Hello, readers! This Index is here for SRWs I have conceived, spent time with, and considered "decent bases" in the past, but which, for various reasons, I don't have time to continue or do not actually ever intend on working on. This is a repository for only the best of ideas, as bad ones or ones that I dislike immensely... like, say, every SRW I tried to work on before 2014 that isn't the prototype of FIRST - get thrown out the back of the truck, never to be mentioned in any official medium again (But to be held back in case I get ideas later to fix them).

To preface this, however, I'm going to start with something rather different - a SRW making guide, for all the people of the internet to enjoy, which will help you make a SRW cast list that stands firm.

First things first: Your dream cast list is bad.

Yes, get over it. This is something you NEED to understand, if you are to get better. If you just stick all your favorite series into one game all pell-mell, the ensuing cast list is going to look absolutely terrible. Here's an example of a cast list I would make if I took leave of my senses and just stuck series I like - or even just series that look cool - and one or two accompanying movies/OVAs together.

~Gaiking: Legends of Daiku Maryu

~Whirlwind! Iron Leaguer

~Whirlwind! Iron Leaguer: Under The Banner of Silver Castle (New to SRW)

~Combat Mecha Xabungle

~Fang of the Sun Dougram (New to SRW)

~Mobile Suit Gundam

~Mobile Suit Gundam: Blue Destiny (New to SRW)

~Mobile Suit Gundam: IGLOO (New to SRW)

~Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt (New to SRW)

~Mobile Suit Gundam 00

~SD Gundam Sangokuden: Brave Battle Warriors

~BB Senshi Sangokuden (New to SRW)

~Tetsujin 28 (2004) (New to SRW)

~Tetsujin 28: The Midday Moon (New to SRW)

~Terrestrial Defense Corporation Dai-Guard

~Psycho Armor Govarian (New to SRW)

~Shin Getter Robo vs Neo Getter Robo

~Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventures! (New to SRW)

~Fafner: Right of Left (New to SRW)

~Fafner in the Azure

~Fafner: Heaven and Earth

~Fafner Exodus (New to SRW)

~Star Driver: Takuto The Radiance

~Star Driver THE MOVIE (New to SRW)

~The Brave of Gold Goldran (New to SRW)

~Strongest Robo Daiohja

~Meteor Machine Gakusaver (New to SRW)

~Beautiful Young Girls Machine Z-Mind (New to SRW)

And if I look at that cast list, I see... an absolute mess! A bit of deep space, a bit of other-planet work, a bit of post apoc, a bit of "the apocalypse happened ages ago", some series where robots are all new things, some series where robots have been around for the longest time, a couple of sequels that happen years apart from each other on the same cast list as shows that happen in a really small timeframe, and of course the festering sore where some robots on this list aren't even made for combat. Perhaps worse than all of that, though, are the series that I have no way of actually viewing - Daiohja and Govarian look cool and I love their concepts, but since I don't understand Japanese, how am I to understand them? Similarly, I've never gone through any of the side things for the original Gundam. And BB Senshi is probably going to take ages of wiki hunting and the horrible barrier of Google Translate to get much info on.

But perhaps the big thing here, the noticeable thing that gets me - the size. That's over 25 series, and while one or two probably won't have plot, quite a number will. Cast size is one thing I never see people pay much attention to, but it always gets me that people pen up these 30+ series behemoths, somehow not realizing that 30 plus series worth of characters and plot will inherently need done. This is a large number, and it's larger than you might expect.

But let's go over these flaws in order.

Having a bunch of settings means having a bunch of things that don't work together.

Now, in making a SRW, it is almost certain that some setting details won't work. You want to write a SRW with Dancouga, that's great, but you probably won't do the "Earth is totally taken over by aliens" bit - I mean, SRW only did that one time with Dancouga. Any Macross after SDF is probably going to ignore having 20+ years of space development, deep space combat, intense focus on the Valkyrie to the point where every other mech is pointless since they do basically anything better. You might have a series or two early in mech development clashing with others far later. That's going to happen, it's inevitable, and part of the clash in making a good crossover is figuring out how to work around that, and which bits of which settings are going to get pushed to the side (or pushed away completely) to make it work as a cohesive whole.

