4th SRW is a sequel to 3rd SRW, furthering the original SRW storyline. It's once again based on the engine used in 3rd SRW and EX. 4th SRW was the largest SRW yet, including 69 scenarios and about 80 pilots and robots.
4th SRW represents a modest increase in complexity from previous titles. Additions include a customizable hero pilot whose choice of robot affects the plot, special pilot abilities, equippable robot parts, hidden items on the map (not seen since the original SRW), more seishins, and new stats such as crit rate and robot size. You can finally choose reactions to enemy attacks during enemy phase on a fight by fight basis instead of issuing general orders. Another major change is that almost all enemies have their stats hidden until you fight them. This added depth means you'll be spending more time figuring out optimal strategies and team setups.
The campaign starts out a little more difficult than usual. It's more difficult to earn levels early on and you don't start with any very strong units. Even Getta isn't a powerhouse until mid-late game. Around the mid game you get handed a bunch of MAP attacks and extremely powerful ultimate attacks, causing the difficulty to plummet. The ZZ Gundam is especially ridiculous with a MAP attack that covers half the screen and can kill almost any grunt in the game with one attack. Upgrades are quite simply too effective, nearly doubling the base damage of a weapon, which becomes even more ridiculous when combined with the Soul seishin that multiplies damage by 3x. Finally, the Revive seishin breaks the game by allowing you to suicide your pilots just to revive them again with full HP/EN, full Spirit Points and 100 morale. The Awaken and Re-Enable seishins are also too cheap and spammable. It's sad when you can finish the last 6 or so scenarios in 1 turn by making full use of the above features.
The endgame is easier than 3rd SRW by far. Bosses are easily blown up by fully upgraded MAP attacks and fully upgraded ultimate attacks. They are essentially big harmless punching bags that go down in a couple hits. In 3rd SRW an end game boss would take the combined might of your entire team to kill while remaining very dangerous, while in 4th SRW they aren't much more of a threat than the high HP grunts surrounding them. Even some SRW EX bosses were more dangerous. There are no waves of double acting grunts like in 3rd SRW, either. Overall the early and mid game have some decent SRW style action, but unless you are playing a no upgrades and no units destroyed playthrough, expect the late game to be a joke.
Once again there are some UI improvements. Units in the unit list can be sorted by HP or level. The new powers menu shows a list of which pilots have which seishins. You can quickly load your mid-battle save by holding select after soft resetting. I was left pining for the modern seishin interface where you select which seishins to activate and they all occur at the same time, instead of going into the menu each time to activate one seishin. There's far too much seishin spamming and it gets tiring.
The color palette is even darker and more muted than SRW EX. Robots on the map are low contrast and blend in too easily with the background. I'm not sure why they did this since SRW EX was a good balance between the overly bright simplicity of 3rd SRW and the low contrast 4th SRW. As usual animations can't be disabled so I recommend using an emulator with a speedup toggle.
4th SRW is a solid entry to the series, but the developers were unable to properly balance all of the newly added features. Much of the difficulty and depth ends up drowned out by overly powerful attacks and seishins.
4th SRW Scramble was a port of 4th SRW for the Playstation, also the first SRW for Playstation. Thanks to the larger save size, you're no longer forced to scrap or dismiss units as the campaign progresses. There are some subtle changes to pilot, unit, and weapon data, mostly buffs to your stats to make the game slightly easier. A few extra missions are added, and some reinforcement and enemy layouts have been altered. 4th SRW S also includes a few interface improvements such as L2 and R2 to switch between enemy units. If you've already played 4th SRW for SFC inside out, it's not really worth a second trip. On the other hand, if you haven't touched either game, 4th SRW S is considered the more balanced (read: easier), less buggy version.
Reviewer's experience: Completed the campaign with no upgrades, no units destroyed, low turn counts, and no save/load spamming for low chances to hit or dodge. 146 turns, 44 scenarios completed.
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