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IN A SKY MISTED BY TEARS, A RAY OF LIGHT NOW DESCENDS! THAT SHINING FORM IS THE MESSIAH OF STEEL! THAT OVERFLOWING POWER COMES FROM LOVE AND COURAGE! IT CAN CRUSH ANYTHING, THUNDER!!!
Art by Orihara.

There are warriors who have wings made out of steel...

They are just about to take off for the last battle that determines the fate of the world...

These warriors will never give up, because they've got tenacious and strong hearts, that are filled with great love...

They are ready to sacrifice their own lives to blaze a new trail for the future, for new hopes... and dreams.
— Opening narration to Wings of the Legend

A long-running, Massive Multiplayer Crossover Turn-Based Strategy video game franchise developed by Banpresto, Super Robot Wars is based on almost every Humongous Mecha series ever made in Japan, such that the franchise was awarded a Guinness World Record in 2021 for "the most intellectual property licenses used in a role-playing videogame series". In Western terms, imagine if The Avengers (both teams of that name), the Justice League, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Teen Titans, the Doctor (all incarnations), The A-Team, Sherlock Holmes (and all other incarnations), the Ghostbusters (plus both incarnations of the unrelated Filmation team), He-Man, She-Ra (both incarnations), the Scoobies, Mystery Inc., and RoboCop fought alongside G.I. Joe, The Autobots (and all subsequent incarnations), the BPRD, Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica (and the original series), every single Power Ranger, Bill S. Preston and Theodore Logan, Spock, The Rock, Doc-Ock, and Hulk Hogan all teamed up while injected with industrial levels of weapons-grade Hot Blood. Now imagine an existential threat it would take to bring them all together, and imagine them pounding it flat.

The first Super Robot Wars was released on the Nintendo Game Boy, and featured mecha from Mazinger Z, Gundam (various series) and Getter Robo (referred to as the "Holy Trinity" of the franchise and would star in nearly every game from then on). This game is one of the oldest and most triumphant examples of the Mascot RPG genre, a Trope Codifier that would go on to inspire many other Strategy RPG Massive Multiplayer Crossover outings between other franchises. As the franchise itself grew, more series were added, as well as their characters. Each game would take the storylines of all the series and merge them into one (mostly) coherent whole. This often required some creative interpretation, particularly in the case of Gundam, as characters, mecha and events that took place decades apart in the original stories now occur within a matter of weeks of each other, if not, simultaneously.

The usual setup for your average Super Robot Wars game is simple: take the story of every Humongous Mecha series included, put it in a blender, and set to "liquefy". The player usually sees the story through the eyes of an original character and their mecha, possibly through different protagonists and different story routes. As the story begins to wind down, an additional threat makes itself known, and the gathered heroes come together to beat the unholy hell out of it. Of course, the interactions can sometimes have an interesting effect on various characters. The Super Robot Wars Alpha games, for example, are highly regarded by many fans for making Shinji Ikari much less of a wuss.

Starting from the second game, entirely new mecha and characters were introduced. These became known as "Banpresto Originals."note  In 2002, Banpresto released Super Robot Wars: Original Generation for the Game Boy Advance, which consisted entirely of the original characters and mecha created for the series over the years; a sequel was released in 2005. Both titles, including Spin-Off Endless Frontier, are the only Super Robot Wars games to be officially released outside of Japan, due to the obvious lack of licensing problems. However, by The New '10s, franchise publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment began a new international push via its licensed installments and the realities of modern Internet commerce (see "International Era" folder in recap).

The series is occasionally referred to by English speakers as Super Robot Taisen, the original Japanese name. While some of this usage can be attributed to Japanophilia, the scant few American releases of the series were specifically titled "Super Robot Taisen" to avoid a trademark conflict with the Robot Wars series. (The Irony of using an English translation of a Japanese title while using rōmaji for an English-language title should be noted.) Strangely, "Super Robot Wars" is a Japanese invention: "大戦" (taisen) is the actual term used, and the only bit of Japanese in the title. At some point, "Super Robot Wars" began to be used as an alternate "English-language" title in Japan, akin to "Mobile Suit Gundam" and so on. This title has been used for the English-language Asian releases starting with Moon Dwellers, essentially making it the official English title of the series going forward. Starting with 2017's Super Robot Wars V, English subtitles were included, allowing North American players to finally play the game by importing the Play Station 4 disc from Asia. The 2021 entry, Super Robot Wars 30, will be the first to have an official North American release on Steam, on October 27, 2021.

Compare Another Century's Episode, the third-person Mecha Game equivalent also thought up by Banpresto, and SD Gundam G Generation, a similar Turn-Based Strategy series, but centered exclusively around the Gundam franchise.

The official website is here.

Chronological Releases of Super Robot Wars games include the following;

For more information on each game, which series and Original Generation debuted in each game, and how they affected the franchise, please check the Recap sub-page.

See here for the massive character sheet.


The franchise is a Trope Namer for:


Tropes to the franchise as a whole, including how the games are played, are the following:

