Genre: Role-Playing
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Monolith Soft
Release Date: April 29, 2009

It's sometimes difficult to remember that despite the vast number of games being translated to and from English, not every country comes close to getting every game. Even Americans don't get everything released in Europe. Just look at Freshly Picked: Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, for a modern example. It's even stranger when only some games in a franchise see overseas release, such as the Super Robot Taisen franchise. It originally began as a bit of a fan-service game, allowing Japanese fans to see their favorite giant robot pilots interacting with each other. However, between licensing issues and the fact that most Americans couldn't tell Dancougar from Daltanius, there wasn't much chance of the games being released in English, despite a small but active fan community.

This changed with Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation, a game that didn't feature any licensed robots and thus was a lot more accessible to American audiences. However, beyond that game and its sequel, there hasn't really been much available to continue the franchise overseas. The only new title, Super Robot Taisen Original Generation Gaiden, would have been difficult to translate, especially coming so late in the PlayStation 2's life cycle. It wasn't until the DS release of Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier for the DS that a new entry could feasibly be released in English. However, Endless Frontier is a very different game from all the other Super Robot Taisen titles, and it runs the risk of being too Japanese for the usual Atlus fan base.

Endless Frontier places players in control of Haken Browning, a bounty hunter in a unique location in space-time known as the Endless Frontier. Something happened quite a while ago that caused time and space to fracture, leading to a large series of worlds to be interconnected by Crossgates, which allow warping from world to world. While on one of his routine explorations of a crashed ship, Haken comes across Kaguya Nanbu, princess of a nearby world, and decides to take her home. Before he knows it, he's caught up in even bigger problems involving mysterious strangers from outside the Endless Frontier, humanoid robot weapons, and an ever-increasing collection of bizarre crystals that are cropping up across the various worlds of the frontier.

Endless Frontier is not a game that is very welcoming to casual RPG fans. To be fair, it's not even welcoming for semi-hardcore fans. It is a game that panders to the most hardcore of Atlus' fan base. You see, there are a total of seven characters in the game, and with the exception of Suzuka, all of them are cameos or references in some fashion. Many game fans might be able to recognize KOS-MOS from Xenosaga, but from there, it gets more obscure. Two of the characters, Reiji and Xiaomu, are the main characters of the Japan-only title Namco x Capcom, and another character is a reference to a minor character from Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation 2. However, part of that particular reference was only included on a drama CD with the Japanese-only PS2 release of Super Robot Taisen: Original Generations , and  another part of that direct reference was mistranslated by Atlus, meaning that one of the game's major plot points only makes coherent sense if you already knew it was there.  Even the final boss of the game exists entirely as a reference to something that happened in other games!  You could easily play through the game without recognizing the references, but it makes an already disjointed game feel even more so.

Even after you get past that, however, Endless Frontier is not really a game to play for the story. Each successive plot point is mostly just an excuse to cram in as much fan service as possible, including weird in-jokes and a seemingly never-ending tide of breast jokes. The primary motivating factor in advancing the plot is seeing what sort of new silly nickname that Haken can come up with for the next over-sexed anime design that the game throws at you. This is not a game that is remotely shy about the fact that its primarily female cast is made up of women with ridiculous bosoms, unrealistic personalities and implausible costumes. It revels in it, and every single moment of the game is packed to the brim with more of this. Even the game's attacks are primarily focused on which parts of the female anatomy they can point the camera at. It's a very silly and sometimes funny game, and if you're looking for a more lighthearted RPG, this could be just what you're looking for. Haken is a character who will discover a dark secret about his past and simply shrug it off and go on his merry way, and there's no angst to be found in this game.

