Super Robot Wars Y is set in the aftermath of a giant mecha anime crossover war. Earth and Space's massive potentially apocalyptic war ended with the assassination of the evil emperor Lelouch, and the Earth Sphere has settled into an uneasy peace. Players follow the story of the A. Advent, a city secretly located on the back of a giant floating carrier and powered by an inexhaustible energy source. When the A. Advent is forced to lift off to defend itself from attack, it emerges as a new power in the world. Gathering together the mightiest fighting forces of the world, this floating independent city-state sets out to find its place in the world, guarded by a secret organization known only as NINJA.

Super Robot Wars has always been something that's best described as someone's crazy anime fan fiction come to life, and Y is no exception. It takes characters from shows like Gundam, Mazinger and Getter Robo and throws them together in weird and unexpectedly cool ways, like Gundam SEED's Shinn Asuka ending up being the martial arts student of G Gundam's Domon Kashuu, or Godzilla being treated as a near-apocalyptic threat even in a world that's used to giant monster attacks. You need some love for the mecha genre to really get something out of it, but a nice thing about Super Robot Wars is that you don't need to know every show because a lot of effort has been expended to make the plots and characters work in a self-contained way.

Overall, I think Super Robot Wars Y is better paced than Super Robot Wars 30 despite being a very long game. It puts more effort into using a variety of different enemy factions instead of repeating the same few robots. Pretty much every stage has some connection to one of the series' plots. There's a lot of fun and cool crossover elements, and Y is better than 30 about making sure everyone interacts and is involved. If I have one complaint, it is that some of the series don't feel well used. The standout is Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, which only uses one season of the show and thus basically vanishes for massive chunks of the plot. Sometimes the game goes dozens of stages without mentioning the show, which is a debuting series in the big Gundam franchise. I wish the dev team had at least included both seasons of the show.

As with the previous games in the series, Super Robot Wars Y is a tactical strategy game where you deploy various robots on the battlefield to fight, with you and then the enemy taking turns. Each robot has multiple resources to manage, including health, energy, which fuels attacks, and morale, which influences the stats of your characters and their available attacks. You can further customize your machines with different equippable parts. Each machine also has a pilot with their own distinct skills and spells to power up their machine in various ways. It's a by-the-book strategy RPG with a lot of customization options.

Probably the biggest feature that Y has over previous games is the new Assist system. This replaced the ExC and Supporter systems from previous Super Robot Wars title by sort of combining them into one. Many of the various non-combat characters from shows are represented as Assist characters. You can deploy a specific number of them in each stage, where they grant specific passive bonuses depending on the character. In a stage, every time you kill an enemy, you earn Assist points, which can be spent to activate special abilities. For example, the Oktai Factory from Godzilla: Singularity Point gives a passive bonus of free MxPoints for every enemy killed passively and recovers energy to all party members. Assist characters will level up the more you use them, so they improve their skills just like standard combat party members do.

For the most part, I really like this system. It's a nice balance between the often-forgettable Supporters and the incredibly broken ExC system. Making the Assist characters into their own characters and having them level up and get stronger is a nice way to make them feel more distinct. In addition, making Assist points shared by the entire party makes the points feel more valuable.

My only real complaint about the system is that some of the choices for Assists felt a little disappointing. Characters like Mazinger's Boss and Sayaka or Geass's Jerimiah and Anya got reduced from being playable with their own units to side characters. This is particularly disappointing for Boss's robot, which is usually one of the most enjoyable to see in the game. Hopefully this is something that can be polished out in future games, and it is the best way to include characters who don't take combat roles, like the Macross idol singers or Godzilla scientists.

Super Robot Wars Y also seems to be trying to address some of the difficulty complaints in recent games. For purposes of the review, I played on the Normal difficulty, but there are two additional difficulty modes that can be played from the start. In addition, they seem to have given enemies, even on Normal, a bit of a buff in accuracy and hitting power. In some cases, enemies were taking down my super robots in three to four hits, but it depended heavily on the robot. Energy costs also seemed higher overall, so it was easier to run low on resource, but equippable parts could often alleviate this.

There's also a new skill tree system where you can spend MxP to unlock various spheres on a large grid. These spheres offer small bonuses, such as a minor boost to HP or damage for all units in the party, with a few big checkpoints that offer huge bonuses like removing the energy cost for barriers or making damage-boosting spells cheaper. There are three different trees (roughly corresponding to Damage, Defenses or Resources) that you can invest in, and you're able to re-spec at any time.

It's a neat feature that offers a nice amount of customization, and all three trees are filled to the brim with useful things, so there wasn't any specific case that was the "best." (I tended to fill up the green resource-friendly tree, which offered a lot more EXP and money.)

In addition, the game tends to add more variety to combat scenarios. While many of the scenarios are the standard "kill everything" missions that you're used to from these sorts of games, Y makes an effort to sprinkle more variety in objectives. Many stages have time limits for optional objectives or special conditions. One stage takes place in the depth of the ocean, so most units fight at a disadvantage without special equipment. Another stage has your characters fighting in a cloud of Red Dust, where they are less accurate. There are even some special optional scenarios with surprisingly intense requirements that can require some planning, such as a one-on-one fight against a powerful superboss with massive HP regeneration that requires you to think about how you can out-damage his massive HP pool.

The result is a game that is, at least on Normal difficulty, still on the easy side but makes a genuine push toward being challenging. I can very much see it demanding a lot more from players on the harder difficulty modes or without upgrades. I still miss the SR points feature of the older games, but the optional objectives are a nice push toward that, and the hardest difficulty modes might have the necessary bite people are seeking.

Super Robot Wars Y tries to strike a balance between the more linear design of the older games and the more freeform level system of Super Robot Wars 30. The result is a mix of the two. Like 30, you have a variety of missions to choose from, including standard plot missions, optional side missions, and Relic and Area missions, which are designed as bonus challenges. Unlike 30, however, there's no time limit, and you can do all the side missions before progressing. In that way, it feels more akin to something like Super Robot Wars MX, but in terms of raw mission count, it's closer to 30 than V, X or T. The pace keeps things from feeling like so much of a drag, but be prepared for a long game nonetheless.

Super Robot Wars Y continues the same general high-quality combat animations the series is known for. There are a few duds among the new units, but there are also some genuinely beautiful new graphics, with Wing Zero Custom in particular getting a beautiful makeover. The basic interface still leans toward the visual novel, but there's more effort put into making the visual novel segments look more dynamic, including a surprising amount of custom artwork for big scenes. I don't really like the new UI, which feels too "clean" in a way that took me a while to get used to after years of SRW looking very similar. As with most games in the series, it retains full Japanese voice acting and a nice batch of remixed and original music from the various series.

Super Robot Wars Y is a darn fun entry in the franchise, and it tries very hard to bridge the gap between the Super Robot Wars 30 style and the style of older games. It isn't perfect, with a tad too many stages and the poor utilization of some series, but if you're a fan of Super Robot Wars, there's a whole lot to like, and in the long run, it's probably an even better introduction to the franchise than Super Robot Wars 30. If you like cool giant robots and insane fan fiction plots, there's nowhere better to turn than Super Robot Wars Y.

Score: 8.0/10