  • Ace Pilot: In most games, pilots earning 50 kills earn this status (displayed as an "A" on their character status menu), with the most common bonus being an increase in Will when sortied at the start of scenarios; meanwhile, the top three aces in the roster earn extra Will when sortied. Modern installments introduced the Ace Bonus, granting character-exclusive new abilities or stat increases upon achieving this trope.
  • Action Bomb: Two instances of this
    • Missiles that appear as individual units, whose sole attack is an enormous, unavoidable explosion with the minimum range of a single panel that will inevitably destroy the missile. This also applies to enemy units purposefully used for Suicide Attacks, such as the Missile Mechanic Beasts and Gaga in Saisei-hen.
    • The "Self-Destruct" Spirit Command often appears for Joke Characters like Boss, but might be frequented by characters (such as Heero Yuy) who have a penchant to use this from their home series. Naturally, using such a command will render the unit unavailable for the rest of the scenario.
  • Action Initiative: Like other Turn-Based Strategy contem poraries, the attacking unit always strikes first. However, the defending unit may perform its counterattack first provided its pilot has the appropriate pilot skill that triggers it (see Counter-Attack).
  • Actor Allusion
  • Actually Four Mooks
    • Alpha 2 started the trend of allowing a "squad" of upwards to four allied units moving and attacking as a single unit, with unit size being the leading restriction in forming squads. This goes double for enemy units - what might be a single Mook can wind up to be composed of four of them (boss units might even be a Flunky Boss). Thankfully, four bosses as a single unit doesn't exist.
    • Meanwhile, Original Generations and its Sequels took the road of a smaller "partner-based" system: K, L, and the Nintendo 3DS games, as well as the Third Z duology followed suit, whereas Z had the three-unit based TRI-Battle System.
  • Adaptation Amalgamation: A common practice across most of the games, from references to a source's side material to its complete adaptation into the source's content.
    • The most stand-out is Getter Robo: A trend started in 4/F/F Final and its introduction of the Shin Getter Robo, it became common practice for the developers to merge elements from various installments of the Getter franchise into its appearances. In the Alpha series, for example, the characterization rings truer to the manga counterpart, yet characters don the looks and voices of their classic series, and have their units' design and animation hailing from or rendered in the style of the Armageddon and Shin vs. Neo animes.
    • The Mazinger franchise also likes to mix-and-match elements, especially when it comes to Mazinkaiser which was conceived for Super Robot Wars to begin with.
    • Alpha reconciles Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its Broad Strokes movie adaptation Macross: Do You Remember Love?, while letting the player decide on elements that are mutually-exclusive.
    • In an example that crosses over with The Artifact, Zeta Gundam's "Beam Confuse" debuted in the anime's Compilation Movies which was the adaptation of choice for the Super Robot Wars Z series. The "VTX trilogy" largely adapts the original television series, where Beam Confuse was never used...but the Zeta Gundam in those games keeps the attack because the mecha's moveset is carried over wholesale from Z3.
  • After-Combat Recovery: Played with - this is automatically done for any allied unit destroyed in a scenario in virtually all installments; unfortunately, some games games also automatically use credits earned in order to repair them, thus any finances spent on ensuring allied units are repaired will be not be spent on making units better via unit upgrades. The exception are pilots with the "Negotiation" pilot skillnote  and of course games that lack any cost for repairing units.
  • Airborne Artillery: The various warships that appear throughout the series tend to take this role thanks to often having at least one weapon with superior range (e.g. depending on the game the Main Cannon Barrage of the Ra Calium may have a range of 6-7 compared to the 4-5 range for the Geara Doga's beam machinegun or Zaku III). Those ships equipped with Wave-Motion Gun-style attacks like the Nadesico or Dreisstrager can have even longer ranges (e.g. with the right skills, upgrades and equipment the Weistregger can have a range of 13).
  • Alpha Strike: A number of units have attacks that amount to using most or all of their weaponry simultaneously. While this has been present since Alpha (where most of the Variable Fighters can perform Hikaru Ichijo's barrage from the ending of Do You Remember Love?), modern installments are fond of adding these attacks to units who otherwise would not have a definitive final weapon in their respective arsenal.
  • Alternate Company Equivalent: During the PlayStation era, Takara made games known as the Brave Saga series with very similar gameplay, including Yuusha Commands in place of "Spirit Commands" (the Super Robot Wars equivalent of magic spells). As the name implies, it's a crossover of Sunrise's Brave Series but also included VOTOMS, Fang of the Sun Dougram and Panzer World Galient as its Real Robot representatives.
  • Always Accurate Attack
    • The "Strike" Spirit Command ensures 100% accuracy, even bypassing unit abilities with a percentage chance of evading any attack, for a pilot's next attack or for the rest of a turn, depending on the game. Meanwhile, "Attune" does the same except a pilot can cast it on any ally.
    • Inverted with the "Alert" Spirit Command, allowing 100% evasion from any attack, making it an "Always Inaccurate Attack" example.
  • Another Dimension: A setting used frequently in order to allow multiple series to crossover, even if it takes place on another world, yet it's still fair game to bring them and their dimension into the overall conflict within one universe (usually the one where the installment's Original Generation hails from). Aura Battler Dunbine and Byston Well is the earliest instance of this, followed by The Vision of Escaflowne, Mashin Hero Wataru Series and Magic Knight Rayearth. Of course, the franchise's Original Generation has one of its in the form of La Gias via the Masou Kishin saga. DD used this without using many series that would require 'another world' setting, where there are five dimensions that work like the trope to each other while each dimensions mostly having their own unique Earth and unique historical advances.
  • Another Side, Another Story: What the route splits entail in general, if they are not being used for Cutting Off the Branches. You can only choose one of them in a playthrough. To play the other route(s) you need to do a second playthrough and pick the other choice(s). The seperate rosters are usually split between the Real Robot and Super Robot members.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: Zigzagged; if players earn a game over, they are brought back to the intermission menu to retry the scenario. In some games, all credits, Experience Points and Pilot Points earned from the scenario are retained, allowing players to do some form of Level Grinding. Unfortunately, earning a game over results in possible "Skill Points" that could be acquired in the scenario to be unobtainable because they failed the scenario in the first place.
  • Anti-Grinding:
    • Enforced like its contemporaries as the franchise calculates Experience Points based on how strong enemies are - a high-level character will earn measly experience destroying low-level Mooks, whereas low-level characters destroying a scenario boss are guaranteed to achieve multiple level ups. With the exception of particular scenarios that respawn enemy reinforcements, most games feature a certain number of enemies per scenario.
    • Played with when repair-based units are considered since F: they can keep performing its primary function to gain as much experience for as long as players like, so if you want to spend several turns levelling your repair units this is entirely possible.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The series allows a limited number of deployments that changes every scenario. Typically, by the end of the game, the player will have two to three times as many units sitting on the sidelines than those participating in the fight. The exception are the games allowing "squads", such as Alpha 2, Alpha 3 and Z, where a single unit can be comprised of upwards to four units (three in Z). The games allow roughly a maximum twenty squads to be deployed, thereby allowing almost all of the player's forces to participate. The "pair-based" games such as Original Generations and K do the same thing, though on a slightly smaller scale, deploying two units in one controllable unit.
    • This limit is later pushed to its extreme in Hakai-hen and Saisei-hen, where a whole game's worth of a new cast, including every previous series from Z. While only around half or less of the cast from Z return, it does include all the best units from each series. However, due to hardware limitations, neither game has a squad-based system. This results in well over a hundred deployable units, and enough deployment slots for around a quarter of that, until getting the extra slots during the last scenarios. The player cannot even deploy a single character from each series without hitting the limit.
    • Zigzagged in Judgment and W, where battleships can gain the ability to switch out active and reserve units during battle. The latter also contains the unique "Support Request" mechanic, which allows a unit to call in a reserve unit for a "Support Attack"note , despite not being sortied and adjacent to them the whole time.
    • Averted in the Endless Frontier games: only four active party members will fight, but the rest can perform a "Support Attack" (provided the currently active party member has enough commands to trigger the support), which can be helpful by maintaining maintaining combos, finishing weakened enemies without wasting a turn and increasing the Frontier Gauge to activate an "Overdrive".
  • Arbitrary Weapon Range: Some weapons in the series cannot be used at point blank range. Ironically, this includes the shotgun in most games, which cannot be used against an adjacent enemy.
  • Area of Effect: Some units may have weapons designated as "MAP", which hits all units within a targeted area. The most common is a circle around the user, but there are other patterns depending on the unit. Most "MAP attacks" don't discriminate friend or foe, but there are some that are Friendly Fireproof.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: Some unit attacks have an attribute allowing it to bypass enemy barriers; moreover, there's at least one Spirit Command where a pilot's next successful attack automatically pierces barriers. Finally, all Combination Attacks have this trope innately.
  • Art Evolution: In general, the series takes less liberties with the mechas' proportions than it once did, downplaying the amount of "Super Deformation" involved and simply scaling them down with most of their original proportions intact. Note the differences in art between Alpha 3, MX, and the "International Era" Super Robot Wars games to see this evolution in action.
  • The Artifact:
    • Nearly every single multi-game saga features at least one series that finishes its plot in an earlier game but still sticks around to fill out the roster, at most having their Mooks reused by another faction.
    • Masaki Andou and the Cybuster are commonly credited as having come from "The Lord of Elemental", which is both unusual compared to other original characters (who simply get the blanket "Original" tag whenever they cameo outside of the Original Generation series) but also techincally wrong; he debuted in Super Robot Wars 2 well before the first Lord of Elemental game. This dates back to Super Robot Wars Alpha, where Banpresto decided to bill the Classic series' La Gias-focused originals and the Shin Super Robot Wars originals as two individual series titled The Lord of Elemental and Super War Machine SRX respectively.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam F91 got into the original Super Robot Wars because it was the newest Gundam series. Gundam F91 got into the vast majority of games for the following decade because the franchise almost never dropped the series that were present in the first game. F91 stuck out like a sore thumb, being a late "Universal Century" Gundam series when Super Robot Wars heavily leaned on the early UC series, and it comes to no surprise that it was among the fastest of the first game's series to fall out of regular use. To put into perspective...
    • International fans still use the term "Banpresto Original", despite the fact its last official use was in 2008's A Portable. Likewise, expect fans to continue referring to the development team as Banpresto, even though Bandai Namco Entertainment absorbed it pre-release of A Portable, spinning them off as new gaming division B.B. Studios. Bandai Namco themselves continued to use the Banpresto mask on the games' respective box arts as late as 2013's Masou Kishin III before retiring it.
  • Artifact Mook: Super Robot Wars does this for some Monster of the Week series, where formerly one-off enemies suddenly appear in droves. Can be jarring in cases such as GaoGaiGar where the monsters were transformed humans and their looks are based on their personality and the environment.
  • Artificial Stupidity: Enemy Mook AI usually prioritizes the "weakest" units within their effective range; in some instances, targeting repair-based units are the norm. However, "weakness" is relative because of unit abilities and pilot skills that, when triggered (usually at low Hit Points), are capable of evading anything enemies throw at them (and provided the unit has the right pilot at its helm). This leads to the AI wasting its turn attempting to hit something it has no chance successfully (minus the work of Random Number God).
    • Conversely, in some installments, the AI will go for units with high Hit Points, thus battleships and super robots are frequent victims (since losing a battleship usually results in an automatic game over). The problem is the AI then tends to ignore half-damaged units; since super robots are almost always designated tankers, Scratch Damage could be in effect, allowing those units not soaking up damage to wipe the floor on enemies too busy dealing with other units.
    • Another example comes from enemies with MAP attacks: normally, a MAP attack targets all units in its vicinity, but in some games, enemies will refrain from using it on the off chance one of their own allied units would be hit. This makes certain bosses with MAP attacks easier, so long as a Mook is within is own range. The exception are MAP attacks that are Friendly Fireproof.
  • Ascended Extra: The franchise is no stranger to this, as supporting or lesser known characters from a series might be accentuated for an installment over its respective series protagonist. For example, Kouji Kabuto of Mazinger gets top billing and protagonist status, whereas Tetsuya Tsurugi plays second fiddle (except in his own series Great Mazinger). Thanks to Breakout Character in the Alpha saga, Tetsuya earns more narrative relevance compared to Kouji, with the Alpha sub-plots using the former as the central character. Even with games featuring Mazinkaiser where it's explicitly "Kouji's show", Tetsuya isn't put out of commission after the initial scuffle like the anime; likewise, installments utilizing Shin Mazinger starting from V will expand on Tetsuya's role rather than relegate him as a last-minute Big Damn Heroes. And in T, Tetsuya had more screentime before the plot of Mazinger Z: Infinity kicked in and he temporarily became a Badass in Distress. But even then, in T, his rescue happened a lot faster than in the movie (which was near the end of the movie), he still had more time to make up for the lost time in distress.
    • Jack King and Texas Mack originally appeared only for one episode and then disappeared. Whenever 70's Toei Getter Robo includes him (and his sister Mary), then he would stick around the good guys team instead of vanishing and also showcasing more positive personalities than being the typical American bully that was considered over the top racist even by the Japanese. This was before Shin Getter Robo vs Neo Getter Robo actually made it canon for their own take.
  • Ascended Glitch: Any music will be overrid- TROMBE!!!.
