20/30 【Play F-Final to pay respects】in space, no one can hear you scream “IDEON GUN!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Released in September 1997, Super Robot Taisen F had been a huge critical and commercial success for Banpresto, to the point of burying the plans for the other new series, Shin Super Robot Taisen, and securing that the SD look of the robots used in the series’ battle scenes would remain right up to the current PS4 / Steam / Switch generation of games (at the very least). Super Robot Taisen F would later see an equally popular PlayStation port, before the next series, Super Robot Taisen Alpha, kinda merged Super Robot Taisen F with the aborted ideas of Shin Super Robot Taisen.
On a more personal note, Super Robot Taisen F was also my first direct contact with the series. The French games magazine Joypad, which had a considerable impact on making import games and obscure consoles like the PC Engine more familiar to French players, had extolled SRT’s virtues many times since at least Dai-3-Ji on Super Famicom, but their lead import RPG reviewer (and robot anime superfan) Greg had been downright dithyrambic about SRT F-Final, in a short review published belatedly in the January 1998 issue.
Having then just finished Shining Force III Scenario 1, I was up for another tactical game, and this review convinced me to take the plunge. I was already familiar with Evangelion, a few Gundam series and a handful of other robot series released on VHS or discussed in the same magazine, but the reason I jumped into SRT F is because it was sold to me as a great SRPG game on its on rights. I saw it as a peer of Langrisser, Front Mission and Tactics Ogre, regardless of its animated licenses. Unlike most Japanese players, it was my newfounded dedication to Super Robot Taisen that made me discover and fall in love with a whole bunch of robot anime series.
So, in my personal case, Super Robot Taisen F isn’t “the Super Robot Taisen game with Evangelion”; it’s the Super Robot Taisen game with that other newcomer, just below, there.
It’s the Super Robot Taisen game with IDEON!!!
Oooh, Ideon… The anime Space Runaway Ideon, broadcast on Japanese television between 1980 and 1981, was Tomino’s first post-Gundam series.
The series draws heavily on Gundam for its themes, its pessimistic vision of mankind, its pacifist message and, to match all the above, an eloquent propensity to kill any character at any time.
However, Ideon has the knack of committing all these war crimes with an eponymous robot that is much bigger and beefier than the puny Gundam, no doubt to rekindle with the more traditional and safer Super Robot formula (remember that the first Gundam series wasn’t an immediate success, either in terms of ratings or toy sales).
As a result, the mecha Ideon in the original TV show is incredibly, absurdly, almost comically powerful. And since Super Robot Taisen is a meticulous series, its Ideon is just as powerful (so much so that it will reappear in very few episodes of the series, so systematically does it screw up the balancing of its games).
I’ll be honest: in the first half of the game, this balancing issue hadn’t jump out at me yet. Ideon was a bulky, goofy-looking robot which didn’t hold a candle to its younger, cooler looking peers.
But as explained above, Terada had been too ambitious with this remake to keep to his deadlines and conclude the story on a single CD-ROM. That’s why Banpresto split Super Robot Taisen F into two games and finally released the second part, Super Robot Taisen F-kanketsuhen, a.k.a. Super Robot Wars F-Final, in April 1998.
(Yes, the first F already meant Final… Let any Photoshop user or programmer who has never saved a file under the name FINAL_v5 cast the first stone.)
F-Final allowed you to resume the save interrupted at the end of the first F, thanks to the Saturn’s internal backup memory, or start F-Final from scratch with a new team and bonuses galore provided to beef up your fresh squad.
The game offers an impressive number of alternative routes and variations, including the secret Evangelion ending mentioned one post above, and allows you to unlock higher maximum stats for your squads. This endgame is where Ideon shines, as it single-handedly rakes the battle maps.
What makes Ideon so strong is that it has access to so-called Map attacks, which are relatively rare (at least in F-Final) because they allow you to attack several enemies at once, without retaliation, instead of choosing a specific enemy and engaging in the usual 1v1 battle scenes. To compensate, these grouped attacks are usually less powerful than proper duels, but Ideon’s attacks hit everyone on the entire map and are also the strongest attacks in the game! They one shot almost everyone. Here’s the notoriously stupid Ideon Gun, which is probably the strongest attack in the history of the Super Robot Taisen series.
To, huh, balance things out a little, at least theoretically, Banpresto relies on a gameplay gimmick called the Id Gauge. Just as EVA-Units have to manage their AT Field and could become Berserk, Ideon can reach a point of no return. As Ideon is attacked and takes hits, it fills up this Id Gauge represented by a symbol that appears progressively on a special icon in the character’s sheet, as you pass Id Gauge levels (level 3 = three strokes on the symbol etc.). Each time you go up a level, you unlock a new, more powerful attack, such as the Ideon Sword or the Ideon Gun, but if you reach level 7, Ideon destroys the Galaxy (and it’s Game Over).
The gauge rises in level faster when you have less HP, and falls again under certain conditions, such as defeating enemies or retreating next to a base; handling Ideon quickly becomes a question of juggling between the usefulness of unlocking its strongest attacks and the danger of screwing everything up with a thermonuclear gigafart.
The thing is, even with this theoretical balancing safeguard, Ideon kicks ass on the last dozen of maps, especially when you catch the map’s biorhythm and aggro foes at the right pace to unlock the best attacks without getting overwhelmed. And since Super Robot Taisen F is a fairly difficult game overall, Ideon becomes your and Humanity’s best friend. Well! I am sure that’s exactly the moral that Tomino wanted you to understand at the end of the Space Runaway Ideon story! If you discover the original anime series in 2024, as I did thanks to Super Robot Taisen F, you won’t be disappointed…
To wrap things up properly, here is also a complete Speedrun-style playthrough of Super Robot Taisen F-Final (going for the Evangelion ending, as its the fastest one you can unlock):