Not a fan of bosses out of nowhere that don't really relate to the story. Kaiser Ephes was a cool looking mech (Kaneko?) but the whole Apocalypse scenario was stupid and then his bit was pretty pointless to.
The Guneden/Balmer Empire story wasn't that great, but it worked as a plot and was weaved into the game constantly and they did a good job building up Ruach the Spirit Emperor as a wild card and Shiva Gozzo as the main bad of the Alpha series. But then you fight Ruach and then the map continues and Gozzo comes to power at the fruition of his long plan and you beat him right away in a fight and he dies and after hundreds of hours of plot relating to the Balmer the Gozzos and Shiva since Alpha 1 -> Alpha 3, it all ends just like that in a little dinky fight.
Then it's about the APOCALYPSE which the plot hypes up for like the last 20-30 maps of Alpha 3 like it's some BIG OG MYSTERY and THE MOST EPIC ENEMY EVER BECAUSE IT MEANS THE END OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE :O :O :O, and then they really just meant there'd be some meteor showers and the STMC were coming. So you go and beat up the STMC and bam, apocalypse over, just like that. I kind of was expecting all kinds of crazy apocalyptic stuff to fight against...not just STMC (which by the way are the most boring enemies to fight; just totally bloat of lots of them with high HPs and uninteresting attacks. Z3-1 combining STMC w/ELS is going to be totally padding spunges unfortunately ;_
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And then you beat the Apocalypse and the Akashic Record sides with you and this universe wasn't a failure, yay! You're the heros of fate woohooo and so BIG BAD BOSS out of nowhere, the original psycho-driver and basically a dude who just hates the circle of life and likes seeing dead people so he fights Alpha numbers, the heroes of the current reincarnation circle of life system in order to destroy it, absorb the power and make a universe full of just dead people who are pissed off and feed him negative power where he can make his own fate and own universe yadayadayada big dumb demon boss out of nowhere and he's the final boss of the Alpha series and I dunno, maybe because I abused the shit out of Ideon and paired him with 3 characters who had awakening and spammed SP regen on them once he hit Ideon Gun so he could do like 5 hot blooded Ideon Guns for 90k each in one turn, but yeah Kaiser went down fast and then Ideon blew himself up and took him out zzzz.
I think the game really peaked at the Ruach/Shiva fight and the whole apocalypse thing (spamming legions of STMC) and spirit emperor kaiser thing were really meh and a boring way to end a 4 game, 9 year SRW story. Cobray was kind of cool but despite all the stages he felt underdeveloped, as did Shiva Gozzo and Kaiser Ephes and most of the new OG characters. I'm hoping that 3rd OGs really fleshes out all @3 story because there's not a whole lot to the actual story, so maybe 3rd OGs can make it more interesting and make the characters cooler like they did with Euzeth Gozzo in 2nd OGs. Plus hopefully they'll have some good series besides @3 to make the whole plot more interesting.
Also, another problem that I'm hoping to see fixed in 3rd OGs is how weak the attack animations were for the OG units. It's like Crow in Z2 all over again! But at least in Z2 the other OG characters like the King dude and Gaiou had BADASS animations. Banprios looks ok but it's animations are really unimpressive. SRX in 2nd OGs is sooooooooooooo much cooler looking in its attacks. The R-Gun combo attack in 2nd OGs destroying planets and stuff is >>>>>>>>>>> the PULL THE TRIGGER animation in @3. I hope they really flash up Banprios in OGs. Dis Astranagant is the same, with him being a really cool looking unit but his final attack where he just fires a beam and it picks apart the enemy was really dull looking outside the Ingram/Cobray cut-in. I can't wait to see @3 do better justice to Kaneko's design. WIth both Branprios & Dis I kept thinking they weren't that impressive because they were going to get another final attack, but nope, they didn't. Even the final bosses didn't really have any impressive attacks. Kaiser Ephes' final attack has a cool Asakim style image flash but otherwise it's just a sea of red souls hitting your mechs. Zzzz.
But yeah, overall, the OG story in @3 is really present at all times, yet it's not particularly great or interesting and even nosedives and gets pretty weak in the end. I'm actually not looking forward to 3rd OGs as much now unless they really flesh out and make this plot more exciting. Meanwhile the good plots in @3 were paced pretty poorly with epic things like GGG Final being in the first half only, and stuff like End of Eva, Dangaioh Final, Gunbuster really only getting like 1-2 stages since they were done in Alpha 1/Gaiden. While the new shows were weird with SEED actually being pretty underused and forgotten for most of the game, while there's tons of Mac 7 despite nothing really happening. Virtual On Mars' plot...did it have a plot? I don't even remember since I've been playing this game for 3 years and Virtual On haven't had any story presence for the 2nd half of the game.
Also the squad system sucked. 4 unit squads just meant spending too much time fiddling with your squads every few missions and making the maps slow and drawn out because of all the units of enemy squads. 4 unit squads just meant seishin banks for the whole game and helped with making it too easy.
And finally, I don't think I've ever enjoyed the "epilogue" in any SRW game. I like the final stages and the endings within the stages. But the epilogue afterwards in every game where it's 30 mins of each anime series group saying what they're doing now that the world is saved (usually like going to school! Or working a job! Or any other boring thing that they can instantly quit and be available for another SRW) and then a few scenes of everyone saying goodbye! Sayonara! Adios! Aka, it's really just a bunch of talking without any actual content. Because everyone only gets like 10 lines of dialogue (since there are so many series), they can't actually do anything "ending-like" for their characters. It's always just basic where am I going to live starting tomorrow, what am I going to do, bye. I was skimming the characters I don't really like in this one :\ I dunno, I guess I could just do without an epilogue in SRW. Have a great final stage and great ending to the stage and an outro saying the group disbanded and went their own ways ready to gather again for a fight should it come -> credit roll and that'd be perfect.