  • Assist Character: Played with - due to the large number of participants for installments, certain characters, usually those considered minor from their home series, will not get their own units. Instead, they participate as part of a main or secondary character unit's stronger attacks. In W, the human-sized Renais Cardiff Shishioh assists KorRyu and AnRyu for one of their individual attacks, while a pilot for the Strike Gundam has an attack calling for the trio of M1 Astrays to attack instead of the Strike. Similarly, certain bosses (particularly large spacecraft or King Mooks) will have an attack where they summon a large contingent of smaller Mooks to attack.
  • Attract Mode: Following the title, a battle animation demo will play if you don't push any buttons.
  • Background Music Override
    • All playable characters have a specific Leitmotif that plays during battle animations; however, enemy bosses and in-game events will have their own that overrides the playable's music. As a result of a bug in Original Generation, the Leitmotif "Trombe!" overrides all themes, including the Final Boss.
    • In some climactic moments, a special theme, belonging to neither the players or the enemies, will play throughout the scenario, overriding everything. Of special note is the final battle of Alpha 3, where the heroic "GONG" plays for the entire fight, unless the Macross 7 characters attack, in which case their music kicks in. Thoroughly justified, however: they're the ones playing "GONG" in the first place.
  • Bag of Sharing: All equippable parts and weapons in games have one inventory shared across all playable units. In the case of scenarios where the group splits off into different routes, equipped items on units not present on the player's selected route will be unavailable until they return; however, the player can unequip these items on non-present units during the intermission and give it to available units.
  • Bag of Spilling: The franchise gets away with this because scenarios are fairly abstract - players generally just lose the best units for a while for various reasons. For instance, the Mazinkaiser and Shin Getter Robo will be used for the first few scenarios, but an in-game event forces both to be shipped back home for repairs. In the Original Generation games, characters will likely keep their better units, though in some cases they have to go and pick them up out of storage.
    • In the case of F, it allows a carry-over of everything over to the sequel F Final. If the player opts out of using that, they're given a lump sum of credits to use, but don't get any upgraded units for the game. The same happens between Hakai-hen and Saisei-hen, to a certain degree.
    • Back in the Alpha games, the Mazinkaiser and Shin Getter Robo show up in each subsequent installment, yet there are various excuses as to why the characters downgrade to the Mazinger Z and Getter Robo G at the start of the next game. Such explanations include correcting a power imbalance or undergoing maintenance when the team gets sent to the future a la Alpha Gaiden. Interestingly, Alpha 2 uses a Continuity Nod explanation: in the previous game, the villains managed to pull a Grand Theft Prototype on the Mazinkaiser, and the heroes recovered it by exploiting a flaw (a blind spot created by its flight pack). At the start of Alpha 2, players get the Mazinkaiser but not the pack, since Professor Yumi is trying to remove the blind spot so future villains can't exploit it themselves.
  • Boss Dissonance: Done occasionally because boss difficulty isn't necessarily determined by the amount of Hit Points or statistics it has, but from its pilot skills, unit abilities and whether or not it can successfully perform a Counter-Attack; fighting such an enemy may invariably lead to the next boss being much easier. Take Alpha Gaiden for example, where the penultimate boss is harder than the Final Boss, despite being statistically weaker than the latter. This is due to the Final Boss having limited ammunition for its attacks.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: Almost any unlockable characters and units can be considered, though specifics are usually handed out to the ones that require Guide Dang It!.
  • The Cameo: Often, you'll find an original character from one game pulling this in another title, with little to no relevance regarding their appearance (Touya Shun of Judgment in K, for example). However, modern games may use this as a form of Foreshadowing for a future release, such as Crowe Broust's cameo in Z for his debut in Hakai-hen.
  • Changing of the Guard: Series-wide, the 1970s Mazinger and Getter Robo series were silently phased out for newer entries around the start of The New '10s, with the first Super Robot Wars Z being something of a last hurrah before they started disappearing. Excluding the remake of Super Robot Wars and mobile games, the inclusion of Mazinger Z Infinity in T ended a nearly ten-year absence of the classic Mazinger continuity.
  • Character Customization: 4 and Alpha allowed a degree of customizing who the protagonist will be - male/female, real/super robot pilot, a personality archetype and a love interest with their own customization. Modern games allowed this via determining how each character plays via stats, pilot skills, terrain adaptibility and which mecha they pilot.
  • Character Portrait: Present for all characters, allied and enemies, in the games; even Mooks and Mecha-Mooks get their own portrait.
  • Clothes Make the Superman: The robots provide the pilots the means to fight but this is subverted for some units that can be switched around by multiple characters but require specific skills to draw out their full potential (e.g. only Newtypes can use Funnels) or a unit's Signature Move is locked to a single pilot.
  • Clown-Car Base: Depending on the primary battleship and mecha the player has access to.
  • Color-Coded Armies: Blue for allies, red for enemies, yellow for neutral/third-party
  • Combination Attack: Mostly ones from the same series, but there have been series crossover combinations.
  • Competitive Balance: Each of the three franchises introduced in the first Super Robot Wars has a distinct gameplay niche within the series, creating the template for most other units and series to follow.
    • Mazinger-type units are Stone Walls, tanking hits and dishing out a decent amount of punishment. Without the natural mobility of Mobile Suits or multiple Spirit Command banks of Getter Robo-types, Mazinger-types require careful usage of Spirit Commands when dealing with mobile enemies. These units found themselves on the unfortunate end of early games that devolved into Rocket-Tag Gameplay, but benefited greatly from the introduction of the Defense pilot stat that was designed to help balance late-game damage.
    • Getter Robo-types are Glass Cannons, carrying hard-hitting weapons (to the extent of being able to One-Hit Kill the final bosses of some games) but folding quickly when hit by anything more powerful than a Fragile Speedster. This tends to be the archetype of choice for units with more than two pilots, with the player expected to balance each pilot's Spirit Command bank to compensate for the unit's lack of mobility and durability. This archetype remains largely unchanged over the years, at worst seeing a slight nerf once bosses' HP no longer had a hardware-induced cap of 65,535.
    • Mobile Suits, the mecha of the Gundam franchise, are Fragile Speedsters whose natural mobility allow them to make life difficult for enemies. Spirit Commands augment their already high evasiveness, making them nigh-impossible to shoot down when used correctly. They compensate by having poor attack power, to the extent that most completely lacked Finishing Moves in earlier games, not to mention limited flexibility when attacking on the player's turn. Still, their fragility combined with their evasiveness frequently bamboozled the AI, prompting the developers to add an "evasion decay" mechanic where each dodge increases the likelihood of hitting the unit. In return, the series began to add Alpha Strike moves to major units in this archetype that lack a canon finishing move, alleviating some of their offensive woes.
  • Continuing is Painful:
    • In games where "Skill Points" are in play, failing the Skill Point objective or its scenario will invalidate the Skill Point from being acquired in another opportunity, preventing players from heading into "Hard" difficulty. In some games, not earning enough Skill Points prevent secrets from being unlocked or heading to a last scenario where the True Final Boss is fought.
    • After every battle, players are hit with a repair bill for every friendly unit that was destroyed during play with the severity depending on how many units were lost and how valuable (expensive) the units were. Although every unit lost is always repaired regardless of whether or not players have enough credits, stumbling too hard in the early portions of a play-through, players may end up with little to no finances to upgrade allied units, becoming badly outclassed by increasingly stronger opposition as the game continues.
  • Coup de Grâce Cutscene
    • Defeating storyline-driven villains will often trigger a cutscene where they regain Hit Points to allow the appropriate hero(ine) to finish them off.
    • Since all combat takes place in cutscenes anyway, this is played with "Dynamic Kills", special animations that only trigger if a specific attack completely destroys the enemy.
  • Counter-Attack
    • The earliest Super Robot Wars titles automatically forces all units to counterattack; EX rectified this by letting the players issue individual orders to their units during their own turn to either evade or defend as necessary against all or lower-level enemies during the enemy's next turn. It was improved in 4, where players were first given the option to manually decide whether to perform this or not during the enemy's turn.
    • The universal pilot skill "Counter" gives the user a chance to attack first before an enemy unit during its attacking phase. Its chance of activation, however, depends on the user's skill stat.
  • Crippling Overspecialization
    • Getter-3 is the archetypal example for these games: it's almost exclusively designed for underwater combat with little to no movement restrictions in this terrain. The problem is most scenarios take place on non-water terrain, which the other Getter transformations excel at; additionally, Getter-3 cannot target aerial-based units. To compensate this shortcoming, Getter-3 pilots will usually acquire more useful Spirit Commands amongst their peers to better use the Getter-3 transformation. Furthermore, Getter-3 will also have the best defensive stats out of all of the Getter forms.
    • In the early games, real robots were generally balanced by having sub-optimal post-movement weapons, making them heavily reliant on long-range duties and/or a focus on Counter-Attack (at least until their respective pilots receive an Extra Turn). Aura Battlers, on the other hand, were given a variety of short-ranged melee weapons, but almost no long-ranged options - in particular, the Sirbine from New Story of Aura Battler Dunbine was infamous for having a repertoire consisting entirely of 1-ranged attacks that it came as an absolute shock when BX extended the range of its Aura Sword attack.
  • Critical Hit: The rate at which this trope occurs depends on a pilot's skill stat; the higher the number, the better its chances of activation. Depending on the game, these deal either 1.2 or 1.5 times the damage. The "Fury" spirit command makes the caster's robot deal crits for the rest of the phase.
  • Cutscene Power to the Max: When a unit gains a new attack, it may debut with an animation showcasing it dealing heavy damage to (if not outright destroying) a powerful, high HP boss. It rarely works that way when the player actually uses it.
  • Defend Command: There are three options when attacked. Countering, defending or evading. Defending halves damage but also halves evasion rate, and vice-versa for evading.
  • Defenseless Transports: Rarely are battleships, the primary allied transport units, incapable of defending itself as most are armed with basic weaponry, but the Tausendfussler-class transport in Original Generation is the one to truly play this straight.
  • Deflector Shield: Both allied and enemy units may possess energy barriers that play this straight. Most of them reduce damage by a certain threshold and outright nullify attacks if they're under that amount. In particular, the Evangelions' gameplay gimmick in most of their appearances are being not particularly evasive, not particularly offensively powerful, mechanically awkward units that are very expensive to repair — but sit behind an absolutely ridiculous barrier that trivializes anything weaker than an Elite Mook.
  • Demoted to Extra: Zigzagged
    • Units that were in one game can be relegated to being part of another unit's attack or just be removed entirely with only that series' most important units remaining.
    • Many series that have been utilized throughout the franchise might have their plot shorten or shafted via Filler or Post-Script Season.
    • The Getter Robo franchise benefits less from the Grandfather Clause than fellow founding franchises Mazinger and Gundam, having been left out of several entries, whereas the developers always find a way to include at least one Mazinger and Gundam series.
  • Depth Perplexion: With the exception of installments that use partner-based or squad-based mechanics, all other games ensure only a single unit can occupy a space on the map. For example, a flying unit cannot occupy the same location where a unit is underwater.
  • Diminishing Returns for Balance: Beginning with A Portable, modern games introduced "evasion decay", a game mechanic where if an allied or enemy unit successfully dodges an attack, the next attack against it in the same turn gains a cumulative bonus to its accuracy rate, only resetting once the unit takes a hit. This is done to discourage units (namely real robots) from being unable to take a hit at all, forcing players to use designated tankers (primarily super robots) to take enemy attacks instead.
  • Discard and Draw: Not only do characters following their series' continuity abandon old units for Mid Season Upgrades, it's possible to put supporting characters in those abandoned units to make them useful again. Amuro Ray leaving behind the Nu Gundam for the Hi-Nu Gundam? Put Roux Louka in the former; got a spare mass produced Great Mazinger or two? Stronger units for Sayaka Yumi and Jun Hono.
  • Disc-One Nuke: Too many to count, though Mazinger units, thanks to high offensive power and armor rating, along with being some of the earliest units acquired in the games, are the guiltiest offenders of this trope.
  • Divergent Character Evolution: There were eight "pre-built" hero options in Alpha, one for each character design. Two of them become protagonists for the rest of Alpha, four are fleshed out into distinct characters in Original Generation, while the remaining two appear in Original Generation 2. Similarly, the rest of the selectable heroes in Alpha 2 get their individual place to shine in the sequel.
  • Dramatic Disappearing Display: By default, the HP/EN bars of units will slide out of the screen for the duration of an attack animation; if it doesn't, it's usually the result of an attack dealing a portion of its damage to the opposing health bar with every hit.
  • Dual Mode Unit: Almost all Transforming Mecha will feature at least two modes - a "humanoid" configuration with better power and defense and a form that allows better movement and mobility. At the same time, one transformation will have exclusive attacks the other does not carry. Mobile suits and variable fighters are the go-to examples.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: The "traditional" series can be broken into two pieces - "classic", which includes most (but not all) games with Limited Animation, and "modern", those with full animations. As one might expect, the former category contains a lot of this trope.
    • Infamously, the option to skip animations didn't show up until Alpha, making it a welcome addition after the load-heavy early PlayStation games and arbitrarily-slow WonderSwan releases.
    • Telltale signs of a "classic"-styled Super Robot Wars include the "reaction" pilot stat (an additional modifier determining accuracy/evasion rates) and the "limit" stat for units (a hard limit on the sum of a pilot and their unit's evasion rating; this was inspired by Amuro hitting the limits of the original Gundam, already a super-maneuverable unit, being able to keep up with his Newtype reflexes). "Modern" games would ditch the latter and replace the former with a "defense" stat.
    • Super Robot Wars in its entirety: the only thing the sequel really retained was Spirit Commands; even then, the mechanic was completely reworked.
