Super Robot Wars T

Super Robot Wars T (スーパーロボット大戦T, Sūpā Robotto Taisen T^?) is a Tactical RPG developed by B.B. Studio and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It is the eleventh standalone entry to the Super Robot Wars series and the third installment of the "International Era" series, with the game's continued focus on the massive crossover between different mecha anime series released in Japan. Released for the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, It was released in Asia on March 20, 2019.

Tropes used in Super Robot Wars T include:

Arms Dealer: Both Anaheim Electronics and the Original Generation VTX Corporation are into this. The former is amoral enough to deal with both sides as usual, but the VTX Corporation makes a point of refusing to do this, given their president is proud of his former service in the Earth Federation military and refuses to betray his former superiors in that manner.
Anachronism Stew: Per series tradition, the various UC Gundam plots, and other shows typically crossed over with them get put into a blender. This time, everything proceeds as canon dictates for most EARLY UC events (though they use the NUE calendar and not the UC calendar for year dates), but they get snarled together with a few other events. The One-Year War and the events of Getter Robo and Mazinger Z take place around NUE 189 (with Great Mazinger and by implication UFO Robo Grendizer happening slightly afterward), the Gryps Conflict and Cosmo Babylonia conflicts happen concurrently around NUE 198, and a cease-fire of the FIRST Neo-Zeon War and the conclusion of the Jupiter Conflict occur around NUE 200, and the events of Martian Successor Nadesico have progressed from the TV show to the events of the movie in between NUE 198-200. The game begins as the second half of Gundam ZZ is about to occur, with Char's Counterattack eventually folded in.
Apocalypse How: Humanity is in the middle of a low-grade Class 1 version, in which the economy and technology in a rut but the situation could turn around. Various threats are attempting everything from glassing most of humanity all the way to glassing all of reality, and the job of the heroes is to prevent all of these events while also jump-starting the revival of humanity out of the Class 1 event the game starts with.
- The expansion pack raises the stakes a bit higher, the villains of that want to bring several universes down with an attempt at a Class X-5 event if their plans reach their logical conclusion. A more localized version that will affect at least three interconnected dimensions occurs during the main game.
Badass Army: A plot point on BOTH sides of the main campaign.
- The good guys are turned into one (the default name is the T3, short for Treading on the Tiger's Tail) to combat the enemies of humanity that are keeping it from leaving it's current dark age.
- The original villains take note of the good guy version of this trope and basically want to create a counterpart for their own reasons, and the fact they want to draft humanity as a whole to fill its ranks does not sit well with the good guy army, and resolving this one way or another is pivotal to the final arcs of the main campaign.
- The Big Bad, who turns out to be Dyma Goldwin, one of the founding sponsors of the T3 in turn took notes from both the good and bad guy versions of this and wanted to build his own based on the best elements of both. Given what he wants is basically just as bad as the UND's goals, the good guys tell him to shove his plans where the sun doesn't shine.
Beach Episode: One DLC features a bunch of the ladies on the same island as that Gun X Sword episode where they had their own beach episode, and various hijinks, including morons trying to creep on the ladies and things going full mecha battle on the beach ensue.
Bigger Bad: Debonair turns out to have been behind a LOT of threats from all corners of the story, including the Invaders, STMC, and was working with Shot Weapon to make the situation in Cephiro even worse than in the source. They even play a key role in the expansion pack where it's revealed Debonair teamed up with Nevalinna and Ende, having used their lingering hatred to survive her original death and reviving them from the dead in turn, which set the whole expansion plot in motion.
- Dyma Goldwin, turns out to be this for the final arc of the main campaign, with Ame Presbund preceding him.
Break Out the Museum Piece: Done literally in some cases by both heroes and villains, and it's a testament to both sides that the museum pieces can hold their own with top quality current-generation tech and in some cases even puts it to shame.
The Cameo: One level has a tile that, if moved over by Mazinger at one point, has who is apparently Go Nagai in all but name hand Kouji an upgrade part.
Colony Drop: Like Super Robot Wars A, one is featured prominently very early in the story. While the worst of it is averted, it has major implications down the line thanks to the inclusion of Magic Knight Rayearth. Said colony drop scares the people of Earth so bad due to the very near miss it provides the monsters that later invade from Cephiro power due to feeding off their fears and also helps Debonair appear later on.
- Since Char's Counterattack shows up, Axis gets an attempted drop, but CHAR is notably not involved. The Claw hijacks Axis with the Dark Gundam, intending to drop Axis for their own reasons.
Compressed Adaptation: Magic Knight Rayearth is not a very mecha-centric series on its own, so they had to compress the non-mecha-related parts down to three stages while still finding excuses for you to fight them (filled in by the Byston Well cast who allied with Zagato). This also resulted in Eagle Vision showing up during the events of Season 1 of MKR's story, the attack upgrades of the Magic Knights got tweaked into being given out for various plot reasons to their mecha, and Lantis gets their own Original Generation Mashin.