For the most part, Endless Frontier is an extremely traditional RPG. You walk around towns and dungeons, either buying items or opening chests. That is about the sole sum of the game's gameplay. Haken has the ability to break rocks, but this only comes up when you're forced to occasionally press the A button while wandering around dungeons or you find an upgrade that lets you break a slightly different kind of rock. There are a few dungeons with little puzzles to solve, but the puzzles are extremely self-explanatory and don't usually involve anything more complex than "push rock A into slot B." There aren't any really special mechanics or systems involved here, and if you've ever seen an RPG, you can pick this up and instantly know what to do.

The real twist comes in the game's combat system, which is interesting but fundamentally flawed. It's turn-based, which means that it's built around 2-D combat and juggling. If you had to directly compare it to an English-released game, it would be very similar to Valkyrie Profile. When a character's turn comes up, you press the A button to focus on an enemy and then press the A button to attack. This will start a string of up to five different combos. Each time you press the A button, you move to the next combo in the list. Doing this knocks the enemy into the air, and careful timing allows you to keep him in the air.

Each hit builds up Frontier gauge, which is a sort of shared group super meter. Once the Frontier gauge is full, you can have any of your characters perform his or her special super move for ridiculous damage. Each character can also cancel one of his pre-existing combo strings to go into the next combo. This allows you to keep the juggle going, since certain moves have long recovery times and can cause you to miss the enemy if you're not careful. If you cancel at exactly the right moment, however, you'll also gain a boost to your Frontier gauge. There's no real sign of when the right moment is, so you'll just have to experiment until you find it for all your characters.

Each attack combo also uses Combo energy, of which each character has 100. The characters regain roughly 60 COM a round, so if you use it unwisely, you may find yourself without it for a full attack string. It is also used for using powerful items, among other things. Fortunately, keeping your Combo energy high is extremely easy, and it really becomes something that players have to keep an on.

All of this sounds simple, but as the game progresses, gameplay will get more complex.  First and foremost is the addition of Support Attacks and switching characters. If an allied character is directly after your current character in the turn order, you can choose to automatically switch to him or her by pressing a button. This will make him jump in and automatically start his own combo string, as well as give a huge boost to your Frontier gauge. You can actually do this between all four characters if your timing is good, which is automatically enough to max your Frontier gauge (maybe even twice in a single round of combat!).

Support Attacks are gained as soon as you reach more than four party members. A party member who isn't in your team will be waiting on the sidelines, and if you press the Support Attack button, he or she will leap in and do a special attack alongside your current character. Players can do this up to two times per character per round, although late in the game, some characters gain the ability to do it three times in a row. The Support Attacker's identity follows a set pattern and moves to the next person in line for each successive support attack. Not only do these attacks keep the combo going, but you'll also gain a nice boost to your Frontier gauge for each Support Attacker you call in. There is really nothing as satisfying as pulling off a 300-hit combo using every single member of your team, and while that is rare, it is a lot of fun to do.

Finally, characters also have skills and spells that they can cast before take their action. Spells are similar to those in the Super Robot Taisen titles in that they're special buffs or debuffs that you can cast on your characters to improve their combat abilities. This can range from giving the character a health boost, to doubling his damage, allowing his hits to juggle an enemy better or restoring COM. However, each spell costs SP, which is the game's version of MP. Players can spend SP and COM to perform special attacks, which either do massive damage to multiple enemies or offer some kind of whole-party boost.  The balance on these abilities is really weird. Spells are useful enough, although who gets good spells and when is completely strange. Kaguya, for example, begins the game with a healing spell that recovers 100% of HP to all characters and enough SP to cast this multiple times. Skills are basically the traditional sort of magic attack, and they're almost entirely worthless. They cost too much SP for too little effect, and it's hard to imagine a time when you'd rather use a skill instead of simply attacking. The sole exception to this is Haken's Rampage Specter move, which is so overpowered that you may never attack with him again.

