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Series-specific YMMV

  • Anti-Climax Boss:
    • The Angels in Alpha are built up to be incredibly dangerous, and each one appears in a unique scenario. Unfortunately, as far as scenario bosses goes, they're incredibly easy, even if players are going for Skill Points or other secrets. Either the Angels are this trope or they're purely inserted into the game for nothing else but show (the fifth Angel Ramiel, for example, doesn't need to be interacted with in a meaningful manner during its appearance).
      • Particular points for this goes to the fourteenth Angel Zeruel: in the show, this creature's an unstoppable death machine. In the game, thanks to the "Demoralize" Spirit Command from Rei Ayanami, Zeruel is relatively easy to take him down without the Evangelion Unit-01 becoming The Berserker. Hell, Zeruel hits so soft it can actually be a challenge to get Shinji Ikari killed for the mandatory event to play out in the scenarionote  unless, instead of lowering Zeruel's Will, players intentionally hit it with weak attacks just to build up its Will pool.
    • The Final Bosses in Alpha 2 and Alpha 3: for the former, after coming out of the hellish Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack scenarios (pitting the player against pretty much every named Gundam antagonist still alive), the finale is considerably easier with no rush for a Skill Point, enabling players to take their sweet time wearing down the boss' immense defenses. Alpha 3, on the other hand, can be easily exploited by positioning allied units at a certain point on the map where the boss will appear, then dog-piling on it, enabling players to end the scenario in one turn, in spite of the boss' high Hit Points.
  • Common Knowledge: One of the most widely known highlights of Alpha 3 is basically a now-badass Shinji Ikari slaps the hell out of Kira Yamato from his Wangst. However, that isn't actually the case: when Kira lashes out at everyone, Shinji defaults to his "meek" personality, but more or less tells him along the lines of "Please, just cut this out...". He's still telling Kira to stop it with his Wangst, yet Shinji remains in his Cowardly Lion persona instead of physically slapping him and going all gung-ho and optimistic.
  • Complete Monster: Keisar Ephes, the true ruler of the Ze Balmary Empire, was once a great hero who succumbed to darkness and became one of the most evil beings in the Super Robot Wars franchise. Known then as Augustus, Keisar Ephes allowed sacrifices in his name, devouring the souls of those given to him. Initiating the invasion of Earth, Keisar Ephes continued to devour the souls of the fallen before finally revealing himself and his true plans: to destroy the heroes and consume their souls as well before annihilating the entire universe and recreating it as a place of eternal suffering where he could lord over his victims like a God.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Ghost X-9s have INSANELY high evasion rates, making them nigh untouchable to even the most accurate and agile Real Robots; it's nearly impossible to hit them without using the "Strike" Spirit Commandnote . Thankfully, they don't show up much.
    • ZAFT seems to enjoy fielding them in Alpha 3, but aside from their evasion rates, they don't hit as hard as they do in Alpha Gaiden, unless you're playing the first half of the Information High scenario.
  • Fan Nickname: In Japan, Nilpha and Salpha for Alpha 2 and Alpha 3, respectively.
  • Game-Breaker: See here for the full list.
  • Goddamn Bats:
    • The STMC and the Buff Clan in Alpha 3.
    • The Aura Battler Mooks in Alpha; all come with an "Aura Barrier" that can absorb a fair amount of beam-type damage. This isn't so much of a concern early in the game, but when stronger Aura Battler units appear late-game, they come bundled with a fair rating of armor. As the absorption is calculated after damage reduction from armor, this means hurting even grunts, never mind Aura Battler boss units, with beam weaponry can become annoying. Unfortunately, this leads to another problem: most Aura Battler Mooks are "S" size. The best units for clearing them out would be Mobile Suits, but they can't damage them reliably. This forces players to either use Super Robots, while others must invest Spirit Points into Spirit Commands like "Strike", lean real hard on the Macross and Aura Battler Dunbine units, or just pray the Level Scaling in damage is faster for allied units than Mooks.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • "Phase-Shift Armor" ability for the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED units in Alpha 3. It reduces damage from a lot more things than it says it does, including energy beams that aren't close enough to what would be a considered a "beam" in Gundam terminology. For example, "Breast Fire" is not considered a beam attack in the game. This problem would be rectified in subsequent installments where energy-based attacks from non-Gundam series ignore Phase-Shift Armor.
