Dai-3-Ji Super Robot Taisen

"More of what we expect."

Super Robot Taisen 3 is a standard strategy RPG for the SNES, comparable to Fire Emblem in almost every way. Battles are done on a 2D grid and between battles is dialogue that just serves to move the story forward. This game is obviously directed towards the fans of all things Super Robot-y, with the robots and characters from a number of different series (most famously, Gundam) amalgamated into a coherent storyline.

Gameplay: 8
Battles take place on an unavoidable basis against enemies that are comparable or stronger than your units, making victory difficult. The one tool that you have to get your pilots out of the mess is to use their powers to up their attack, critical %, movement, or whatever, but that only takes you to a certain point, after which you might need a workable strategy. The gameplay is pretty typical for a strategy RPG. All your units attack, which may be returned with counterattacks, then the enemy attacks.

My two annoyances are that first off, in most other strategy RPGs, there is a bar where you can see your Hit % and Damage, among other things, and decide from it whether or not you want to carry out the attack. In SRT3, you only see it after you choose to attack, and sometimes you find out that your own hit percentage is so low that you shouldn't even have attacked in the first place. Granted, you can see the other pilot's stats, but I don't feel like attempting to derive the battle algorithms by trial-and-error.

Secondly, whether your units choose to counterattack, evade, or defend when they're attacked is chosen on an overall basis. The setting, which applies to every unit, is to either always counterattack, counterattack unless you're about to die, counterattack if you're over 50% health, or always evade. Obviously, for a multitude of different situations, you're not going to find a set solution, so I prefer the games where you can decide that sort of thing case-by-case, like in the GBA SRT games.

Storyline: 7
It's hard to give a rating to the storyline of this particular game because the entire storyline is part of the SRT series and a lot of it seems to be intertwined. Some of you, who have already played other SRT games, might find it more coherent than those who have not, but even still, the storyline is followable, and it occasionally even gives you choices about where to go or what to pursue.

The basic gist of it is that aliens have arrived and a group called the DC has organized on a platform of attacking the aliens and attacking the military that wasn't really strong enough to fight the aliens. There's also some interaction between the characters, but you have to have watched the anime of the other series to catch on, and I'm not really a fan of anime.

Graphics: 7
The graphics are decent when we keep in mind that this was SNES-era work. All of the robots are pictured, and they look well-drawn in the anime style, but since I don't have any basis of conparison, I can't really tell if they were drawn with any sort of accuracy. On the battle map, the robots are more of a symbol instead of anything resembling them, but they're still interesting.

The battle scenes aren't that great; the robots are rather static and when they fire their weapons, it comes out as rectangular laser blocks or those little yellow ovals to represent bullets. The melee weapons are just slashes over the sprite. The sort of put the projectiles near where it looks like the robot is carrying a gun, but sometimes, it just draws a giant missile half the size of the robot itself out of nowhere and sends it on its way.

Sound: 5
Um... the sound is... interesting. It's not so much music as it is synthesized notes that repeat themselves every 20 seconds or so. I remember playing the first mission, and when the enemy units are placed on the screen, it plays this techno-ish laser sound constantly, and I was just like, "wtf?!!?"

It's not really bad as far as the definition of bad goes, but let's just say it's far from Carnegie Hall material. A few characters have their own themes, and they're decent, but the majority of the time, when you're looking at the grid, the sound is just weird. They also have the default sounds for like, laser, missile, and getting hit, which aren't that great, but it doesn't detract signifigantly from the overall

Buy or Rent?
Buy it if you can read Japanese. Buy it if you like Super Robots. Buy it if you're just interested in turn-based strategy RPGs, like me. If you're not, then there's really not much point in playing, so I'd say rent, but I don't know of anywhere that still rents SNES games.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/26/07