Your first impulse might be to just throw things in from another universe. This is, after all, Banpresto's all time winning move, and has been used to great prevail in past SRWs - you're going to quote things like the Zs, I know it, but let's ignore those and remember how D handled Megazone, or how MX handled Machine Robo, or how Compact 3 handled New Dunbine. All of those games are significantly far into SRWs past... and they had "just drop one universe's cast into the plot with no setting details really". And it clearly works out well!

...for Banpresto.

The thing is, Banpresto isn't making games the same way you're making fanfiction (or fangames, even, but we'll get to THAT). A long time ago, Banpresto's way of making SRW was, essentially, "Ignore like 75% of the settings, we have one generic plotline and maybe two enemy groups and all the casts fit into that." (Said enemy groups including the Divine Crusaders, the Neo Divine Crusaders, the Guests, the Guest/Poseidal Alliance, Muge Zolbados's Empire, Balmar on a few occasions, A and R's enemy factions that were all working together for no real reason, the Meganoid/Muge Zolbados alliance, the various major UC Gundam alliances, the Vegan Empire in D, GC's three big enemy alliances...) And that worked for game purposes, but was kind of dumb plotwise, so don't do stupid things like that unless it somehow actually fits your setting for every single enemy to want to work together.

But that changed in more recent years. Over time, Banpresto's included more varied series, and their plots started being actual good crossover plots. But including a bunch of varied series means they have to pay more people, and soon there became an issue of "we can't spend a lot for a license to a series and then not include it, the money is too much. We need to take what we can get." On top of that, as animation got trickier, the reuse of assets that has been in this franchise since SRW 2 has gotten a lot bigger of a deal. That's what happens to their cast lists now, they're more about using things the can get ahold of easily and have animations/models for.

And this is where you differ. As a fan who isn't turning a profit on anything, you don't release an official product, and nor do you pay any costs to make anything. Thus, your cast list can include whatever you want, and you can afford to make it all fit into a single theme. Because of this, nothing should be out of place, and since nothing is out of place, you don't need to resort to lazy "and then X came from another universe and this was barely used at all afterwards" storytelling.

Though, I should point out, there's exceptions to be made when your cast list already includes stuff like that. It wouldn't be right for Raijin-Oh to omit beings from other universes, for instance, or Dancouga, or Cross Ange, or Gakusaver, or Might Gaine for example. But these are big plot elements, and should be treated as such. Z1 has people from all sorts of universes, but that's a major part of its plot - the various settings were forced together despite not quite fitting, and you're trying to make the new world better. (And even then it had issues - Aquarion's world was never visited before Break The World, for instance.)

Since you can't just throw every setting in from other universes, you're stuck making your various settings work. This will make or break your SRW depending on how well you handle it. If the various settings don't work, you'll have to take bits of each series out, and if you take too much of a series out, anyone who's a fan of that series is going to be annoyed. This is the issue that some shows (a huge example is Braiger, which has been in 3 games and has been properly represented in 0) have a lot of in SRW, but a bunch of other series have gotten things shoved to the side - in fact, I think every single show that has gotten in SRW has gotten important details pushed to the side for reasons of plot. That's going to happen. But you're trying to include various series in SRW, not things that are vaguely resembling various series, so you need to keep setting details around or it won't work. The key is striking a good balance, which is of course far more difficult than it sounds.

Oh, and if you can't fit a series into your plot, or if you realize your game's plot is moving to places that make a series not work, don't try to keep said series in anyway. It will stick out like a sore. On the other hand, if your cast list is looking a little small, but a series fits in really well, put it in! And then integrate it properly of course, don't just shove new series in like children shove pegs into holes they shouldn't go in.

(I'm adding this bit in as an edit, because it bears mentioning. There exists a fanfic - that is only the prologue - with SEVENTY FOUR SEPARATE SERIES on its cast list. I can in absolutely no way fathom what sort of insanity the author had to undergo to reach that total. AND THEY'RE STILL TRYING TO FIT MORE IN! I... I just can't take this silliness. Never, ever, do that.)

