Features I wish Super Robot Wars games had

The animations in Super Robot Wars games may have evolved greatly in the last few iterations of games, but the standard feature set hasn’t quite enjoyed the same level of innovation. Here are some ideas for new features which I think will make the series even better.

Make the Battle Viewer a standard

This isn’t exactly a new feature, but OG Gaiden and I think the SRWZ Special Disc had a battle viewer where you could pick any 2 units to fight each other with certain conditions set, like HP, critical Hit, etc. Why not make this a standard feature for all SRW games?

Have proper Volume Controls

This is actually a new and welcome feature in Saisei Hen for people like myself who like to cut and edit battle footage. The problem is you can’t actually mute any of the three categories (Voice, BGM, and Sound Effects), essentially making it a gimped feature. Let me turn off the music if I want to dammit!

Let players tailor the challenge to their play style

Let’s face it. SRW is a pretty damn easy game where EX Hard and SR Points just aren’t hard enough. For years people have been doing things to make the games more challenging, like having no PP, no upgrade runs etc. Why not legitimize this? Aren’t SR points already a way of making the game artificially harder?

What we need is a “Custom Game” option. Basically at the start of each playthrough you could set combination of a few rules, such as the following examples:

• Enemy upgrades (none to MAX)
• Enemy levels
• No PP earned
• No Cash earned
• No upgrades
• No Quick save/load
• No seishin(!)
• Seishin costs doubled
• Turn limit
• Forced SR Point
• etc

The game would keep track of which ones you have achieved, and you would even have trophies for certain combinations. This would make the average SRW game way more replayable and much more interesting.

Better secrets worth (re)playing for

Okay, imagine that by completing stages you earned points which you use use to spend at a “secrets” shop. This could even work with the Custom Game in the sense that you could have multipliers on your points earned depending on the difficulty of the stuff you have activated.

The shop would only available at the start of each playthrough and you can buy cool stuff that normally isn’t normally allowable in the game, maybe like replacing Klan’s Queadluun-Rhea with Armoured Klan permanently, or the 00 Gundam crew get their old MS from Hakai Hen in Saisei Hen.

Or maybe you could even have crazy options such as allowing characters to pilot mecha which they normally can’t, like putting Amuro into the Mazinger. Or better yet, allow the purchase of grunt units which ANYONE can pilot (hello grunt challenge)!

This system would reward players who choose the game to be challenging, while still allowing casuals to eventually get the secrets anyway, just at a slower pace.

Make SR Points count for something

Most games as of late don’t really reward the player for getting SR Points other than personal challenge, making the game slightly harder, or in some rare cases, award some kind of secret unit late game. How about actually giving the player something? In the case of the above secret shop, maybe achieving an SR Point would award more secret points than normal? Or say allowing the player to “spend” their SR point to actually make the game harder, like purchasing upgrades for the enemy.