    • The Sega Dreamcast version of Alpha has an odd bug where unit "Limit" is disregarded: it doesn't actually limit anything. The only reason to upgrade it is to get the "Full Upgrade Bonus".
    • There's a funny little infinite cash bug in Scenario 58 of Alpha (PlayStation version only), where if the Spirit Command "Provoke" is used on Tashiro, every move allied units make will rake in roughly 50,000 credits until someone attacks a target. By the end of a player turn, expect a metric asston of credits.
  • Growing the Beard:
    • The Alpha series marked the beginning of the complex plot weaving between series that's become iconic with Super Robot Wars as opposed to a borderline Excuse Plot for an Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny between Humongous Mecha it had during the "Classic Timeline". It was also the starting point where the animation budget got bumped up, where instead of static character models bumping and jerking around to attack or dodge, you got more fluid movements, and even bigger ones for the ultimate attacks. Alpha Gaiden improved it so much the animation got borrowed by Impact, and then Alpha 2 enhanced everything even more.
    • Alpha Gaiden is a massive step up mechanics-wise and can arguably be seen as the very first "modern" Super Robot Wars. With the removal of natural double movement, exchange of the Reaction pilot stat in favor of a Defense stat, implementation of the Support system from Compact 2 and introduction of unified weapon upgrades, the only areas where it lags behind most early-to-mid-2000s SRWs is the inclusion of the Limit stat and lacking Combination Attacks and pilot-building mechanics.
  • Heartwarming Moments: In the End of Evangelion story in Alpha 3, the non-Evangelion characters manage to get Shinji to stand down and get him to help them prevent Instrumentality from succeeding. At the end, Shinji questions if he did the right thing in going against his father, to which Amuro answers that it is something he must decide for himself. The dialogue from the Evangelion cast reeks of So Proud of You and Earn Your Happy Ending, including a Broad Strokes of the characters clapping to Shinji a la the "Congratulations!" scene.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: According to Victory Five, The Baam Empire and Boazania had a bloody, violent war 3000 years ago. But in Super Robot Wars Alpha 2 and 3, Prince Heinel of the Boazanian Empire and Prince Richter of Planet Baam meet and become good friends, in spite of being Captain Patriotics of their respective nations.
  • Ho Yay:
    • Averted for the Alpha originals, much like it was in Super Robot Wars 4. When choosing the protagonist's (romantic) partner, it must be of the opposite sex, without exception. The game has no support for same-sex pairings, not even non-explicitly-romantic ones.
    • Naturally, the licensed series can carry over any homoerotic undertones they had: Shinji Ikari and Kaworu Nagisa are a famous example and span multiple games.
  • Mentor Ship: A surprising number of people ship Viletta with Ryusei; much of this stems from the time they spent off-screen in Alpha Gaiden training.
  • Moral Event Horizon: EVERYTHING Kashim King does in Alpha Gaiden. Of couse, he brainwashes Elche like in the series, but in the final battle with him, he sends out Rosamia Badam in the Psyco Gundam MK II after he'd ERASED HER MIND. If you deploy the Zeta Gundam like you're supposed to, you get a Tear Jerker as Kamille Bidan is forced to kill her as she attacks the La Cailum battleship. Then Kashim fires a ton of nuclear missiles he dug up and tries to wipe out every non-Innocent off the face of the Earth. Kamille flies into an Unstoppable Rage and gives Kashim King nearly the EXACT speech he gave Paptimus Scirocco in his home series, accompanied by a Theme Music Power-Up, Mid-Season Upgrade and a whole lot of Ramming Always Works.
  • Player Punch: You want the Zeta Gundam's exceptionally good final attack in Alpha Gaiden? Make sure you kill the Brainwashed and Crazy Rosamia, who can be saved, otherwise.