    • Earlier games had a strange mission design quirk: if a mandatory event is supposed to occur on a specific turn, but players manage to clear the map of all enemies before it happens, the scenario immediately ends. This could cause players to miss acquiring allied characters and units for the scenario, among other things. One notable glitch in Super Robot Wars 3 causes players to lose a good chuck of their team if a scenario is completed before reinforcements arrive.
    • Losing a battleship doesn't constitute in an instant failure condition; this persisted as far as Compact 2.
    • Up until Alpha, Gundam units weren't simply Super-Deformed: they were actually based on the SD Gundam line, complete with human-like eyes. This remained present in early CG movies and renders for Alpha for "legacy" Universal Century units (new Alternate Universe units simply got Super-Deformed with their original designs), but disappeared completely with the release of Alpha 2.
    • Older games enforced the Grandfather Clause with regards to the series present in the original Super Robot Wars, often times resulting in things like an adult Amuro Ray using the RX-78-2 Gundam and Benkei Kuruma piloting the standard Getter-3 to justify having the original Mobile Suit Gundam and Getter Robo, respectively. Following Super Robot Wars Judgment, whose cast list excluded every single series present in the first game, the only guarantees are a Mazinger and Gundam series (and NEO pushed the latter about as far as it can get without completely omitting the franchise).
    • The "Classic" series of Super Robot Wars 2, 3, EX, and 4 sports inconsistent continuity, with retcons and Hand Waves galore resulting in certain plot points being recycled across multiple games. Later multi-game sagas, while not immune to the occasional plot hole, feature much more coherent plots.
  • 11th-Hour Superpower: Any unit acquired in the last few scenarios, be it mandatory or through requirements met, will likely become this.
  • Enemy Scan: Generally, information about an enemy and its unit's abilities and stats will be seen after trading blows with an allied unit. The "Scan" Spirit Command can reveal this immediately for the lowest possible cost of one Spirit Point, while also reducing enemy evasion rates. Later games which show enemy stats by default change its effect into a debuff that slightly increases the damage the enemy takes and reduces the damage it deals for the rest of the turn.
  • Energy Absorption: Depending on the game, barriers may have a chance to absorb damage taken and convert it into HP/EN for the unit to recuperate from.
  • Escort Mission: Occasionally in the games, scenario objectives can be a straight "reach from point A to point B"; naturally, losing the escorting unit results in a game over. In some cases, this even means destroying a specific enemy unit.
  • Eternal Recurrence: A recurring plot point featured in multiple games/series is the fact that the universe has a natural cycle of death and rebirth. Attempts to survive or prevent the destruction of the universe is a motivation for many characters and factions, both original and copyright. This is also used to connect certain games, for example, the Alpha series was implied to take place after MX, and 30 apparently took place after the Z series.
  • Event Flag: Any game that contains Multiple Endings will have this, as are unlockable characters and units.
  • Experience Points: Earned not only by destroying enemies, but also simply by attacking them.
    • No Experience Points for Medic: Until The Lord of Elemental, mostly to give the poorest combat-based units, but reliable medics a chance to level up.
    • Tech Points: Called "Pilot Points" (PP), they are acquired by defeating enemies and can used to purchase additional points for stats, pilot skills and changing terrain adaptibility.
    • Point Build System: See Tech Points. Mecha, on the other hand, are upgraded through credits and plot-based events.
    • Skill Scores and Perks: Simply called "pilot skills" (which encompasses both "skill" and "perk" definitions), they are available either by purchasing via pilot points, are already available and unique to the character or requires an in-game event to be unlocked. Most pilot skills are passively activated, but certain skills require an activation through "Will" or certain conditions (such as HP dropping below a threshold). Units possess their own abilities that are not unlike pilot skills, which also require a Will activation.
  • Exposition Break: Done in-between scenarios to explain the concepts of all Humongous Mecha series involved in the game for those characters who come in late. Justified in some cases for series not set on Earth (the common locale for installments) or from the future; other times, it heads into Voodoo Shark territory, but is considered rare, as every title is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover setting where all characters co-exist, and always have. It would be the equivalent of someone in Real Life never having heard of the Gulf War despite having lived through it.
  • Expy Coexistence: Since newer Mecha series inevitably take inspirations from older ones, this tends to happen with certain characters and units. Char Aznable is in plenty of installments where his Char Clones are also present.
  • Extra Turn: In some of the earlier games, characters who reach a certain level gain the ability to perform two actions on the same turn. This later changed into a pilot skill, though is more or less an enemy-exclusive pilot skill in the modern era. The Spirit Commands "Zeal" and "Enable" can allow the pilot or any ally to do this trope, respectively. Later games in the series either make this into a passive skill that requires the character who has it to kill an enemy to gain an extra turn while meeting a minimum morale requirement, or make it into an ExC ability accessible to everyone that requires a set number of ExC points to use it.
  • Fake Longevity
    • Due to Health/Damage Asymmetry, most Final Bosses having hundreds of thousands of HP rendering the games into this. This is before mentioning their own Overly Long Fighting Animation; made especially bad in early installments when these animations can't be skipped.
    • The series is kind compared to many games in that each section of text appears all at once rather than slowly scrolling in. However, while you can button-mash through cutscenes, you can't skip them altogether, except in the modern games, and even then it's only the intermission. Fortunately, there is a fast-forward button these days to alleviate this trope a bit.
  • Fix Fic: It's quite often you'll see changes to the stories of the liscensed series, and most of them tend to be issues fans had with the original work.
  • Fun Size: As a result of Super-Deformed, the appearance of many units in a lot of games' attack animations.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: Unfortunately, the franchise isn't entirely immune to this, more commonly in older games. Super Robot Wars 3 has the most notable standout, as doing too well on Stage 7 can cause almost the entire party to disappear.
  • Geo Effects
    • Movement across any map costs 1 EN per panel, and all terrain on maps provide some form of defensive and evasion bonuses that's added towards combat calculations. Meanwhile, terrain such as city buildings, forests, mountains and water-based locations have movement penalties for ground-based units; for space-based scenarios, Asteroid Thickets. Movement penalties can be mitigated by increasing a unit's terrain adaptation. Some terrain on maps might even provide HP/EN regeneration (military bases and hangers are the usual ones).
    • Furthermore, units in the air do not gain terrain bonuses, yet are unaffected by movement penalties. However, units staying in the air use more EN than units staying on the ground, as it costs 5 EN per turn to do so.
  • Glass Cannon: A unit with a poor armor rating, but can dish out high damage via weapon statistics, unit abilities with its pilot(s) having offensive-based skills and/or Spirit Commands are this. Top spot for examples goes to Getter Robo, and is more or less reserved for supers.
  • Gradual Regeneration: In the form of Hit Point and/or EN regeneration as unit abilities, while "Spirit Point Regeneration" is a pilot skill and considered invaluable.
  • Grandfather Clause:
    • The Mazinger and Gundam franchises are represented in every single license-based game in the series. The Getter Robo franchise eventually had its guaranteed appearances revoked, but still appears in more than two-thirds of the traditional Super Robot Wars games. All three were present in Super Robot Wars and are responsible for making or codifying the vast majority of mecha tropes.
    • Generally speaking, the series that make up the roster of Super Robot Wars 4 are prone to be added to a game with either very little of its plot being used or flat-out starting with its main plot already resolved. They get more of a pass than newer series in this regard, as most of the SRW4 cast went on to show up in a large number of games before Super Robot Wars started focusing on intricate storytelling.
    • The Vulcans that many Mobile Suits carry are the type of Cherry Tapping weapon that largely went extinct once the franchise began the move to smaller movesets, yet remain for the sake of tradition. It helps that they are very easy to animate.
    • In a meta case affecting this very wiki, the Game Boy Advance license-based entries (Super Robot Wars A, Super Robot Wars R, Super Robot Wars D, and Super Robot Wars J) are known as Super Robot Wars Advance, Super Robot Wars Reversal, Super Robot Wars Destiny, and Super Robot Wars Judgment based on what the final letters were "intended" to be. None of the other games with similar titles (such as Super Robot Wars V) are referred to this way, but the GBA games remain a special case here and in other internet circles.
  • Guide Dang It!: Most secrets; some of the more infamous ones require knowledge of an installment's "perfect bible" to even comprehend the procedure of acquiring it.
  • Hard Mode Perks: If players keep up long enough on "Hard" difficulty, some games will award bonus credits, parts, Pilot Points, and unlockable characters/units. In some instances, these awards can only be acquired when playing on this difficulty. Averted with Alpha Gaiden, where "worse" units can be obtained on a Hard run with the major exception of the Hi-Nu Gundam.
  • Harder Than Hard: Certain games feature Dynamic Difficulty scaling between "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard" depending on how many "Skill Points" ("Battle Masteries" in the localization of the GBA OG games) you earn by clearing scearnios quickly or defeating bosses who normally retreat after taking enough damage and so forth. They also have "EX-Hard" mode, which permanently locks the difficulty at Hard, gives enemies higher stats and stronger attacks, and makes it more expensive - if not, outright forbidden - to upgrade characters and mecha.
  • Healer Signs On Early: Typically an allied unit with the unit ability to repair its allies will be available at the start of the game or join within the first few scenarios. Aphrodite A and the Methuss are two of the most recurring users. Alternatively, instead of repair-based mecha, some installments have pilots with healing-based Spirit Commands at exceptionally low costs like Roy Fokker in Alpha and Denzel Hammer of Z.
  • Health/Damage Asymmetry: Bosses (and some Mooks) will carry five to six-digit Hit Point figures. While it isn't difficult to deal with five-digit damage figures, it may take some time to bring down some bosses. Fortunately, even with the majority of playable units having four-digit Hit Point figures, it usually takes more than a hit from any enemy to bring down an allied unit on the team, though One Hit KOs do happen.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack: Naturally, clustering allied units around any enemy with a MAP attack can turn into this trope.
  • Hero Must Survive: By default, battleships; Justified because losing them means losing the In-Universe characters who are in charge of the rest of the allied units, back-up units in reserve and, sometimes, the journey home. In other cases, particularly scenarios which are centered around the storyline belonging to the Original Generation, it will be the protagonist and their unit.
  • Hit-and-Run Tactics: The aptly named "Hit & Away" pilot skill, allowing a unit to move after performing an attack or healing allied units first.
  • Hit Points: Natch; at least one game had units carrying a shield of some form with its own individual HP bar.
  • Hold the Line: Most games will occasionally have scenarios where players must prevent enemies from reaching a point on the map or crossing a designated zone. Failure to prevent it is almost always a losing condition for the scenario.
  • Hopeless Boss Fight: Done many times in cases where the script of the series being played out means the heroes must lose, even though it might be possible for the player to win in gameplay terms.
  • HP to One
    • Expect this to occur during many in-game events and cutscenes, be it an allied/enemy unit.
    • The "Mercy" Spirit Command lowers an enemy unit's Hit Points to exactly 10 without destroying them, making it useful for keeping high-level enemies alive to allow low-level characters to destroy them and gain more Experience Points, or to clear scenarios/attain Battle Masteries that require players reduce an enemy unit's Hit Points to a certain threshold.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming
    • Sequels in "major" continuities (Alpha or Z) are stylized in Japanese as "第(#)次スーパーロボット大戦" - "Dai-[number]-ji Super Robot Wars (continuity name)". This is a semi-formal way of saying "the second/third/etc". When referring to the games in short, fans on both sides of the Pacific tend to denote them as "SRW4", "Alpha 3", "Z2" and whatnot.
    • Meanwhile, when talking about two-part installments such as the Second Z, one needs to make a distinction between Hakai-hen and Saisei-hen. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work for the Original Generation series (see entry for more details).
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy: Happens occasionally, where a technologically advanced real robot has the same Hit Points and stats to a planet-sized, world-destroying super robot.
  • Infinity +1 Element: All attacks are classified as either physical blade, energy blade, beam, bullet, missile and remote. Some units have abilities that block attacks of a certain type, such as a "Jammer" against missiles or a "Beam Coat" against beams. However, some attacks have unique properties which bypasses these abilities, like "Beast" from the Dancougar and "Supreme" from the Elemental Lords.
  • Karma Houdini Warranty: Let it be known to any mecha villains that managed to escape the hand of karma and justice in their original series that the heroes in this series, starting from the default heroes, heroes from other series and original heroes, will have precisely none of that shit; they will redirect the hand of karma itself accurately with the sheer power of Hot-Blooded justice.
  • Later-Installment Weirdness:
    • The introduction of an invisible "points system" for unlocking Secret Characters and alternate routes - instead of performing the usual mandatory two to three tasks of recruiting characters and their mecha, there are several smaller objectives each worth a number of points; the game will not tell how many of these points have been earned. Players will gain these secrets if they have amassed enough points by the time the secret is due to be given out. This system famously (or infamously) made its debut in Z, where the reward was preventing the ZAFT pilots from Gundam SEED Destiny from pulling a Face–Heel Turn for most of the final third of the game, and has been used in many games since.
    • The International Era games avert The Faceless for mooks. As a side effect, V, X, and T make a token effort in creating more faces for their respective mooks.
  • Leitmotif: All playable characters and villains will have this, in the form of either a theme song associated with their respective series or likely the opening song from its series' Animated Adaptation. Original characters get their own exclusive themes, and sometimes when they get their own Mid-Season Upgrade, their theme music changes too.
  • Left the Background Music On
  • Let's Split Up, Gang!
    • Route splits will occur for a few scenarios at various points in each game and playable characters will split up into two or three groups. Besides influencing the course of the story, these usually allow the player to unlock hidden characters and/or units.
    • It's also a way to level up characters the player may have been neglecting and suddenly decide to use. When they rejoin, their levels will increase relative to how long they've been away, usually enough to match the others.
