Super Robot Pinball

Name: Super Robot Pinball

Platform: Game Boy Color (2001)

Growing up with Toonami, I had the opportunity to watch Mobile Fighter G Gundam, The Big O and a handful of other mecha anime. I also had my typical teenage infatuation with Evangelion. It wasn't until 2020 I really *got* into mecha anime, primarily through a virtual watch-along of the three Gundam compilation movies with friends. Sorting through over forty years of mecha anime, I found myself spending more time reading forum posts and watching Youtube videos than I did with the source material. The ever expanding cannon of mecha before me felt both daunting and exciting.

Domo's Golden Finger shouts were some of the first Youtube videos I watched

Before this mecha journey, I had a passing familiarity with Super Robot Wars. I'd actually played one of the few games officially translated into English, Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier. I had no idea at the time that it had any relationship to Gundam or the other mecha I knew, and for good reason - it happened to be a release in the sub-franchise that featured only Banpresto characters and a couple of Namco Bandai cameos. When I tried to learn more about the core Super Robot Wars games, I was overwhelmed. Dozens of games across nearly as many consoles, with only a handful fan translated into English. It didn't help that I'm often intimidated by strategy roll-playing games, and that there was no clear "starting" point I could find. Podcasters and articles I found spoke highly of the music, animations, and the amusing "what if" crossovers across Super Robot Wars games. After cycling through a couple of fan translation download pages, I shook my head and told myself I'd be wasting my time.

In the final days of 2021, a fan translation was released for Super Robot Pinball. I'd never heard of it before, and only saw its release because of a Romhacking.net tweet. "Man, this looks a lot like Pokemon Pinball," I thought to myself while looking at the four included screenshots on the translation page. I spent a month of 2020 learning how to mod my Gameboy Color with an IPS screen, and decided to load up the game to play on it. 

As the opening credits scrolled past, I recognized the Jupiter logo from the handful of Picross games I'd played on Nintendo platforms. I hadn't realized that the same Jupiter made Pokemon Pinball, and that Super Robot Pinball was released just two years after Pokemon. How could Jupiter possibly follow up the iconic designs of Pokemon? It turns out that chibi versions of everyone's favorite mecha and their enemies is a good substitution. 

The game feels like a refined version of Pokemon Pinball, most notably switching from a two-screen transitioning field to a scrolling field. I'm not the most experienced virtual pinball player, but the scrolling field made the table feel more cohesive and fun to shoot around. I found myself impressed with the light RPG elements. Pokemon Pinball incorporated traditional pinball design alongside a "shoot to catch" system that has the player shooting the ball into sprites of each Pokemon. Super Robot Pinball more closely resembles a menu-based RPG, with options like attack and healing mapped to specific routes on the board. While there were RPG trimmings like character stats and special attacks, they felt mostly inconsequential to the gameplay. I was free to pick Eva unit 2 to fight against a Z'Gok, as long as I hit the right attack sequence. 

Battles in Super Robot Pinball opened my eyes to the greater Robot Wars connection. Like in those games, the sprite work in Super Robot Pinball is superb. Chibi renditions of nearly a hundred characters are beautifully drawn in some of the best sprites I've seen on the platforms. Each also has a couple of unique animations alongside great chiptune renditions of their theme songs. I picked Eva Unit 1 for every fight at first just so I could keep hearing the game's rendition of Cruel Angel's Thesis (an absolute banger of course). I finally got over my Evangalion fixation to try some of the rest of the cast including shows I was unfamiliar with. Thanks to a Library function, it was easy to check which series a character came from as well as watch loops of their fight animation. 

Look at the cute lil' Sachiel!!

As I looped between games of pinball and dives into the Library, I felt like I was beginning to understand the appeal of the Super Robot Wars games. It turns out its fun to watch the mecha you like bash into each other like virtual figurines. Robot Wars' strategy RPG gameplay intimidated me, and pinball allowed me to dip my toes into the franchise without the weight of mainline games. 

I am unsure if I will ever try a Super Robot Wars game, though the recently released Super Robot Wars 30 certainly caught my eye. Super Robot Pinball took what I thought was an intimidating game and got me to have fun in its world.