Game:

Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden (2001)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 48:28

4,926 views

80

Recorded on September 26, 2019
Translation by Aeon Genesis: https://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=srwag
Mel and Kristian are with me.
I have a Twitter: https://twitter.com/mageknight404

The year is 2000, and Super Robot Wars is still a very niche and budget series of video games over in Japan. The Classic series had definitively wrapped with the release of F and F Final a few years back and the series was starting to gain some traction. Then along comes the big one - Super Robot Wars Alpha. A hearty, sprawling epic spanning 67 scenarios, multiple route splits, and filled to the brim with secrets galore, Alpha was the shot in the arm the series needed and quickly became the series' gold standard that SRW games from then on would be compared to up to now.

A year later, as the events for Alpha 2 were being laid in stone, some cleanup in the Alpha 1 story still had to be done, so along comes Alpha Gaiden, a stopgap game to get some extra mileage out of the aging PlayStation before the PlayStation 2 would become the new king of the mountain. Set some time after the end of the Balmar War, a deadly shockwave is on a fast track to the Earth's vicinity and threatens to wipe all of humanity off the map. The plan to prevent that? Why, use all of Earth's Super Robots and some reals to generate a giant barrier on the moon to shield Earth from harm! One problem, the Titans want all the glory and demand the robots be relinqushed to them, otherwise they'll get dangerous. Let's get dangerous!

Alpha Gaiden was also the first SRW to have a noticeably increased animation budget, even moreso than Alpha. Nearly all of the series introduced in this entry have very lavish animations for their attacks(Xabungle and Turn A Gundam in particular) and even some returning players got a welcome animation bump for a handful of moves. This would become the series standard as the series would continue to have cool battle animations for each new game released.

By 2009, the series was getting a bit more noticeable on the other end of the sphere and this entry ended up receiving a fan translation that Mel and I would become quite attached to. While it's not perfect, it did help set the ground work for later translations and also propelled the lead translator, Christina Rose, into being a part of the localization efforts for the VTX SRW entries! And they're quite excellent scripts, too!

Alpha Gaiden was instrumental in forming the foundation for our love for Super Robot Wars and Mel and I would like to take this small break from A Portable to share it with you.

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Our story begins at the Saotome Labs. Ryoma, Benkei, and Musashi of the Getter Team are trying to keep the Titans away from the lab and prevent their egos from festering it. However they're understaffed - Hayato's missing meaning they can't form Getter Robo G and have to fend them off with just their planes. They choose to stand their ground instead of surrender, and fortunately, they get some help in the form of some Londo Bell members!

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