  • Level Scaling: Mooks usually scale to the level of either the lowest playable character in the party or the average of the entire party. Bosses, on the other hand, will likely be around one or two levels greater than the highest characters' level.
  • Limit Break: In the Endless Frontier games, this is called an "Overdrive", performed by filling up the "Frontier Gauge".
  • Limited Animation: 90s Super Robot Wars games, as well as the WonderSwan games and a significant number of Game Boy Advance entries, feature incredibly crude animation; mecha have a single pose even while moving and weapon effects are pasted on, sometimes with no logical sense. Here is just one example or, if you would prefer a direct comparison, the Nu Gundam in the PlayStation port of F Final vs the original PSX version of Alpha.
  • Loophole Abuse: As noted in the "International Era" subfolder above, Bandai Namco used the fact that the PlayStation 4 and Switch have next to no region restrictions to skirt around the prohibitively-expense task of obtaining all North American and European licenses for a Western release. The only thing that a Western fan would have to do that's out of the ordinary is set up a Play Station Network account for one of the English-speaking Southeast Asian countries in order to buy Downloadable Content.
  • Made of Explodium
    • Just about every attack in the game - laser blasts, sword slashes, punches, giant-robot rhythmic gymnastics, etc. - ends with a colossal explosion. Any enemy destroyed will spontaneously explode, whether or not they're robots.
    • Averted with modern titles which give out respective death animations if needed. Some of the exceptions are the Tekkamen in Judgment and W, who shatter into pieces, and the Festum disappearing into a black hole when destroyed in K. In Z, Anti-Body Coralians will turn to sand-like pieces and break apart, Zeravire will implode, Angels and Evangelion Units will emit blood, Mugen will explode into bits (minus the collateral damage) and the Shurouga turns into a bird and disappears amidst black/purple fog.
    • Zonders, on the other hand, if finished by the GaoGaiGar via its "Hell and Heaven" attack explode just as they did in the series, and it doesn't matter what gets hit by the Goldion Hammer: it Disappears into Light.
  • Mascot RPG: The Trope Codifier, especially for crossovers — this franchise is to the Mascot RPG what Super Smash Bros. is to the Mascot Fighter.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Between several Humongous Mecha anime, manga and video games.
  • Mecha Tropes
    • Combining Mecha: Any unit(s) that can combine with another must be placed adjacent to one another, allowing the "combine" command to appear. Some units, however, are permanently locked into its combining mode and cannot be seperated.
    • Humongous Mecha: Obviously; within the games, the size of a unit plays greatly into combat calculations, where the larger the unit, the less damage it takes and the more it deals and vice versa. However, a large unit is less likely to give its pilot better accuracy/evasion rates against smaller units and vice versa.
    • Mid-Season Upgrade: Par for the course in the genrefor Mecha. This applies to everything from getting a Mecha Expansion Pack, a brand new Super Mode, a new attack or of course an actual new unit.
    • Powered Armor: Judgment is the first game to break tradition by including this.
    • Transforming Mecha: The aptly-named "transform" command for units that can do so.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter: While there are countless unit archetypes given the sheer number of series that Super Robot Wars has covered, a few units have their own separate mechanics:
    • Ideon has the Ide Gauge. Ideon starts each map with a not-so-impressive set of weapons, but as the unit and its allies face danger, the Ide Gauge increases and gives the Ideon a variety of status buffs. At its most dangerous, Ideon's terrain ratings change to S-Ranks, its EN becomes infinite, and — once Ideon's HP is reduced below a certain level — it unlocks Purposely Overpowered MAP weapons with infinite range and damage that exceeds 9999. In its debut, the Ide Gauge could get too high and lead to a berserk Ideon and a Game Over, but this was removed for its second appearance in Alpha 3.
    • Evangelions, on top of their very unusual archetype of being Stone Walls with real robot-esque weapon sets, have a number of mechanics that are (or were) unique to them:
      • For much of the series, Evangelions had to be tethered to a power supply via the Umbilical Cable, be it a battleship or a specially-marked building, that refill their EN each turn. They could only move a certain number of spaces away from said power supply without unplugging and subjecting themselves to increased EN loss. This system was done away with in the Super Robot Wars Z series.
      • Evangelion pilots have a Synchronization rating unique to them that further modifies their stats, including the strength of their AT Field barrier, and increasing it enough may be required to enable their Deadly Upgrade Super Mode. The closest cousin to this mechanic, introduced decades after Evangelion was introduced in Super Robot Wars F, is the Harmonic Rating that pilots from Majestic Prince have in Super Robot Wars 30.
      • If EVA-01 is shot down, it resurrects thanks to the Dummy Plug and becomes a neutral unit that attacks anything within range.
    • Games featuring Martian Successor Nadesico also feature the Gravity Wave system. The Nadesico emits Gravity Waves to units within a certain number of spaces from it, allowing Aestivalis units to automatically refill their EN each turn. However, if an Aestivalis wanders out of the Nadesico's range, it will suffer EN penalties. Like the Evangelions' Umbilical Cable system, this would be highly simplified in newer games, allowing recharging at any distance so long as the Nadesico was on the map. Additionally, Nadesico typically brings its own unique weapon archetype, Gravity weapons, that interact with barriers differently than Beams or other ranged weapons.
    • Dendoh's "Final Attack" weapons drain all but 10 of the unit's EN regardless of how full it was beforehand. That sounds simple enough to work around... except Dendoh has another unique mechanic where it can only be resupplied by special units from its home series.
    • The Satellite Cannons that Gundam X and Gundam DX wield utilize cooldown mechanics instead of strictly requiring a certain amount of ammo or EN. Additionally, the games zigzag between implementing another requirement — that the moon is visible.
    • The Sound Force are, in most cases, Support Party Members whose music is used to buff allies. However, their music is capable of dealing damage to the Protodeviln (who are resistant to other types of damage) and the DAMON, original Mooks from 2nd Z. The music has a different interaction when used on Vajra, "attacking" their Morale and forcing them to retreat once their Morale dips below a certain amount.
    • In the 3DS games, Demonbane's Deus Machina and SD Gundam Gaiden units run on magic. While far from the first Magitek representation in the franchise, their having a MP gauge instead of the usual EN stat is unique. They cannot be refueled by regular resupply units (nor drained by enemy attacks, for that matter), needing spirits or specific means to recharge. Even more unusual, MP regeneration on Demonbane units is tied to a pilot skill instead of a mech ability.
  • Mission-Pack Sequel: While each game obviously has its own set of featured series and unique stories, the series as a whole has been highly iterative since the turn of the millenium at the very least; this causes games that make radical changes, such as NEO and its usage of radius-based movement and targeting, to stand out that much more. Standout examples include:
    • Compact 2 is essentially the first Compact with no double-movement and a primitive version of the Support Attack/Defense systems. Compact 3 zig-zags this trope, as it certainly looks the part but is actually a peculiar mix of old and more contemporary mechanics.
    • The loose "Nintendo handheld" line of games make a number of smaller changes game-to-game, but the major changes can essentially be boiled down to one or two points per game: Advance runs on Super Robot Wars F-era Early-Installment Weirdness, Reversal dumps its predecessor's oddball shield mechanics and changes stats and the damage formula to reflect the PS2 games, Destiny adds Chain attacks that strike multiple enemies and port over the pilot-boosting mechanics that other games in the series were beginning to experiment with, Judgement has a massive Animation Bump, and W buffs Chain attacks while adding minor battleship support mechanics. K is actually an aversion beyond artstyle, as it adds a variation of the squad system used in the console games and only shares one series with W, but L then continues the tradition by essentially replacing items with Partner Battle bonuses. The Game Boy Advance games are also very similar cast-wise, with the DS games retaining a number of series from Judgement and L in particular pulling quite a bit from W and K.
    • The Z series, interestingly enough, only plays this completely straight for the explicitly episodic entries: the first Z released on the PS2 and features three-man squads, the Z2 duology released on the PSP and features no squads, and the Z3 duology released on PS3 and Vita and feature two-man squads.
    • The International Era games are easily the most blatant games in this regard, to the extent that T subtly pokes fun at it by naming the originals' company the VTX Union and flat-out introducing the V and X originals in bonus stages. The only notable mechanic added since V (which itself was essentially a rework of Z3's engine) is the Supporter Command system in T, and that only comes into play a couple of times per map. The cast lists are also very similar, pulling from each other and Z3.
  • Money Multiplier: The "Luck" and "Bless" Spirit Commands, which doubles the amount of credits earned so long as an enemy unit is destroyed; the former works on the caster, the latter can can affect any allied unit. Furthermore, some character-exclusive pilot skills allow a character to earn a certain percentage more of credits whenever they destroy enemies.
  • Monster Compendium: An "encyclopedia" is available for most console releases, featuring all characters and units, heroic and villainous. Some of these installments will even have sound bytes where characters will say their popular catchphrases from their home series.
  • Mook Commander: Units with the Commander skill increase accuracy and evasion for nearby allies, with famous commanders like Bright Noa or Lelouch Lamperouge sometimes having a unique bonus or ability that enhances it. Enemy ships sometimes have the Chain of Command ability that increases accuracy for all enemies based on how many are present on the map.
  • Morale Mechanic: All characters, including enemies, have a "Will" (or "morale") counter which increases or decreases over the course of combat from dealing or taking damage, successfully destroying units or having allied units destroyed. In order to pull off the strongest attacks for units, a high Will requirement is necessary, thus while a super robot may start off with Eye Beams and a Rocket Punch, as the battle rages, it can pull out its BFS to use its finisher. Additionally, Will also determines whether certain pilot skills can be activated after reaching its Will prerequisites.
  • More Dakka: Alpha 2 introduced squad-based mechanics, where up to four allied units can be grouped into a single unit, unleashing attacks first before the headlining unit in the squad uses this. MX and Original Generation would have a variation of this during attack animations. Z and its unique TRI-Battle System has an entire class of attack, the "TRI-Charge", based on all three units in a squad simultaneously unloading rapid-fire weapons at the enemy.
  • Multi-Directional Barrage: The "Placement Bonus" introduced in modern games, wherein a unit surrounded on two or more sides by enemies will receive an increase in damage taken. This modifier applies to allied and enemy units.
  • Multiple Endings: Certain releases will use this; often, the path towards the "good/true ending" requires the player to achieve a certain amount of "Skill Points", reach the last scenario in a limited number turns taken in one playthrough or scoring a hidden point value within the game that never confirms whether it's been achieved or not (Guide Dang It! is certainly in play for the latter). In most cases, the difference between a "normal" and "good" ending is who the Final Boss really is.
  • The Multiverse: Connected scenes in Alpha and Original Generations plus its adaptations reveal that every Banpresto work and Super Robot Wars game is connected in this manner. Some noteworthy interactions arising from this include:
    • The Time Diver, a singular Mysterious Protector hailing from the Alpha timeline who can freely jump between the continuity of any work at will. Initially Ingraham Plissken's role, he posthumously hands it down to later protagonist Cobray Gordon, who promptly makes his exit into the multiverse at the game's end. They pilot the Astranagant and its upgrades, essentially an Eldritch Abomination disguised as a Real Robot that quite fittingly breaks down the fundamentals of space and time at its strongest. As the role is multiversal, it also prevents other timelines from letting their Ingraham retread the original's path fully or allowing their Ayin Barshem to become Cobray Gordon. It is also seemingly impossible to create a new Astranagant.
    • The Great Battle characters wind up in Original Generations because of dimensional jumps in their home universe, most notably the catastrophe involving Gilliam Yeager and the XN-Geist.
    • Because of reality breaking down constantly in the Z saga, it's inevitable that someone would become aware of the other games eventually. Full Frontal is one such case who learns of Char's cooperation with aliens in Shin and mocks the one in his world for it.
  • Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Primarily as a result of route splits, since some characters (particularly Secret Characters) can only be unlocked by making a specific choice.
  • My Name Is ???: All unidentified enemy units are labelled with question marks, including their stats, until a battle encounter with (or through Enemy Scan); meanwhile, bosses with high Hit Points will have question marks over their HP bar until it is low enough. In fact, this trope also uses shadowed portraits to conceal the identities of characters in certain dialogue scenes (usually being villains) during pre- and post-scenario intermissions.
  • Nerf: This has become an occurrence in the modern entries, such as reducing the maximum Spirit Points per pilot, buff-based Spirit Commands learned last, all attacks have some form of cost (be it ammunition or EN) and certain pilots skills being unavailable or difficult to obtain. Naturally, this is done to counteract certain tactics such as sending a fully-upgraded One-Man Army to soften a bunch of Mooks or using various Spirit Commands to perform more actions than normal during the player's turn. On the plus side, to balance out most of these, enemies and bosses are given their own tweaks, such as lower maximum Hit Points.
    • Sometimes, this trope risk becoming excessive since tweaks can come out of nowhere. For example, Original Generation received a bunch in a series infamous for Final Bosses having Regenerating Health and powerful barriers. Naturally, this prompted players to spam Spirit Commands in past games until the nerfs appeared.
    • The WonderSwan Color version of the first Compact, Impact, and Compact 3 experimented with nerfs to the "Valor"note  and "Soul"note  Spirit Commands to solve "classic" Super Robot Wars issues with Glass Cannon bosses. It didn't catch on, and the franchise embraced astronomical hit point ratings instead.
    • A rather infamous accidental nerf occurred in Alpha Gaiden: the Masou Kishin characters were not readjusted for the new game, thus wound up becoming weaker than anticipated.
  • New Game Plus: Present in many games, with credits and pilot kill counts being the most common things carried over.
  • New Work, Recycled Graphics: A common complaint about the series is that sprites and other assets evolve very slowly between installments. This became obvious with the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS installments, which shared many series between the titles.
