Super Robot Wars is the first entry in the venerable Super Robot series of games. You'll find many of the series hallmarks including seishins (special abilities), transformations, recruitable enemies, willpower, and air/land/sea attack and movement types.
Players start out by choosing one of three robot teams. You'll then choose one of those robots to be the leader, granting them stat boosts and SP to use seishins. You'll see the other robots you didn't choose scattered in various missions, ready to be recruited. Successful recruiting depends on the enemy's HP level and the recruiters charisma and series relations. You can only have up to 8 current party members, so no recruiting the whole robot army. Ideally you want to have 8 of the best robots on your team, so strategically sacrificing weaker units to recruit better ones is an option.
There are 13 missions total, usually with a boss that must be defeated to progress. Items can be found in capturable towers and secret locations scattered around each map which are used to bolster your stats during intermission. There is usually a group of initially aggressive enemies at the start of a level, but the rest are fairly passive, letting you heal up and search for items if desired. It's usually best to dump your stat boosts on your leader robot since you can't lose them without facing defeat.
Gameplay tends to be somewhat unforgiving as healing is limited to seishins and captured towers, there are no quicksaves, and defeated units leave your party (but may be found as enemies later and re-recruited). This leads to a heavy reliance on uncounterable ranged attacks in order to preserve health. Whenever you open the seishin menu, you'll get your pick of 3 randomly selected seishins, so you never know if you'll get something useful or not. It's a surprisingly above average difficulty game that may throw SRW fans for a loop, since you can't spam quicksaves or grind to get out of trouble, and death comes quickly for your robots if ganged up on. One unusual feature is that player units cannot pass through other player units. I rarely see this in tactics games and it makes bunched up situations more tricky since it's possible to box in your own weakened units that need to retreat.
Graphics are surprisingly good for a Game Boy game, with well detailed map icons and good looking battle sprites. Music is limited to one battle loop. Animations can't be turned off so if you are on an emulator using the turbo button is advised.
Controls are a mixed bag. The cursor can't move diagonally, there's no button to switch between units, some menus can't be backed out of, and there's no quick button to check a units stats. And yes, they could fit that into the Game Boy's control scheme if they wanted to.
Overall Super Robot Wars is a good first entry to the famous robot series and shouldn't be missed by fans or anyone looking for some retro tactics action.
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