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The story
A poster on 5ch’s “Live Anything G” board, who bought both halves of the Saturn version of Super Robot Wars F for 500 yen total, started a thread asking “Is this really a classic?”
Complaints piled up over the game’s unreasonable difficulty—low hit rates, long waits before enemies counterattack—while the discussion also branched into comparisons with other Super Robot Wars titles like AP, Masoukishin, and the Complete Box.
What people said
Went full confidence and just kept mowing down the whole enemy army solo forever.
The real classic is G Generation F.
Was it just normal for Heisei-era kids to grind through this kind of ordeal to play games?
I couldn't figure out how to play, so I looked it up, and apparently the Saturn version has a bug that wipes your entire save.
I'm seriously considering just deleting my save and calling it quits.
I bought both halves for 500 yen total though, so no regrets either way.
If you're on an emulator, just crank up the speed.
Saturn.
Yeah, a game from back when the 32-bit console wars were raging.
That's just ego talking!
Then at least make the battle scenes smoother.
The wait before the enemy's counterattack is way too long…
Complete Box is genuinely awful.
EX is still okay, but the 2nd and 3rd games bundled in it have zero sense of satisfaction.
Just having actual voice acting was enough to get everyone hyped back then.
The same thing happened with FF's cutscenes too.
Your units get one-shot constantly, so you end up poking enemies from outside their range and save-scumming (リセマラ, reset-and-retry grinding) over and over until some 10%-hit-rate move finally lands. Truly miserable.
Your memory must be fuzzy, because that situation doesn't add up.
Even accounting for bad luck, that approach is just dumb.
Sure, the early stages were still manageable — that was near the end of the Final Chapter (Kanketsu-hen).
In F's endgame the enemies pilot some pretty broken machines too, so that's plausible if you're not using spirit commands.
Aren't they all basically the same game lol
Nope, none — the series has never even broken a million copies sold.
Can't say yet about the difficulty curve — maybe it eases up as you go —
but I was shocked at how strong the enemies were even on Stage 1, which is supposed to be basically a tutorial.
it strips spirit commands out of the Winky Soft SRW formula, resulting in absolutely fiendish difficulty.
I remember clearing it somehow through sheer grit.
Not sure if it's downloadable on consoles, but I'd recommend AP.
Repeat playthroughs aren't too much of a pain either.
If it's a game about steamrolling everything with your favorite robots, then yeah, the easy, comfortable ones are better.
And if what you actually want is a high-quality tactics game, you shouldn't be playing Super Robot Wars for that in the first place.
If someone can clear the whole thing without save-and-reload, that's genuinely impressive.
Yeah, in F there are moments where you basically need Hot-Blood, Grit, or a Critical to pull through, so that's fair.
Outside of that though I don't reload much.
Though I guess some people hate the parry mechanic enough to reload over it.
Come on, F and AP are worlds apart in playability.
Not sure why AP still gets called one of the harder entries in the series.
but Shin Super Robot Wars barely gets discussed at all.
Can't help it — when Shin does come up, it's for its memes, not its gameplay.
but somehow none of that effort translated into actual fun.
Just stack Hot-Blood and Luck, dodge with Sixth Sense, wait for the follow-up window, and fire off the Akashic Buster. That's basically the whole strategy.
Lately more and more people are throwing around the word "unfair" pretty carelessly.
Background and Key Points
Super Robot Wars is Banpresto’s long-running tactical crossover series that lets players pilot mecha from franchises like Gundam, Mazinger, and Getter Robo in the same battles; it began on the original Game Boy in 1991 and has since split into dozens of entries across different developers and difficulty philosophies. F and its sequel, F Final Chapter (Kanketsu-hen), came out in 1997 for Sega Saturn and PlayStation and were made by Winky Soft, a studio whose SRW titles (this one, the “Complete Box” compilation of the 1st–3rd games, Masoukishin) became notorious for punishing, RNG-heavy combat: low hit rates, unskippable battle animations, and counterattacks with agonizing wind-up. Banpresto eventually moved the series to other studios, which is why later, more forgiving entries like Alpha, AP, and MX exist — a shift the thread never states outright but that explains why posters treat “easy and fun” as a different lineage from “Winky-hard.”
The thread doesn’t actually agree that F is bad; it splits on whether the difficulty is legitimate old-school challenge (build up one strong unit via resupply/repair, lean on spirit commands like Hot-Blood or Luck) versus simply “unfair” design — RNG so harsh it forces save-scumming rather than skill. A side debate over whether the series has any “classic” at all, given no title has reportedly sold a million copies, never gets resolved either.
Readers unfamiliar with 90s Japanese SRPGs may assume the lack of a skip button was laziness; it was closer to the technical and design norm of the era, and Winky Soft’s stated reason — not wanting players to skip animations “they worked hard to make” — reflects that mindset directly, even as players called it ego.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Live Anything G) thread “I’m playing this thing called Super Robot Wars F — is it actually a classic?“
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