SUPER ROBOT TAISEN OG SAGA: ENDLESS FRONTIER

NINTENDO DS

By GARRETT MARTIN

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ATLUS

4.28.09

Boobs are a fact of everyday life. They are in billboards, puffing out of advertisements, and they made MTV what it is today. I'm cool with that. But that doesn't mean I need a video game based almost entirely around them. The makers of Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier might love the female form a little too much, if all those heaving bosoms and carefully rendered posteriors mean anything. The perviness is a legit bummer for a man who plays his games on the train, lodged tightly between total strangers who can't help but shoot a stray glance at the fool messing with a child's toy. It's not nearly as bad as reading Alan Moore's Lost Girls on the T, but it's like the first in a series of steps that head in that general direction. Anyway, the ridiculously exaggerated sexual characteristics distract from what is otherwise a great old-school Japanese role-playing game. SRTOS preserves the best tropes of the pre-Final Fantasy VII RPG: memorable characters, a slowly unfolding story, deep exploration, utter inscrutability and a gradual progress, toward godhead-level power. It then transcends the retro nostalgia flavor with timing-sensitive active combat in lieu of a traditional menu-based system. Mammoth, heaving, canyon-cleavage breasts aside, it's a fine game with which to kill dozens of hours.