  • The Scrappy: Katz Kobayashi remains as annoying as he is in Zeta Gundam. He even expresses racism similar to the Blue Cosmos in Alpha 3 (though Kamille quickly corrects him). No surprises that he keeps getting labeled as "expendable" in various manga adaptations of Alpha.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Players cannot deploy the SRX ("Super Robot Type-X") by itself in Alpha, something repeated in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, and must require all three R-Units on the field at the same time to do so, which will inevitably cost players two slots for far more valuable units upon sortie. The SRX "Banpreios" in Alpha 3 rectifies this by already being combined when it appears, including a reasonable In-Universe justification.
    • The squad system in Alpha 2 allowed the ability to group upwards to four units into a single squad, but all of it must be done manually. That it slowed the flow of play down, despite being at the intermission menu, was something many players found redundant and tedious. It's no wonder Alpha 3 overhauled the system to allow the game to automatically generate squads based on specific unit attributes, as well as adding quality-of-life squad mechanics.
  • Sequel Difficulty Drop: After the first game, the Alpha series got considerably easier towards the Grand Finale. Although bosses did become statistically stronger with each succeeding title, allied units scaled in power much faster.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • The destruction of the SRX in Alpha 3. We feel your pain, Ryusei.
    • Rosamia's death and Magus reverting to Sophia Nate as she dies in Alpha Gaiden.
  • That One Boss:
  • That One Level:
    • "Chapter 48: For Whom The Bell Tolls" in Alpha 1 is real gimmicky, since your only fielded units are the "fighter plane" units (including Gundam core fighters, the Jet Pilder (Kouji), Brain Condor (Tetsuya), Queen Star (Jun), Getter-1 (Ryoma), Getter-2 (Hayato), Eagle Fighter (Shinobu), and some of the airborne-capable separated components of Combattler V, Voltes V (mainly their head and leg "pieces"), and Daitarn 3), and not many players tend to upgrade those. On top of that, it's a protection mission, and four of your units don't move. Thankfully, the units you have to fight are the really weak craft. But to get the Skill Point, you have to finish off all enemies in 4 turns.
      • And then this gimmick sort of happens again in the beginning of "Chapter 53: Duel For The Earth", but with less and different units (namely all the V-machines are present) deployed. On top of that, you also have a duel gimmick between Kenichi and Prince Heinel that will cost you the chance to get 10 SKILL POINTS if you don't honor it. And to achieve the bonus objective, they have to exchange blows at least once, which can be hard if Kenichi's unable to evade Heinel's attack. Thankfully, come turn 4, you get to deploy your other units.
    • The Information High sequence in Alpha 3. Due to the singing by Sharon Apple, players cannot use Spirit Commands until a certain point in the scenario. The knife-twister? At the very beginning, only two allied units are on the field: Isamu Alva Dyson's YF-19 and Guld Goa Bowman's YF-21. Worse, Ghost-X9s are the enemy, so unless money has been poured onto the mobility stats of the YF-19 and YF-21, it's considered luck if their accuracy gets above 30%. Acquiring the Skill Point is also a Luck-Based Mission.
    • The Turn X scenario in Alpha Gaiden. This is around the time where the game hates players for getting this far: not only is the Turn X, at this point, the strongest enemy in the game with high strength, accuracy and maneuverability, but Spirit Commands are needed for most attacks to both hit it and not die from the Gym's counterattacks. Unfortunately, the Turn X comes with a high percentage of Regenerating Health, flanked by two powerful Mooks with "Support Attack"/"Support Defend" and Gym will cast "Guts"note  once half his HP is gone (though the latter's due to a triggered event). The field itself has a large group of enemies standing between allied units and the Turn X, on top of a turn limit of 10-18 turns (depending on difficulty).
    • The best part? This scenario is the time where the Difficulty Spike becomes apparent. Fortunately, in the last few scenarios after that, Breather Levels kick in, only for the game to be rendered cruel again, particularly scenarios 42, 43 and 45 (ESPECIALLY 43). However, despite its That One Level status, Turn X is merely a Wake-Up Call Boss.
  • What Could Have Been: According to the Alpha 3 Perfect Guide, GaoGaiGar was planned to debut in Super Robot Wars Alpha rather than Alpha 2.