  • Night and Day Duo: Nine times out of ten, if an installment has Daitarn 3, the robot that uses The Power of the Sun, then its moon-based counterpart Zambot 3 is more than likely to be right beside it. This is telling when their "Combination Crash", starts out with them using their finishers, respectively the "Sun Attack" and "Moon Attack".
  • Old Save Bonus:
    • In the Z saga, having clear game save data for the previous game on the same system (Hakai-hen data for Saisei-hen, but not Saisei-hen for Jigoku-hen) grants credits, kills, Pilot Points and special parts when starting a new game.
    • W grants credits and special parts for starting a new game with a Japanese Game Boy Advance Super Robot Wars game inserted in the DS. The part received is stronger for newer titles.
    • Endless Frontier unlocks special accessories for starting or loading a game with one of the Original Generation Game Boy Advance cartridges inserted.
  • One-Hit Polykill
    • By default, MAP attacks, provided there's more than one enemy within its Area of Effect. A more straightforward example are "ALL attacks" in squad-based games, where a unit targets all enemies in a single squad. Meanwhile, ALL attacks when paired with the Twin Battle system can target an enemy "Twin" unit, but also an adjacent Twin unit within the ALL attack's range.
    • The Chain Attack system also works like this so long as enemies are adjacent to one another while positioned in a row, allowing the unit to use a Chain Attack-capable weapon to mow them all down. The same system used in W allows this to occur so long as enemies are within range of the Chain Attack, despite not being placed in a row.
  • One-Man Party: Due to the mechanics in certain games, it's entirely possible to clear entire scenarios with a single unit by granting its pilot every possible pilot skill and unit ability available, provided the game allows no skill slot limitations, alongside heightened stats.
  • One Stat to Rule Them All
    • The skill stat, which functions like a Luck Stat, governs not only the chance of scoring Critical Hits, but whether some pilot skills can be activated, such as "Counter", "Attack Again"note , "Sword Cut"note  and "Shield Defense"note .
    • Until the modern era, the "mobility" stat for units determines accuracy and evasion. Averted beginning with Z when this is separated appropriately for units into "mobility" (evasion) and the new "targeting" stat (accuracy).
    • While not deliberate, the "evasion" stat for pilots: it doesn't matter if the pilot's unit can or can't take damage if the pilot can dodge enemy attacks with ease when this stat is upgraded, especially if the pilot's unit also has a unit ability (such as "Mirror Image"note ) that takes advantage of evading attacks. Likewise, there's no point towards upgrading a pilot's "accuracy" stat when almost all pilots have access to some form of a Spirit Command that increases accuracy rates for one turn.
      • Inversely, for pilots using units clearly designed to be tankers (usually super robots), evasion is moot: the "defense" pilot stat will be the one upgraded, and when coupled with finances poured into the armor rating for the pilot's unit, expect Scratch Damage from Mooks with only bosses being a point of concern.
    • Inverted with the "reaction" pilot stat, an utterly-redundant accuracy and evasion modifier. Some early guides tie the stat into double movement, but noting the specific character level to reach to gain double movement works just as well and is indeed what later guides do. It would eventually be dumped for the aforementioned "defense" stat, addressing a hole in Super Robot Wars' damage formula that lead to Rocket-Tag Gameplay.
  • Original Generation: The Trope Namer and by far the biggest known example. Most games starting with Super Robot Wars 2 have at least 2 original protagonists, a few side characters which are original and the main antagonists. The number eventually climbed so high Banpresto pooled them all together into a single game and released Super Robot Wars: Original Generation in 2002, kickstarting the Original Generation subseries. Besides the characters created for the so-called "mainline" series (i.e. for all the entries that have licenced mecha properties in them), Original Generation expands the cast even further by creating its' own Original Generation characters.
  • Overly Long Fighting Animation: The most guilty examples are usually the strongest attacks from units. Modern games allow a "fast-forward" button during animations to speed through it, while most entries allow you to turn them off entirely if you wish.
  • Parrying Bullets: The pilot skill "Sword Cut" allows a pilot using a mecha equipped with a melee weapon to have a chance at cutting away missiles, grenades, and Attack Drones out of the air before it hits them, even deflecting enemy melee attacks. Making this even more implausible, some mecha like Daimos and members of the Shuffle Alliance don't use weapons but their bare hands.
  • Permadeath: Averted for all games except the original Super Robot Wars, yet justified given its lack of any coherent plot. Instead, Plotline Death is usually the go-to method when Spared by the Adaptation isn't in use.
  • Point Defenseless: Provided buffs are not used, most battleships will be unable to hit anything that isn't a Mook the closer they are to them, despite their weakest weaponry usually having the highest percentage of accuracy at its disposal.
  • Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: Almost everyone explodes with several small explosions followed by a big one. Even living beings like the Radam beasts.
  • Post-Script Season: Done often in order to include a series by after its plot be resolved in the back-story simply to pad out the cast list of an installment. Mazinger Z is the usual go-to example.
  • Power Creep, Power Seep: The games hand out Adaptational Badasses and Adaptational Wimps as much as necessary in licensed installments to balance the entries. Without this trope, Super Robot Wars would be more literal and Real Robots from harder science fictions wouldn't have a fighting chance.
  • Power Echoes: Usually accompanies voiceovers for characters who ride a Super Robot or is basically a Cyborg (The only true example of this for Cyborgs are Didarion, but it should be noted that in their original series, all Tekkamans have echoes), to showcase their raw power as opposed to the more mundane weapon-based Real Robots. This is mostly on the older series from the 70's or 80's, even newer Super Robots do not have echoes despite their immense raw power, such as Mazinger Zero.
  • Power Equals Rarity: Any unlockable secret in the games that requires a Guide Dang It! will usually result as this.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: Not only are each series' respective stories reworked to fit from a narrative standpoint (usually fitting under Adaptation Expansion or Adaptation Distillation), some elements have to be reworked to fit within the bounds of a strategy video game. A few out of the many elements that were changed for gameplay purposes include:
    • Once the games started embracing full animation, and especially once the series entered the realm of HD animation, units began to lose their lesser-known weapons and transformation modes until they were only left with their most iconic moves and forms. Occasionally, the lesser-known moves are included in the animations of a unit's "official" weapons, while alternate forms might be reduced to single attacks.
    • Super Robot Wars is forced to get creative with series that don't have climactic final battles and/or antagonists that actually pilot mecha:
      • Alpha 2 tries to somewhat salvage GoShogun's Anti-Climax ending by forcing the players to destroy Neo Neros's missiles instead of GoShogun effortlessly disabling them as it does in the source material.
      • Since the original Armored Trooper VOTOMS anime doesn't have a climactic final battle and instead ends with Chirico destroying Wiseman on foot, Saisei-hen creates a more gameplay-appropriate climax by making the player fight off Elite Mooks and enforcing a size limit to make sure that the player can't bring anything too far above said mooks' weight class.
    • The mecha from Aura Battler Dunbine typically have very little in the way of unique attacks, and unlike Mobile Suits, are primarily melee units. So to give them a proper niche, the developers took Chum's one-off labeling of an ordinary sword attack as "Aura Slash" and turned it into a pair of actual Aura-charged attacks. Additionally, the plot point about Aura Battlers being nigh indestructable on Earth but less durable in Byston Well is reduced to an "Aura Barrier" ability that works everywhere and isn't particularly powerful beyond the earliest games in the series.
    • Dancouga is somewhat unique among Combining Mecha anime in that the individual components of the titular robot play a massive role in the early part of the series, with Dancouga not actually forming until about halfway through. Dealing with that many component units is cumbersome in gameplay, not to mention rather time-consuming to animate, which is why almost every game (4/F/FF, 64, and Alpha being exceptions) skip to Dancouga being formed, if not going for an outright Post-Script Season.
    • GoShogun's ultimate move - Go Flasher Special - is not an "attack" at all; instead, it causes enemy machines to become sentient and self-destruct to escape being further used as tools of war. Rather than try to figure out how to make that work in a strategy game, the developers just made Go Flasher Special into a standard finisher.
    • Adapting the tournament aspects of Mobile Fighter G Gundam is already a challenging proposition from a narrative standpoint; the fact that the game engine isn't built for Duel Bosses except when absolutely neccesary means that the Gundam Fight tends to be either glossed over or already finished in Super Robot Wars. Instead, the games tend to lean on the plot threads involving the Devil Gundam and Master Asia.
  • Protection Mission: More often than not, this type of scenario occurs frequently in almost every installment, from ensuring an allied or Non-Player Character unit survives a scenario to defending one or multiple areas on the map from enemies entering it.
  • Rank Inflation: Variation with terrain ranking for characters and units - it's not used as an accomplishment, but as an aspect of gameplay to determine how they perform while on that terrain, scaling from "D" to "A", and then "S", with "A" being normal performance.
  • Recurring Element: Series and mechanics come and go, but there are several traits that are so common among the various entries of the Super Robot Wars series that it is more notable when they are absent:
    • A Mazinger series is present starring Koji Kabuto. The original Mazinger Z is playable, even if it might get replaced as the game goes along. Super Robot Wars UX is the major exception as it instead uses Mazinkaiser SKL as the Mazinger representative.
    • At least one Gundam series from either the Universal Century or Cosmic Era universes is included, as UC and CE are the most popular Gundam timelines and the only two to contain more than one TV series. If it's Universal Century that's present, it is almost always an Anachronism Stew of multiple UC series with Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack included to give hero Amuro Ray his signature Nu Gundam. Super Robot Wars NEO is the major exception as it instead uses just Mobile Fighter G Gundam as the Gundam representative.
    • The heroic army is forced to temporarily split up their forces to deal with simultaneous threats.
    • An Original Generation protagonist and an Original Generation final boss is present. The original protagonist frequently receives a Mid-Season Upgrade. Exceptions where there are no Original Generation characters at all include Super Robot Wars until it's remake, and Super Robot Wars Compact, games who have Original Generation characters but whose final boss is not an Original Generation character are Shin Super Robot Wars, Super Robot Wars F Final, and Super Robot Wars Compact 2, and finally there is Super Robot Wars Scramble Commander who curiously has an Original Generation final boss but not any Original Generation heroes.
    • Even after the series did away with the ability for every unit to gain a second move per turn, the final boss can make multiple moves in a single Enemy Phase.
    • The game has a theme performed by JAM Project and a partial version of it is played in the game's title screen, with the full version being reserved for the last phase of the Final Boss as a form of Near Victory Fanfare.
    • Most multi-game continuities (Classic, Alpha, Z, the VXT trilogy) include Gunbuster in their final game.
    • There are also a few recurring traits that apply to individual series such as Tod Guiness almost always being recuritable, Elpeo Ple and/or Ple Two either surviving automatically or being recuritable, and Musashi Tomoe always dying with Benkei Kuruma becoming a Suspiciously Similar Substitute.
  • Redemption Demotion: Zigzagged; occasionally, players may be rewarded with a boss unit who retains its abilities and stats, be it mandatory or through requirements met. Other times, this enemy unit pulling a Heel–Face Turn will play it straight and have their HP and stats standardized to allied units.
  • Relationship Values
    • Some of the games have a built-in mechanic where pilots adjacent to a friend, rival or significant other gain higher stats during scenarios. Quite useful, as it can affect the skills of the pilots if they're surrounded by the people closest to them.
    • In Judgment and K, the Original Generation sub-pilots are alongside the main pilot(s): choosing the same one over and over eventually ends with the games pairing them up.
  • Required Party Member: Scenarios will designate character(s) and unit(s) who must be sortied out next for story purposes and they frequently must survive until either the mission is complete or a story event takes place. Some games even mark these characters on the intermission screen.
  • Resting Recovery: Allied units can re-enter battleships to restore Hit Points and EN back to maximum after a few turns, but will take a dip in Will as a result.
  • Revisiting the Roots: The "International Era" games, while influenced by the tail-end of the Z saga mechanics-wise, revisit certain elements omitted or Downplayed in the late Turn of the Millennium and early The New '10s.
    • Isometric grid-based maps, which had been dropped in licensed-Super Robot Wars after the first Super Robot Wars Z, return.
    • Following an era in which multi-unit squad systems were very frequent, these games return to strictly having one unit per map icon.
    • Super Robot Wars V, X, and T, for better or worse, resemble Advance, Reversal and Destiny - three standalone Mission Pack Sequels released over a rough span of three years. This is in contrast to the Episodic Games of the Z saga, with a year-long gap between each "numbered" entry.
    • The heavy Anachronism Stew of Universal Century Gundam series returns, including staples Zeta Gundam, Gundam ZZ, Char's Counterattack and Gundam F91 (at least in the case of X for the latter). Meanwhile, the less-recurring Crossbone Gundam appears for all three, Hathaway's Flash and Gundam Unicorn in V, and far-flung sequel Gundam: Reconguista in G in X. Excluding Super Robot Wars OE and mobile games, V was the first traditional Super Robot Wars game since Alpha 3 to mix more than three Universal Century Gundam series together.
    • Each installment features bonus units from the "Classic" Super Robot Wars era: Huckebein and Grungust in V (complete with pilots styled after the Super Robot Wars 4 protagonists), Masaki and the Cybuster in X and a Gespenst for T.
  • Road Cone: Any game with multiple protagonists to choose, leading to a direct sequel where they reappear in, but are no longer considered the protagonist again. Alpha and Original Generation are the best examples.
  • Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Early Super Robot Wars games, particularly the F duology and games with similar damage formulas, are known for late game bosses than can one-shot just about any allied units but similarly go down in two to three solid hits from the player.
  • Running Gag: Any promotional trailer of a new Super Robot Wars game will end with an incarnation of the Mazinger using its "Breast Fire"; once viewers have seen the attack showcased, it's time for the trailer to end. The only exception being the trailer in Super Robot Wars 30, where Breast Fire was shown early, the trailer ended with "Grid Beam".