- Cowboy Bebop is another series adapted that they had to work around its non-mecha focus by altering portions of its plot to be refocused in a mecha crossover-friendly sense while still adhering to all the notable plot points. They managed to do this by adapting various Bebop episode events to SRW-based equivalents and gave Vicious and the Red Dragon Mafia a peripheral but vital connection to the main plot to justify their inclusion to preserve the main plot progression of the Bebop overarching plot.
  - A DLC reveals Hoi Kow Lou from Might Gaine got on the Red Dragon's bad side even though he's no longer a member, with the implication that he backstabbed them a while back and they were not happy about it when they finally tracked him down. Other DLC flesh out a few other plot threads not possible to insert into the main story.
- Captain Harlock got some more modest changes based on the Arcadia SSX 1982 anime plot, albeit with a lot of elements compressed to their essentials and reconfigured to all take place in the Sol Solar System. They still reference how Harlock has traveled past that point in the past to explain things like how La Mime is part of his crew and managed to incorporate aspects of the Vichy Earth and his rivalry with Fader Zone in a modified form as well.
- Real life wrote the plot and forced the creators to delete the Excelion and its captain from the story since his voice actor passed before the game was released, which resulted in a modified Gunbuster adaptation. Most of the major events still occur, albeit in a slightly abbreviated form, deleting most of the first half's regular-sized mecha (save for a brief cutscene) and skipping straight to the Sizzler and the titular machine itself.
Degraded Boss: Black Noir has a pitiful role in this game. Having already been defeated in the backstory, they show up in one level only to be killed off again and are far less deadly than in SRW V and X. Justified since they basically were teleported through time before they truly died originally and thus were already weaker as a result, despite The Power giving them a slight boost.
- The Dark/Devil Gundam plays second fiddle to the Gun X Sword villains, but this is deliberate, as the original was destroyed and the villains were only able to create newer yet weaker copies because Rain had a remnant of the original left inside her body from the original story.
Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Specifically, you get to punch out Wiseman, Black Noir, The Z-Master, the STMC, the Invaders, Infinity, Debonair, System Nevalinna, and Ende.
Dub Name Change: While the English versions of SRW V and X were translated fairly literally from the Japanese sources, this game opts to use American dub names for any series that got an American showing in the English translation. This, unfortunately, obscures a plot connection intended for Magic Knight Rayearth and Mazinger: Infinity to a degree.
Equal Opportunity Evil: The UND is pretty egalitarian, being willing to hire and pay anyone who is competent at waging war.
Expansion Pack: In a first for the series, the expansion pack is not a game unto itself, but a story that takes place after the main campaign that follows up on the secret levels where the SRW V and X cast debuted. On top of being much harder that the regular game, it also fleshes out some dangling plot threads teased in the main campaign, and serves as a way to resolve certain things like the ambiguous ending of Cowboy Bebop the main game leaves vague.
Everyone Went to School Together: Or rather, served together at one point or another. The UC Gundam, Getter, and Mazinger casts explicitly served together in the backstory. Captains Bright Noah and Harlock both were regular Federation officers who knew each other at one point, and the Original Generation characters Ame Presbund and Dyma Goldwin both served in the Federation as well, and said early service plays a role later in the plot. In fact, it even jump-starts it, as Dyma's VTX corporation is trying to get a unit mass-produced for use by the Federation military as their mainstay unit, as Dyma is someone they have more faith in as a former soldier than the more amoral Anaheim Electronics. Said testing of the candidates is what gets the plot off the ground.
Let's You and Him Fight: The Company/UND are fond of this. Also, a lot of Gundam Fights get kicked off by this.
- One DLC, like SRW V and X before it, has all the ladies able to go head to head over who is the best woman which eventually derails into them all having to fight some party crashers.
Humans Are Warriors: Not only is this part of why the game plot exists, as this tendency has led to a lot of the conflicts in the backstory, it's also why the UND show up, they want to exploit this trope for all it's worth.
One Nation Under Copyright: The UND is an odd cross of this with a military. They have control over entire planets and they function with all the equivalent powers of galactic government, but they also double as a brand name and run their operations like an actual corporation with a military background. Their primary business is being an intergalactic private army for hire that also will expand its own markets for mercenaries on its own hook to remain in the black in terms of having a business. The main conflict of the game story is based on them seeing Earth's people as prime mercenary recruits.
