twists and turns.
I must admit that nostalgia did factor a bit into my decision in playing SRW A, having seen a number of classic anime featured in this entry during my childhood. Mazinger Z, Voltes V and Getter Robo, for instance. Of course, after nearly two decades of not watching these series, I forgot all about the characters and plot, but it didn't diminish my enjoyment. The Robopedia feature certainly helped me to get reacquainted with the characters once more.
The turn-based mechanics, mecha customization options and pilot skills obviously aren't anywhere near as deep as any modern SRWs, but it's doesn't make it less difficult. The animation sequences obviously can't compete with the anime-style presentation of SRW V, for example. However, the sprite animation definitely has its own charm and appeal to a lover of pixel arts such as myself. The game does have a steep difficulty spike in the last quarter of the game. The scarcity of upgrade parts and skill points for pilots only exacerbate the matter. Not to mention some scenarios seems to go on forever as it goes into multiple phases of enemy waves.
I've played the game from start to finish on PC with PPSSPP and I didn't encounter any performance problems. The game run at 30fps and I couldn't find any cwcheat to unlock the framerate, sadly. Still, the game is entirely playable. The fan translation is acceptable. It's certainly dry enough with its own share of issues ranging from a simple misspelling to glaring grammatical errors. There are a couple of graphical glitches in chapter titles that I saw, and sprite alignments seems a little off in one of the menus, although this was probably a byproduct of higher resolution scaling.
Despite my time with the game (roughly 50 hours) and how much I enjoy playing it, (and that includes laughing at the absurd plot), I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it to newcomers. SRW fans would probably enjoy it a lot more -- even then this entry is not well received when it was newly released. I would recommend one to start with SRW V instead. It's much more accessible, and it features much more recent mecha series (Eva! Yamato 2199!) so everything is still fresh in the audience's minds.
Next up: Zanki Zero.