  • Save Scumming: It's incredibly easy to abuse Suspend Save and use it frequently in order to figure out, for example, at which Hit Point threshold a boss will retreat. Such a method can be justified as some bosses may be required to be defeated in order to unlock secrets, though in all likelihood this is done to earn those extra experience points/credit/pilot points or to ensure an allied unit never gets hit, even at high accuracy percentages.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Players can stack whatever robots of whatever sizes inside battleships as long as the unit number isn't over the limit, no matter how impossible it would be for all of them to fit. Later series have a truly ludicrous amount of units.
  • Scratch Damage: Certain abilities can reduce damage to zero, although pure defense can't reduce damage below ten (out of Hit Point totals in the thousands or tens of thousands, as a matter of fact). One Spirit Command allows a single attack that connects with the unit to deal the minimum ten damage, that is, however, subject to cancellation by barriers and shields.
  • Second-Person Attack: Quite a few attacks do this, likely so the animations can play fine regardless of how the target looks. A good example would be the "Final Kaiser Blade" of the Mazinkaiser. Another variation of this involves animating the attack so that it would show the enemy sprite from behind while it's being attacked, but instead of giving every enemy in the game a second idle sprite just for the purpose of that one single attack, the enemy is instead turned into a blacked out silhouette when it's shown being attacked from a nonstandard angle, like for example to avoid making it look like it flips around mid-attack even though it's meant to be held in place.
  • Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: Generally, the stronger an attack, the more over-the-top its animation is. However, due to the mix of unit abilities, pilot skills and Spirit Commands present, it's possible these attacks will deal minimum damage, a fraction of it or miss entirely.
  • So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear:
    • The series tends to do this, especially with storyline deaths. A very early one occurs in 3 where one character disappears to spy on the villains and takes the unit you placed her in. Here's hoping what she reappears in later, having pulled a Face–Heel Turn, is a mook-level unit.
    • Another one happens in Alpha 3: if the player chooses to begin the game with the male super robot protagonist, the story plays out the beginning of the second half of GaoGaiGar. Sadly, when the titular unit gets trashed, the machine and its pilot go through a 10-Minute Retirement and all of the GaoGaiGar's upgrades are rendered moot.
  • Spin-Off: Most famously Original Generation, Endless Frontier and Another Century's Episode, but there are others such as Super Tokusatsu Wars, Real Robot Regiment, Super Hero Sakusen, Legend of the Sunrise Heroes, etc. The series itself is one to the Compati Hero Series, a Crossover between Gundam, Kamen Rider and the Ultra Series.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Crossover: There are several cases in the franchise where a small number of series receive disproportionate representation over several others, be it from dominating the story or by receiving many more pilots and units. Notable multi-game examples include:
    • Gundam in general, but especially the series from the original Universal Century timeline. UC Gundam almost always appears as an Anachronism Stew of multiple series instead of just one, dominates each game's worldbuilding, and tends to include way more pilots and units than other series. The Nintendo handheld line of games would eventually pass the mantle to the Cosmic Era Gundam series instead, though being much more willing to toy with the plots of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny for the sake of the crossover plot.
    • Martian Successor Nadesico for the early 2000s. It appeared in six Super Robot Wars games between its debut in 2001's Super Robot Wars Advance and 2007's Super Robot Wars W after which it went on a lengthy hiatus. It's a key part of the plot in almost all of those games as well, an unusual level of representation for a series that is not tied to any of the earliest Super Robot Wars rosters, although interestingly enough the series has never appeared on a multi-game saga.
    • Macross Frontier in The New '10s. It debuted in 2010's Super Robot Wars L and was a major part in almost every single license-based game from Super Robot Wars L to 2015's Super Robot Wars BX, the only exception being the HD remake of the first Super Robot Wars.
  • Standard RPG Items: The most common equippable parts for units range from increasing movement, mobility, armor rating, terrain adaptibility, HP and EN. Uncommon parts include granting a unit a Deflector Shield, flight (if the unit can't fly), increasing the pilot's starting Will at the beginning of a scenario. The rarest parts contain a multitude of attributes from common and uncommon parts.
  • Status Effects: Includes decreasing accuracy, evasion, mobility or Will, absorbing EN, locking movement or the use of Spirit Commands for a turn
    • Critical Status Buff: The pilot skill "Prevail" increases a pilot's accuracy, evasion stats alongside their critical hit rate and their unit's armor rating as their respective unit's HP decreases. Like "Counter", this skill is also universal.
    • Damage-Increasing Debuff: Any attack with the "armor down" properties is this, since the lower the armor rating of a unit, the more damage it takes. The Mazinger Z's "Rust Tornado" and the Original Generation equippable weapon "Armor Breaker" are just some examples. Of course, enemies themselves have this, though they are fewer in number.
    • Status Buff: Many Spirit Commands, ranging from temporary increases to accuracy and evasion rates, strengthening defenses or dealing damage dealt by twice the amount for the next attack. Macross 7 in all appearances will perform this, essentially making them the White Mages of Super Robot Wars.
  • The Stations of the Canon: Zigzagged - while some installments are able to combine and re-imagine the various plots from the licensed series crossing over with one another or play their respective Canons absolutely loosely as possible, other games merely "copy-and-paste" particular episodes or Story Arcs as a single scenario without the heroes interacting with each other, except the ones from their home series. Judgment and K are examples where licensed series' Canon is followed almost viciously straight.
  • Stock Audio Clip: A given considering how many times the same series and characters reprise. The most famous example of stock audio used is Todd Guinness from Aura Battler Dunbine. Hidemi Osaka, Todd's seiyuu, has only done two voice acting roles with Todd being the more notable one of the two. According to Terada in the 1997 Super Robot Wars F guidebook, Hidemi Osaka left the public eye that it took six months to find him with the help of private investigators, Shigeru Nakahara and Hirokazu Hiramatsu. Osaka provided the voice clips for Super Robot Wars F before disappearing from the public eye yet again, these clips still being used to this day whenever Aura Battler Dunbine appears in a Super Robot Wars game.
  • Stone Wall: Any unit, particularly supers, with a high armor rating and its pilot having a high defensive stat and/or defensive skills, but offset with a lack of unit movement and mobility. The Giganscudo of Original Generation is one example.
  • Straight for the Commander: Zigzagged; destroying the scenario boss automatically ends the level in some situations, while other scenarios can only end if all enemies on the map (including, if any, reinforcements) are defeated. Conversely, enemy units will go after allied battleships, no matter how much (or rather, how little) damage they can actually do (see Artificial Stupidity).
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: See also Artificial Stupidity
    • The usual AI script has enemies making sure to attack the target that would take the most damage from a successful attack, but never bothering to check if it's even possible for the attack to hit. While older games tend avert this, modern releases are getting a little worse, where there seem to be a few more parameters than target Hit Points.
    • Judgement tried the other way: enemies will attack units they have the largest chance of hitting, meaning they mostly target super robots and battleships. Unfortunately, because both targets are more or less designated tankers, this makes gameplay a cakewalk, since supers can easily plow through Mooks. This is a mixed bag: Though this means that the supers will often have more kills and experience than your dodgy reals, you can also ensure the survival of your faster units by parking a Mighty Glacier in-range of your enemies, and by Cherry Tapping using their weaker attacks you can ensure everybody gets kills.
  • Super-Deformed
  • Super Mode: Unit abilities like Mazinger Z's "Mazin Power", Jeeg's "Bronze Bell", Burning Gundam's "Super Mode" (and even Hyper Mode) or Tekkaman Blade's "Blaster" modes activate upon reaching a certain Will threshold, granting bonuses like damage increases, higher accuracy/evasion rates and strengthen defensive capabilities.
  • Super Move Portrait Attack: Abused to hell and back when even the most basic attack is precipitated by a cut-in of the pilot.
  • Suspend Save: Almost every installment has this, which invariably leads to Save Scumming.
  • A Taste of Power: Some games allow players to use a unit or a group of units for a short amount of time before they are taken away for plot purposes, yet are handed back later in the play-through either because of mandatory reasons or secret conditions were met. "Galaxy Showdown", the third part of Compact 2, is a notable application of this trope, where it provides the entire roster of its two predecessors for a few scenarios before splitting up the party and giving the individual units back over the course of the game.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The TRI-Battle System in Z incorporates three different strategies when tackling enemies.
    • "Tri Formation", using the TRI-Charge to allow all units in the squad to use their respective "TRI" capable weapons together as a single attack, damaging all units in an enemy squad with no damage penalties and automatically pierces enemy barriers.
    • "Center Formation", with the squad focusing fire on a singular enemy unit.
    • "Wide Formation", where the squad fires on their respective enemies in a squad (squad leader attacks enemy squad leader, left to left, right to right).
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Zigzagged - dialogue spoken by heroes and villains during attacks are played straight, but Averted in some situations where an allied character needs to directly speak to a plot-important enemy unit (usually from the same series) by being placed adjacent to them; doing so will have the appropriate "convince" command appear and take up that character's action for the rest of the turn, though whether the enemy will switch sides or not varies. Made particularly important if the act of convincing said enemy unit is used as an Event Flag to eventually unlock the enemy later as a Secret Character.
  • Team Kids: Played for laughs in one of the official gag manga, where Captain Bright Noa is treated as the Team Dad by the majority of the combined heroes. In one story, Tetsuya Tsurugi expresses his admiration that just about everyone views Bright as a surrogate father, to which Bright replies that as captain of the Ra Calium, he's naturally A Father to His Men. Tetsuya notes that as an orphan, he's never had a father to discipline him properly and asks him to demonstrate his legendary Bright Slap. After a brief moment of confusion, Bright obliges and knocks Tetsuya clean off his feet with a single slap. A Running Gag is how the orphans in the crew often act more childishly around him, due to seeing him as a Parental Substitute... even if, like Tetsuya, they're grown adults and veteran soldiers.
  • There Is No Kill L Ike Overkill: In most modern games, if a specific attack is guaranteed to destroy an enemy, it will produce a "Dynamic Kill" animation rather than the generic "enemy unit explodes" animation. Depending on the attack though, both can sometimes happen.
  • Timed Mission: Played with - given most installments are Turn-Based Strategy, a turn limit might be in effect as part of scenario objectives, ranging from destroying a specific enemy or reaching a point on the map in a set number of turns.
  • Too Awesome to Use: Certain equippable parts that can restore a unit's Hit Points or Spirit Points to max and resupply ammunition and EN can only be used once per playthrough. Despite being common or even purchasable for in-game stores, players abhorred the idea of using them and ended up with dozens of such parts by the end of the game. Averted post-Z where these items can be used once per scenario, making them far more effective for use.
  • Top-Down View: Nearly all games in the Classic Timeline uses a bird's-eye-view of the scenario map, including many handheld installments and most of the Z saga. There's also an option in modern releases where players can switch instantaneously between the 45° angle view and this.
  • Transformation Is a Free Action: Zigzagged - while this is played straight for all transforming units in nearly all installments, combining units will end its turn after forming into a new unit, provided the primary pilot of the combined unit did not attack or move before combination occurs. Some units can also transform after moving, usually when they unlock their custom bonus.
  • True Final Boss: Until the franchise reached the PlayStation 2, this trope was in effect for almost all games in the series.
  • Turn-Based Strategy: In the older games, you can't even select an action during the enemy's turn.
  • Units Not to Scale: To keep parity for everybody in animations, most units are rendered in Super-Deformed style. Averted during certain attacks and the Scramble Commander titles. Shin subverts this, like the Fighting Game Spin-Off Super Robot Spirits, by giving the robots the correct proportions as they appeared in their own anime but not in relation to how they compare with robots from other seriesnote .
  • Unlockable Content: Spades of this are available, with the most common being Secret Characters, additional difficulty settings ("EX-Hard Mode") and "Special Mode" (unit upgrades can reach as high as fifteen ranks).
  • Video Game Long-Runners: Reached its 30th year in 2021.
  • Video Game Weapon Stats: All weapons carry a base attack power, EN cost and/or Will requirement (if any), range, accuracy, critical hit chance, ammo capacity and how well it can be used on which terrain. Depending on the weapon, if may also inflict Status Effects. In the Original Generation games, equippable weapons have an additional "weapon space" value that determines how much space it takes up for the unit to use it.
  • Violation of Common Sense: In some games, using a MAP attack on allies that are capable of repairing themselves is a fast way to level up in the game. Alternatively, doing so to destroy one of your own battleships is a quick way to intentionally fail the mission so you can carry over the money and pilot kills/PP you gained from it if you don't care about losing Skill Points for that specific mission and want to keep replaying it for grinding purposes.
  • We Buy Anything: Modern releases allow the player to sell any equippable part or "skill parts" for credits.
  • Wolverine Publicity
    • If Amuro Ray is in any release (be it his One Year War, Gryps Conflict or Second Neo-Zeon War incarnation), expect him to use the Nu Gundam even if he's in his teens and none of other elements from Char's Counterattack are present. Justified because the RX-78-2 Gundam is virtually outdated and outclassed by the likes of the Zeta Gundam and V2 Gundam in Universal Century canon.
    • Barring UX,note  Koji Kabuto has appeared in every single mainline installment since the introduction of pilots in Super Robot Wars 2, given that he's one of the most notable Humongous Mecha pilots in Japanese fiction.
  • The World Is Always Doomed: Don't be surprised if you see Char Aznable deciding that it's a good idea to drop the Axis colony all while there are some Alien Invasion, or Dr. Hell is ravaging the world with his army of Kikaiju. That is the state of the world of SRW: doom always looms the world, but our heroes are Hot-Blooded enough to make sure it doesn't come to pass.
  • Zerg Rush: Occasionally overlapping with Multi-Mook Melee, this is primarily an AI-favored tactic, since enemies will almost always outnumber the amount of allied units that can be sortied into combat, including going on the offensive. The Buff Clan and Space Terrible Monster Crowd from Alpha 3 and the Einst in Compact 2/Impact are notable examples.

