Super Robot Wars Y plays just like a kid’s giant robo fanfiction

When I was 16 years old, I wrote my first fanfiction. It was a crossover fic where the cast from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy gave the anime dog demon Inuyasha a makeover. It was stupid and poorly written, and yet, to this very day, I remember it fondly. This is exactly what it’s like playing Super Robot Wars Y — an exceedingly silly, nonsensical plot featuring characters that have no business speaking to each other all, stitched together by tactical robot action. It rules.

Super Robot Wars Y was released on Nintendo Switch 2 and Steam on August 29th. For this blog, I played the demo that covers the game’s first chapter with progress carrying over to the full game. It is the latest entry in a series of robot strategy games that spans back to the NES days, but this recent game is only one of a handful of English releases. Super Robot Wars takes all the robots from your favorite mecha series — Getter Robo, Mazinger Z, Gundam, and more — and mashes them together in a big ol’ strategy RPG toybox.

That’s excellent for the Universal Century-loving, Knightmare Frame-driving girlies such as myself, but absolute hell on studios who have to navigate complex licensing agreements with anime distributors and production companies once you get outside Japan.

It’s only been through the dedication of fan translators that Super Robot Wars has maintained a robust English-speaking fandom. And it’s apparently big enough that Bandai Namco has decided it’s worth it to give these games worldwide releases, starting with Super Robot Wars 30 in 2021 and now Super Robot Wars Y.

This game is, to use the technical term, goofy as shit. You play as an original character, a mecha-piloting soldier sent to protect a young girl who’s found herself in charge of a giant city that’s also a floating battleship. (If you’re familiar with the original Mobile Suit Gundam’s White Base, it’s that but with a city on it.) From there, it gets really silly. The utterly charming thing about Super Robot Wars Y is it makes an earnest, full-throated attempt to incorporate every component series’ plot and most important moments into a singular coherent story.

When Domon Kasshu (Mobile Fighter G Gundam) shows up, everyone gushes over him because he’s the pilot who won the 13th Gundam Fight. They also gush over him because he’s the guy who gave the most “romantic love confession ever,” and if you’ve watched G Gundam, you’ll know what they’re talking about. And if you don’t, the game includes a robust encyclopedia of characters, organizations, and events to get you up to speed. But I’ve found I don’t care when I don’t know someone or something.

In one fight where I was overwhelmed by mecha-kaiju, four teenagers with attitude climbed into four different mechs that then fused into one. Did I know those kids or care about them? No. Why? Because their giant mech — which I’m told is called a Dynazenon — transformed again into a giant, flame-spouting mecha dragon. Who cares about teenagers when you’ve got giant robot dragons?

Characters with similar motivations and goals are gathered on one side of the conflict and their opponents on the other, leading to legendary team-ups that were once only possible eight pages deep into an AO3 fanfic search. I cannot express how much the sentence “Lelouch vi Britannia mounted an all-out assault on Char Aznable” breaks my brain in half. But I can definitively say it was also the moment I bought all the way into this game.

The other reason I’m sold is the combat. I’ve been searching for a tactical action RPG. The last couple I’ve played, Fire Emblem Engage and Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, left me cold with a bland story and uninteresting combat, respectively.

Super Robot Wars Y has adequately scratched my itch. It works like any other tactical RPG: send units out on missions to destroy enemy mechs on a gridded battlefield. Each pilot has a suite of abilities you can swap out and improve, the same way you can upgrade mechs by changing out their parts and enhancing them.

Since this was a demo of the game’s first chapter, combat was relatively simplistic. But I can see that the upgrade systems offer depth to explore beyond that. You also get abilities called “spirits” that grant you temporary stat bonuses or let you dodge attacks, and support characters who also grant temporary combat boons, so you can build your team to your liking. There’s also something called the “Sacred Tri-Directional Galaxy Memory,” which is basically a skill tree that rewards picking a dedicated path with massive, team-wide bonuses.

There’s a part of me that wanted to caveat all the praise I have for Super Robot Wars Y with “as childish as it sounds,” but that’s not really fair. Even from the little bit I’ve played, the enjoyment I get out of Super Robot Wars Y is real, and not strictly because the combat scratched an itch or the batshit story provided a rousing good time. It reminds me of the fun I had writing fanfiction as a kid, and I hope, as the game goes on, that feeling continues.

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