Character-specific YMMV

Ryusei Date

Raidiese F. Branstein

Ingram Plisken

  • Magnificent Bastard
  • That One Boss: R-Gun Rivale in Original Generation. In spite of the machine having more health than the game displays, the scenario it appears in grants it powerful, low-cost weaponry, Regenerating Health and a protective Warp Field that halves all damage. Worse, in order to achieve the Battle Mastery for the scenario, you must lower its HP to zero in seven turns. What most players find so difficult about the Rivale isn't so much that it's That One Boss, but there was never any build-up to it appearing at all.

Kusuha Mizuha

  • Americans Are "Meh" About Kusuha: The majority of international fans only know Kusuha via the Original Generation games via the Game Boy Advance, where not only is she unpopular due to her constant Damsel in Distress issues, but is statistically a below-average pilot. A fair cop in that context - Kusuha basically gets into trouble like the "partner" character from Alpha, rather than the protagonist, thus her skill set and stats aren't what they were in Alpha. This also frustrates those more familiar with the franchise, because they know she's much more capable in her own games (or even in the Second Original Generation).
  • Moe: A popular opinion about her, particularly among Japanese fans. In the Alpha games, this often makes something of a contrast to her quiet, yet relentless badassitude.

Brooklyn "Bullet" Luckfield

Leona Garstein

  • Alternate Character Interpretation: In the Divine Wars TV series for Original Generation, Leona participates in the final battle between the Earth Federation Army and United Colony Corps; in the games, she's ordered not to by her commander Julia Heinkel.
    • Additionally, in the manga Record of ATX, Leona and few surviving members of the Troye Unit make the decision to join up with the Hagane and Hiryu Custom battleships right before the Divine Crusaders invades Geneva, Switzerland (Federation government headquarters). While Leona does the same thing in Divine Wars, only after the DC has been defeated in Geneva does she wind up aligning with the heroes (in this case, her cousin Elzam had to persuade her).

Sanger Zonvolt

  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Oh, so very much - began as a sympathetic enemy and late-joining Sixth Ranger in Alpha Gaiden, but was so popular thanks to his Samurai trappings, he was brought back as a protagonist for Alpha 2, with a prominent role in Alpha 3, a plot-driven character for Original Generation and finally the representative for Super Robot Wars in Project × Zone. Helping his status are fans touting him as the biggest badass in The Multiverse setting of this franchise.
  • Memetic Badass: With the amount of things he's done in the Alpha saga alone, fans gravitated towards him easily, proclaiming him Banpresto's personified, walking embodiment of badass. Among other things, Wodan Ymir and Sanger's Duel to the Death in their respective Humongous Mecha, with their BFSes clashing at the "Earth Cradle" in Original Generation 2 being strong enough to destroy the outer shell of a facility built to withstand an Apocalypse How is - this is but one of Sanger's many Moment of Awesome throughout the franchise.

Ibis Douglas

  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Although not to Sanger's extent, Ibis still became one - surprisingly popular in Alpha 2, she wound up voted as champion of the 2006 Saimoe RPG tournament, and despite in-game weakness and lack of "assets", her story and Character Development in Alpha 2 clearly endeared her to the audience.
  • Moe: Actually won the 2006 Saimoe RPG tournament!

Sleigh Presty

  • Alternate Character Interpretation: The Inspector Animated Adaptation took steps to rewrite her portrayal in Original Generation 2, including her rivalry with Ibis. After escaping from the Tesla-Leicht Institute, Sleigh sticks around to not only protect the Tesla-Leicht transports from the Inspectors (as Ibis' Calion is shot down in the previous episode and Kusuha decides to not deploy in her Grungust Type-3), but to later witness Ibis handle the Astelion with considerable talent. Sleigh realizes Ibis is more committed to Project Terrestrial Dream than she is and chooses to join up with Ratsel on the Kurogane battleship instead of fleeing to the Neo Divine Crusaders. When Sanger and Ratsel assault Tesla-Leicht to liberate it from the Inspectors, Sleigh assists them; however, she opts to retreat back to the Kurogane instead of joining up with Ibis and Tsugumi. Most players agree The Inspectors handled this much better than Original Generation 2.
  • Les Yay: With Ibis; a source of frustration for her as her odds at landing a guy aren't looking good when she's surrounded by plenty of girls.

Arado Balanga

  • OT3: The fandom likes to pair Arado, Seolla and Cobray together as a...er, "happy trio".

Seolla Schweizer

  • OT3: Some fans present Seolla as someone who doesn't mind... "switching" between her long-time partner Arado and their friend Cobray.

Irui

Touma Kanou

Cobray Gordon

  • OT3: Gets paired up with Seolla in fan works, and sometimes Arado is there "assisting" them.

Selena Recital

  • Epileptic Trees: "Who exactly IS she????" barely covers the numerous questions about her identity and involvement in Alpha 3, especially when Selena vanishes without a trace after the conclusion of her route in the game.
  • God Never Said That: The fact that so little of her back-story has led to all sorts of Wild Mass Guessing being made about where she really comes from. The "Shadow-Mirror Theory", one of the more popular ones, is also one of the most implausiblenote .

Ze Balmary Empire

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