Given the magnitude and scope of the franchise, pretty much any anime/manga trope can be found in Super Robot Wars sooner or later, due to the fact that it contains so many series. Some that stand out, though, are the following:
  • Adaptation Distillation: As the games rely heavily on Fix Fic, elements from included series that weren't received well in its original narrative or took too long for the plot to move along might be Downplayed or removed entirely.
  • Adaptation Expansion: The games often incorporate cut content and ideas from the series they adapt, put in entirely new things, or take things from different perspectives. The most famous example is Mazinkaiser, an entirely new Mid-Season Upgrade for Mazinger Z that eventually became part of Mazinger's own timeline.
  • Adaptation Personality Change: A common trait to the franchise, as different circumstances mean characters will develop differently than they did in their own shows. Shinn Asuka in the Z saga, for example, changes from a rash, angst-riddled teenager into a mature, young soldier. Even villains like Haman Khan become kinder than her canon counterpart - during several points in Jigoku-hen, she expresses genuine concern for the well-being of Marida Cruz and Mineva Lao Zabi. The most famous example of course is Shinji Ikari changing from helpless wimp to Cowardly Lion and legitimate badass in the Alpha saga.
  • Aerith and Bob: In these games, there are fairly standard names like Russel, Ryusei, Sanger, Jonathan, Sophia and Mai, but off-the-wall names like Irmgult, Excellen, Seolla, Alfimi and Ratsel also exist. Plus the mish-mash of the many different series part of it.
  • The Alliance: The Zuvorg Alliance of the Classic Timeline subverts this. While it's all just the Zuvorg, from what we can see, they have their own share of bad apples.
  • Alternate Continuity: "Classic Timeline", Alpha, Z, Compact/Impact, Original Generation, etc.
  • Alternate Universe: Each game continuity's essentially an Alternate Universe to each series included. Z, on the other hand, takes this trope and runs with it by mixing and mashing universes together into one.
  • Anyone Can Die: If any of the games can save a person who fell victim to this, it usually does this, too. Subverted when even the most hated villains may live (especially if it's a sequel series), due to the Fix Fic nature of the games, thus characters who're supposed to die will live, with the added bonus of certain villains performing a Heel–Face Turn and joining the crew.
  • Badass Crew: Each game has the heroes band together to form a special task force for the sake of going against the numerous threats that plague the world. By the end, you'll have an unstoppable army composed of the most badass Humongous Mecha and their pilots and battleships.
  • Battle Couple: Prevalent in nearly each game's original characters
  • Beam Spam: A favorite tactic of Gundams or any other real robots that utilize Frickin' Laser Beams.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Just about every playable character does this at one point or another, but special mention goes to Rom Stol, who has this down to an art form. He has a habit of appearing (sans robot) just in the nick of time when the heroes about to be kicked in the teeth, distracting the villains with a badass speech, then leaping into his mecha to properly stomp some asses. An argument can be made that Rom is the heroes to the heroes.
    • The best part is his speeches are fully voiced (by Kazuhiko Inoue no less), and despite a lot of Purple Prose, are usually the most awesome parts of the game.
  • Bilingual Bonus: See Naming Conventions. Many original characters and mecha are named after foreign words.
  • BFG: Abundant; the "Hyper Tronium Buster Cannon" of the SRX epitomizes this trope.
  • BFS: Multiple examples, with the Zankantou (localized as "Colossal Blade") as its headliner.
  • Big Bad: Usually an original character, but older titles used a few from licensed series.
  • The Blank: Generic nameless Mooks tend to become this, both good and bad. It's not too noticeable if they're wearing a space suit, but some of their portraits look rather creepy.
  • Boisterous Bruiser: There are lots of these characters, but overall, there is also a group of musicians (aside of JAM Project) that sang some Leitmotifs of some Original Generation that fit this trope (such as Baran Doban, Rand Travis and Michiru Hanaten)
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: In addition to several characters from the various series represented in the games undergoing this, many of the originals have undergone this trope at some point.
  • The Cape: Banjo Haran and Rom Stol play this role whenever they show up.
  • Character Exaggeration/Flanderization:
    • Bernie Wiseman often gets depicted as a Zaku fanboy, while Kou Uraki and his dislike of carrots, basically a throwaway gag in Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, is made distressingly canon.
    • In classic timeline, Quess Paraya has her Spoiled Brat personality removed, and instead has her fangirl attitude toward Amuro increased to the max. She try to impress him by bringing very good MS with her upon joining (either Sazabi, Jagd Doga, or both), something you will be appreciate.
    • In an uncommon Gameplay and Story Integration, Lunamaria Hawke and her missing a battleship with a beam rifle in Gundam SEED Destiny is translated into the "Strike" Spirit Command costing 30 Spirit Points for her (by contrast, "Strike" costs half or a third that for most pilots). Only Masaki Andoh matches this level of exaggeration.
  • Chunky Updraft: Expect many attacks to feature this form of animation
  • Continuity Nod: Mostly for the original characters, specifically those making cameo appearances or reference what they'll be doing once they're fully integrated into Original Generation continuity.
    • One particular example is a specific equippable part: the "Tem Ray Circuit" is based off an item that Amuro's father made in the original Mobile Suit Gundam that is nothing more than a piece of junk.
  • Darker and Edgier: The plots of some installments delved deeply into this post-Alpha with Super Robot Wars Destiny being a standout example. Not even the anime are immune to this, especially when comparing The Inspectors to Divine Wars. In the opening scene of the former, a helpless SRX Team is virtually annihilated by Beowulf.
  • Detachable Blades: The SRX's Finishing Move, Tenjou Tenga Nendou Bakusai Ken (Heaven and Earth Psychoburst Sword) impales its opponent on a blade of volatile psychic energy, snaps it off at the hilt, and then detonates it as a bomb. Its upgraded form in Alpha 3, Banpreios, can generate these blades from its fists as part of its T-Link Blade Knuckle attack.
  • Drill Sergeant Nasty: Many, as someone has to keep the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits in line and shape. If Tetsuya Tsurugi appears in any of the games, he'll usually be this.
  • Easily Forgiven: So you've pulled a Face–Heel Turn and joined The Dark Side, while shooting up a bunch of our allies. Hey, we're all cool with it now; so, Katejina Loos, want to join the gang again?
  • Evil vs. Evil: Despite Enemy Mine situations, some games will invariably steer itself towards this, as most antagonist factions don't have the same goals as others. W, in particular, pits the Zonderians fighting the Radam, who are against the Evoluders, who were previously in combat with the Eleven Lords Of Sol.
  • Expy, Captain Ersatz: Multiple characters and mecha.
    • The Grungust from 4 is clearly a Mazinger with a little Daitarn-esque transformation thrown in. Irmgard Kazahara basically acts like and fulfills the same plot purposes as Banjo does in "normal" SRWs, except with less dough.
    • In no way whatsoever do any of the Huckebeins of Alpha resemble Gundams...honestly: just ignore the head crown and the coloring, totally.
    • The Gunleon from Z has many similarities to GaoGaiGar and maybe a little hint of Evangelion.
    • The Randgrith of Advance barely even bothers to hide itself as a Dougram as drawn by someone other than Kunio Okawara. Interestingly, its Ace Custom Laz Angriff is red, compared to the green Randgrith, which brings to mind another line of mecha designed by Okawara.
    • The Compatible Kaiser from The Great Battle series received an updated appearance in Original Generation that makes it a clone of Gravion (granted, it's the same mechanical designer Masami Obari).
  • Fanservice
    • Beach Episode: Aside from the text-based intermission scenes using this in the Original Generation games, the end credits of The Inspectors, featuring a multiple of the girls in bikinis and School Swimsuit. Perhaps as a joke (or a likely Shout-Out due to the games), two male characters in one segment are wearing nothing but Loincloth and a speedo.
  • Fix Fic: At least until Alpha, the franchise goes out of its way to avert more unpleasant elements and "fix" problems many fans had with the original series, with the most recent Z towards improving peoples' attitudes on Gundam SEED Destiny by mellowing Shinn Asuka out. Being able to have the Mind Screw plots of Evangelion and The Big O make sense have earned the fans' respect for the writers.
  • Foreshadowing: Beginning around the time of Original Generations, Banpresto started including hints at future games.
  • The Federation: Naturally, Universal Century's Earth Federation in most games and its own version in Original Generation
  • Gambit Index
  • Gratuitous Foreign Language: You name that language - it's there.
  • Hot-Blooded: Never in the medium has there been such a pure concentrated dose of heroism ever assembled. Handle the games with care: your game system might spontaneously combust from the sheer awesomeness of it.
  • Large Ham: What else would you expect from a series full of super robot pilots?
  • Mecha-Mooks: Sometimes enemy units are controlled by a super AI rather than a human soldier.
  • Multinational Team: Z particularly exploits this (ZAFT, the fact that virtually all the aliens are bad guys...)
  • Mythology Gag: So, so many. Of course, the franchise itself has a few gags with its own originals. Irm and Ring Mao from 4 reappear in Alpha and Original Generation, but aren't direct expies of their 4 counterparts in contrast to other characters. Instead, they are rendered significantly older than their first appearance in 4, and rather than a simple lovey-dovey couple, they're no long together and tend to bicker Like an Old Married Couple.
  • Naming Conventions
    • Arms and Armor Theme Naming: Several original characters are named after brands of firearms, such as the Nanbu, Browning, Ingram, Beretta, Enfield and Armalite. One of the franchise's most famous Humongous Mecha, the Astranagant, is a composite of Astra and Nagant.
    • Theme Naming: Virtually almost all original characters, factions and mecha
  • No Fourth Wall: A staple of the save-quit intermission dialogues, which can vary from standard Guilt-Based Gaming messages derived from particular series' casts to jokes about the voice actors. One of more notorious examples comes from Alpha Gaiden, where Masaki "Hikaru Midorikawa" Andoh speaks in the voice of Heero Yuy behind an "unknown character" portrait.
  • The Power of Friendship: Alongside The Power of Love, mandatory events in these games are driven by both of these.
  • The Power of Rock: Certain heroes from the Macross and GaoGaiGar universes use it as attacks or boost stats to allies.
  • Precursors: Several names are mentioned - Alpha has the "First People", W has the "E's" and K has the "Crusians". Some titles like Destiny or Scramble Commander 2 have relics left by a nameless race.
  • Punch! Punch! Punch! Uh Oh...: Usually any introduction of a powerful enemy
  • Rule of Cool: The driving force behind a lot of the games, characters and mecha, though really, the premise of the franchise is this to the Humongous Mecha genre.
  • Schizo Tech: Alpha Gaiden and Z, mainly. Yes, technically, Xabungle, Gundam X, and Turn A Gundam all take place in post-apocalyptic settings, but the technology and terminology for each fluctuates so wildly between them, you could even call this a "Schizo Setting" for Alpha Gaiden, since one continent uses gasoline-powered mecha, half of another continent roams about in landships scavenging for mecha, and the other half is practically set in the Victorian-era with very little concept of mecha or high technology whatsoever.
  • Shut Up, Hannibal!: The heroes' usual response to a villain's speech
  • Slasher Smile: Many Super Robot pilots display one, with Ange, a Real Robot pilot, joining in the fun in V.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: An installment frequently takes the cynical side from its series and turns it on its head towards idealism - essentially, friendship and love drive the plot. Villains that were Karma Houdinis in their home series? Not here; however, modern releases have played with this, putting it more on the edge of cynicism, without fully sliding it towards complete idealism.
  • Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic: The gist between "Real Robots" and "Super Robots" is that Real Robots are highly reactive with fast evasion and sharp accuracy while Super Robots have Heavy Armor, Large Healthpools, and access to the most powerful weapons in the game.
  • Spared by the Adaptation: Many, many characters, either heroic or villainous, have been spared from their canonical death, usually as a result of Fix Fic
  • Still Wearing the Old Colors: Usually when characters from an enemy faction defect to the player's side, they would retain the uniform from when they were enemies (as seen in attack cut-ins and character portraits during intermission). This is especially true with enemies from licensed series who didn't switch sides originally.
  • Thematic Series: Provided an installment isn't part of an overarching saga like Alpha, Original Generation or Z, all standalone titles feature different Humongous Mecha series, with an Original Generation character headlining the game for a Massive Multiplayer-type Crisis Crossover.
  • Theme Music Power-Up: Nearly everybody gets one, but Ratsel Feinschmecker's the most obvious, due to Ascended Glitch.
  • Time Skip: W does this to allow it to use a set of series, then use the sequels of said series in the same game. Alpha Gaiden revolves around our heroes taking one past two or three apocalypses to use Desert Punk mainstays Xabungle and Gundam X. This is later played heavily with Saisei-hen, where some characters don't age between games, while others get hit with it pretty hard. Dimensional collision nonsense is used to justify this.
  • Time Travel: First used in Alpha Gaiden, the whole plot in Reversal and partially responsible for the events in W
  • Took a Level in Badass: Many characters, and thanks to Fix Fic, Shinji's much-appreciated badassery stands out the most in Alpha 3. He took enough levels to do a Get A Hold Of Yourself Man on another character.
  • Truer to the Text: This is typically inverted for Super Robot Wars, where the first adaptation is the most faithful and later adaptations take liberties, but is played straight for a lot of series present in older games that had heavily-compressed or flat-out bizarre adaptations, such as Zambot 3, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, and Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.
  • Victory Pose: Especially prevalent following a "Dynamic Kill"
  • We Will Not Use Photoshop in the Future: Both civilians and the heroes in Z fall to this.

 
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The Boazanian base, Skullrook

The Boazanians operate through the Skull-shaped mechanical floating base, Skullrook. Though it behaves as a military base for the most part, it's also capable of launching attacks and missiles. It manages to easily overwhelm Voltes V.

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Main / BewareTheSkullBase

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