Super Robot Wars Y will be the series' first console entry to use Unity engine

Bandai Namco held a demo session for Super Robot Wars Y for numerous Japanese news outlets. This session also included a joint interview session with the game's producer Kota Toma. The interview newly revealed many aspects about the upcoming game, with the biggest one being the reveal of Unity as the new engine applied for SRW Y, for the first time in the series' console game history.

Before we go in-depth with that, this interview also covered Kota Toma's background. While he had also appeared in prior SRW live streams to promote the SRW: V Crusade and OG Crusade card games, he was still part of Bandai Spirits' hobby division back then. But as he has a strong desire to make a new SRW, he got into a transfer to the SRW game team and was eventually appointed as SRW Y's producer.

Going back to the game engine, this interview revealed that following the conclusion of the first SRW sub-series with Super Robot Wars F in 1997-1998, the series' dev team made a new game engine for the 2000 PS1 release of Super Robot Wars Alpha. It turned out that the team continued using the same engine with several gradual improvements up until the release of Super Robot Wars 30 in 2021.

This is not the very first time the SRW team has used Unity, though. They have also been using the engine for Super Robot Wars DD, the mobile game that launched in 2019 and is still ongoing as of this writing.

Out of the Japanese outlets invited to the demo session, Dengeki Online has the full interview notes. We have translated the interview's key segment about the game engine as follows:

Q: You have reformed the game engine, but what kind of intentions did you have here?

Toma: The biggest reason is because we want to continue releasing the Super Robot Wars series even in the future. On the other hand, I do think that the core gameplay elements in general are interesting, so we have decided not to make huge changes there.

If I could speak in a bit more detail, actually up until SRW 30, we continued using the game engine made for the SRW Alpha series while improving it. But there is a focus strain on some of the engineers (programmers), and we worry the time will eventually come for a fatal bug to appear... That's why in order to continue the series' development, we have decided to move on to the generic engine Unity.

Q: Did you have any hardships when moving to the new game engine?

Toma: The team had really been creating games with the unique engine for around 20 years since the SRW Alpha series, so at the early phases of development they were struggling with the learning parts, such as understanding Unity's specifications.

On the contrary, by switching to a new game engine, there is also a necessity to re-adjust the detailed aspects of SRW, so I feel like that was also a hectic point.

Q: Were there also talks about changing the game engine in the past?

Toma: From what I could grasp, there wasn't any. It was changed once during the SRW Alpha era, and since then they did not do a major engine overhaul. This structure causes a lot of burden focused towards specific engineers, so we would properly address that with this opportunity.

Q: Please tell us about the series' future prospect.

Toma: If I could speak honestly, in the past there may have been a period where a new SRW game was released on a yearly cycle. But there has been a change in the environment surrounding the gaming industry between then and now, so even after we have finished moving to the new engine, I think it will still be difficult to once again maintain the pace of releasing a game each year.

On the other side, we also understand well that all the fans are waiting for it, so the wish to do our best to deliver them as soon as possible is shared with the entire dev team.

I think we have constructed an organization that lets us continue the SRW series even in the future, so while we are also listening to the customers' opinions, I would also like to continue thinking what's the best way to expand the game engine.

In this interview, Kota Toma also addressed the concerns about the Tactical Area Selection feature returning from SRW 30. While this feature lets players prioritize their favorite titles, the high degree of freedom ended up making the overall scenario more difficult to grasp. The team will therefore make the following adjustments to SRW Y: Chapter 1 will be focused on introducing the game's world. Early parts like Chapter 2 will have a similar high degree of freedom choice like SRW 30, but later parts of the story will have a more similar feel of focused scenario like the earlier entries.

In addition, Bandai Namco has also since updated SRW Y's Japanese official website with a Q&A page that divulges more details about the game. There will be 6 new Spirit Commands to complement the 35 existing ones, with some of them being reassigned to Sympathies as they will be linked with the Assist Link feature. There will also be several assist crew members who can only join after fulfilling secret requirements. And this page also confirms what has now become pretty much a staple feature in the series: Support for custom MP3 music files on the PS5 and PC versions, but not on the Switch version.

Super Robot Wars Y will be available worldwide for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam on August 28.