Pragmatic Adaptation: While they still left a few parts of the Gun X Sword plot on the cutting room floor, they did a more faithful take on it than was done in Super Robot Wars K, to the point of being an Author's Saving Throw version. While still moving the events of that to the Terran solar system as K did, they moved most of the events to Mars to avoid issues K had with placing it on Earth, and they still managed to work in the "takes place in another galaxy" trope the story worked with due to some creative connection to Armored Trooper VOTOMS, specifically The Claw is from the Astrageius system, managed to find Earth via a wormhole that connected the Terran and Astrageian systems, and those from that system who discovered Earth prior called it the Endless Illusion, which preserves the original story while moving it to the Sol system with few issues. They also used Martian Successor Nadesico to good effect to smooth over any remaining issues like how Mars had so much advanced tech and mecha running around.
- Since so much of the story is tied to the characters, and the lack of many of them actually hurt the story presented in SRW K, they found ways to work in characters like Joe Lutz (whose absence in K created a Plot Hole) by modifying what story scenes they did include to logically reinsert them where the plot needed them.
- Char's Counterattack eventually shows up, following after post-Zeta anime canon but following the novel depictions otherwise. While this means Beltchorka Irma takes Chan Agi's place, and the Hi-Nu Gundam is eventually introduced into the story alongside the Nightingale (as well as their movie counterparts), the story otherwise proceeds as if the anime events were canon, including most of the events of Char's Counterattack, though to maintain consistency and pacing with leading Gundam ZZ into CC, a few events are switched around, with Gyunei being the one to goad Amuro back into battle, not Char. Kamille also has a story role and the game presumes the Zeta TV series events are canon.
Reality Ensues: Much like in Super Robot Wars Z, there is understandable friction between the more button-down military cast and the more independent-minded lone wolves and mercenaries from the various series represented. The good guys work around these difficulties by having Harlock take on their less formal team members while the more military cast handles other things. This fades away by the midpoint of the game, where circumstances make them realize they are more effective working together despite any personal issues they might have with the arrangement.
- Played for Laughs in a DLC where the Gunbuster and Magic Knight Rayearth cast get made Super-Deformed temporarily, just like in their source canons. It's cute and all, but they find piloting their mecha is a lot harder when they get shrunk down into smaller, cuter versions of themselves. Thankfully, it wears off in time before things get too bad.
Schizo-Tech: Discussed. Your team is a hodge-podge of the latest current tech and some things that would be in museums, but even the museum pieces can hold their own due to the regression in the Sol Solar System's technological prowess leaving them just as good if not superior to some of the latest tech available.
Inner Dialogue: Since Fader Zone and Amuro share a voice actor, this is inevitable.
The Bus Came Back: Much like Super Robot Wars V brought back the Huckbein and Grungust, and Super Robot Wars X brought back the more classic version of the Cybuster, this game brings back the original black Gespenst, which can be made available for use on the team early on via DLC. Otherwise, it joins much later.
Twenty Minutes Into the Future: The game reconciles the Schizo-Tech and, in a rarity for SRW games that usually play a bit vague with the exact year or use a fictional calendar, even allows the player to nail down fairly precisely when the story takes place. Due to using the backstory of Aura Battler Dunbine, whose mass world devastation and destruction of Tokyo Tower is explicitly mentioned, combined with an exact amount of years given due to Maito Senpuji who explains he helped rebuild Tokyo Tower in Nouvelle Tokyo and gives an exact amount of years since the original version was destroyed, this allows the player to figure out the plot takes place around 2650 AD, give or take a few dozen years. This also allows Magic Knight Rayearth to take place since the teleporting of the main characters to Cephiro takes place at Tokyo Tower in the present day. As for the actual tech disparity, that is explained as to how humanity barely was getting out of the regression of tech they were in about twenty years prior to the present day, but by the start of the game, several events kicked humanity back into a stagnant technological rut.
Villain Team-Up: Several.
- The villains of Rayearth and Dunbine work together pretty closely, though Zagato isn't really a villain and both sides were well aware the alliance was one of the mutual interests in the first half of the game. The leaders and their motives change in the second half, but the alliance still holds.
- Per usual, the Claw hardly works well with anyone, and even his alliance with Master Asia is quite shaky as Master Asia had every intention of subverting his plans and was playing the long game to do so.
- The Company and later the UND team up with every faction they can feasibly make a deal with at one point or another, but this always tends to be either due to shared interests or due to being contracted out, per their mercenary army ethics.
- The Expelled From Paradise and Armored Trooper VOTOMS villains are revealed to have a connection. Wiseman made possible their own internal conspiracy when they drifted through the wormhole in the backstory and wound up in the Astrageius System, and they in return tried to serve as a proxy for Wiseman's revenge against Chirico Cuvie to return the favor.
- The various Neo Zeon warring factions, depending on route choices, agree to put aside their differences and face your team as a united front, resulting in both potentially Haman's Neo-Zeon and Char's Neo Zeon (and their respective Gundam ZZ and Char's Counterattack forces) fusing into one.