The real problem with the battle system isn't with the players, but with the enemies. You see, when I said the entire game was built around juggling enemies, I wasn't kidding. About a quarter of the way into the game, you're going to encounter Forced Evasion on basically every single enemy you meet. If an enemy is allowed to touch the ground, he'll instantly stop your character's attacks, blocking any remaining blows and very likely launching a counterattack. This means that how challenging the game is depends entirely on how good you are at juggling. For a Valkyrie Profile fan like myself, it was a complete snore fest. No enemy could provide a reasonable challenge, and boss fights only took time because the bosses have ridiculous amounts of HP. If I hadn't been used to the quirks of juggling in 2-D RPGs, I could have found the game ridiculously irritating.  Enemies blocked all of my attacks over and over as I tried to get the grasp of how to keep them in the air. There's not really a good middle ground here, and either enemies will be completely unsatisfying to fight or potentially very annoying.

Even beyond Forced Evasion, the enemy balance is extremely awful. Random encounter difficulty bounces around more than the female cast. Enemies may hit ridiculously hard in one area and then be pathetic wimps in the next dungeon. You can encounter two ninjas early in the game who have a huge amount of HP for the area, and then the entire next dungeon is filled with things that die in one combo from your weakest character. There didn't really seem to be any sort of balance or forethought given to enemy placement, so there is no way to tell if something you're going to face is tough or easy. Fortunately, the game's difficulty level is low enough that even strong enemies are annoying because they can absorb a ridiculous amount of damage or one-shot one of your characters. The latter might sound bad, but revival items are so common that it's a minor inconvenience and you usually don't even lose your turn. Bosses are generally meat walls who are time sinks more than challenges. Bizarrely, Endless Frontier loves its boss fights. You'll encounter no fewer than two and sometimes as many as five boss fights or mini-boss fights per dungeon. None of them are particularly hard, but it is extremely bizarre to fight a boss, walk into the next room and fight another boss, and then walk into the next room and fight yet another boss.

Endless Frontier is a pretty nice-looking game. The overhead view used for the dungeons and world map is a little plain but has a charming retro feel. It would be nice if there were a little more detail in some of the later dungeons, since a lot of them feel very bland and uninteresting. The combat animations are a lot better and fairly smooth and fluid, with lots of neat little details and gimmicks. The only problem here is that you're going to see those animations a lot. Each character only has five attack strings that you can get, and you'll probably only use one or two of them. This means that combat revolves around watching the same-length animations over and over and over again. Admittedly, they're rather nice animations, but it's pretty tedious to repeatedly watch them.

Endless Frontier has a nice soundtrack, although almost the entire thing is made up of remixes. You'll hear songs from Xenosaga, the various Super Robot Wars games and Namco x Capcom, so don't be too surprised if some of the music sounds familiar. One thing to note is that the game isn't dubbed at all, so all of the characters still speak in their original Japanese voices. This can be a plus or minus, depending on how you feel about dubbed voices, but there is one element of the game that this hurts slightly:  At the beginning and end of every battle, characters have humorous little conversations with one another. Since these are still in Japanese, most gamers are going to have absolutely no idea what is being said. There are no subtitles; characters will chat in untranslated Japanese pretty often. Atlus has said this is due to technical issues, but it may be a turnoff for players who expected to understand these little conversations.

Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier is a very casual RPG for hardcore gamers. It's not really challenging or complex, and the story line is the very definition of pulp adventure, right down to the cowboy protagonist. It's a good game for those seeking to blow off a little steam, as long as they don't care that it's an extremely silly and lighthearted game without much plot. The combat system is pretty fun, if extremely repetitive, and the presentation is overall solid.  However, there are things that could very easily turn off players. The game has balance issues, and while none of them are enough to ruin the game, it does make for a disjointed experience. The biggest barrier to the game is going to be Forced Evasion, which is a potentially game-ruining feature, and the amount of trouble is entirely dependent on a gamer's particular talent for juggling.  Fans of the franchise probably already have their copies, but more casual RPG fans will want to approach with caution. It's a potentially fun game, but it has just enough potential pitfalls to make it difficult to wholeheartedly recommend.