Brave Police J-Decker has made its debut appearance in Super Robot Wars, joining its fellow Brave franchise series King of Braves Gaogaigar. However, J-Decker effectively replaces in Super Robot Wars 30 a huge portion of the Gaogaigar cast of characters—specifically the Brave Robots introduced in the novel sequel King of Kings: Gaogaigar vs. Betterman—and in doing so merges their two plotlines together in a way that defies SRW precedent. It’s something I can appreciate, but I also feel that it comes at the expense of the “everything and the kitchen sink” approach the game franchise is famous for.

While J-Decker precedes Gaogaigar in terms of their air dates (1994 vs. 1997), Super Robot Wars 30 flips things around. The story specifically has the events of the latter take place first, and makes the Brave Police the first Brave Robots since the events of Gaogaigar Final. I find this to be a pretty clever way to tie the two plots together, especially in order to reconcile having an adult Mamoru (the kid character in Gaogaigar) with a young Yuuta from J-Decker. 

However, the idea that the Brave Police are the latest generation of units doesn’t square with what takes place in the Gaogaigar vs. Betterman novels where a new Brave Robot Corps is formed with the likes of NichiRyu, GetsuRyu, ShoRyu, and Porc-Auto. Those robots aren’t even included in Super Robot Wars 30, meaning that their role in the story has been supplanted by the robots of J-Decker. This is highly unusual, if only because SRW games are often about “more is better.” While the franchise over the past decade-and-change has been trying to streamline a lot of the bloat inherent to it (so no excessively redundant attacks, for example), it’s rare to have them omit entire groups of potentially playable units that are an important factor in the source material.

I suspect that there are a number of extenuating circumstances that resulted in this compromise. It wasn’t that long after the conclusion of Gaogaigar vs. Betterman that SRW30 was announced. There are elements of the story, regardless of the mecha, that are skipped over. In addition, most of the new robots introduced in the novels don’t already have voice actors, so it’s not like calling up Hiyama Nobuyuki and telling him to reprise his role as Guy. While there have been cases of SRW assigning voices where there weren’t any before (see the Virtual On units in Alpha 3), that was also over 15 years ago. 

Incidentally, that’s also a case where only a handful of reps are included (as opposed to every Virtuaroid).

So while having Gaogaigar vs. Betterman is one of my favorite parts of SRW30, the changes made mean we still don’t have the might of the full cast of characters from it. Maybe we’ll see it happen in the future. 

And maybe what could make it easier is having an actual anime version…