Timeskips, and why you should handle them like guns.

Sequels are things that are going to get in SRW all the time. They're inevitable. Why, even looking at the next upcoming release - as of this writing it's V - I can see that we have Zeta, its sequel (ZZ Gundam), their sequel, Char's Counterattack, the sequel to that, Hathaway's Flash, another sequel, Unicorn Gundam, and of course Crossbone Gundam which is a sequel to all of them. (And its two sequels.) And then we have all three Rebuild movies released as of its announcement, the full FMP timeline... we've got sequels to spare. And most of the time, when you include sequels, you have to worry about the time that comes between one work and the next. Sometimes you don't (Zeta and ZZ happen right after each other), but if you're talking about, say, the various Fafner works, Right of Left is months before the series, Heaven and Earth is years later, and Exodus is years after that. So including all of them in one game is impossible unless you either change the timeline on everything - which may be very problematic - include unnecessary time travel, which is ALWAYS problematic, or if you make a time skip! Indeed, time skips seem like the simple and elegant way to handle things like that.

They're not. They're a trap. A big trap.

This is a bit more a problem with video games than with just fanfiction, as with fanfiction you don't need to have portraits and voice changes and things that aren't in the original show made up wholecloth. But even in those, just including a year or two long timeskip might change the flow of everything dramatically.

For instance, let's say I have Fafner, Heaven And Earth... and then we'll say shows like Ga Keen, Ginguiser, and other silly 70s shows. Fafner ends, and HaE is two years later, so that's a two year time skip... so, since the other shows started beforehand and ended afterwards, you mean Earth was at war with aliens and underground empires and itself for TWO YEARS offscreen? What happened to the characters? Did anyone die? That's a problem if your cast contains elderly people, like if, say, Zambot 3 or something was on the cast list. Were they forced to fight for years with no end in sight? Have major plot points happened? Two whole fucking years have happened, you can't just brush that under a carpet! UX shortened that exact time skip to six months and there are still weird issues (Anticross and Katou are just kind of still in the same position they were beforehand, Al Azif was missing for all six damn months, Joey didn't age a day despite being really young... Arnie's one of the few things that changed.)

But it gets worse when you put things like Gurren Lagann, Gunbuster, Change! Getter Robo!, or, god forbid you try, Gundam AGE on the cast list and seriously want to have all facets of it. Or if you want to run all of UC chronologically. Or if you have SDF Macross and any Macross work after Plus (which still has horrible issues, but compared to the later ones it's small potatoes). Ten plus years should be a HUGE effect on literally the entire cast. But if only some of the cast has changed, and the rest are still fairly the same... well, you're going to have problems.

So watch out the minute large gaps of time start happening. Anything past six months is suspect. And watch out before trying to skip past timeskips by having things at various points in the timeline happen together, like how they used to do UC Gundam - it's difficult to do right, and it will usually look silly (see also Neo Zeon and Zeon existing at the same time in Alpha 1. And Zanscare, and the Cosmo Babylonia, and the Titans.).

Oh, and since it's not enough for its own column, be similarly careful of any show or OVA that has its entire plot resolved in a matter of days at most. Things like Tales of Neo Byston Well, Wings of Rean, like half of the VOTOMs OVAs, Giant Gorg, and all three of Megazone 23's parts. (In fact, throw in most OVAs here.) You will need a very good reason to stop their plot to go back to other things, or you'll handle an entire series in like two or three consecutive stages - while that's somewhat allowable for sequels (Mazinkaiser vs Ankoku Daishogun and Dancouga: Requiem For The Lost, for instance, will likely just be effective final battles for their series), for full plot series, it doesn't work.

ALWAYS EXPERIENCE EVERY SERIES YOU PUT IN.

NEVER EVER RELY ON SECOND HAND INFORMATION TO A SERIES YOU'RE INCLUDING.

THIS INCLUDES OTHER SRW GAMES OR FAN WORKS.

You know all that stuff about how important it is to make your settings work? How important it is to make each series stand out? Well, the only way you can know how everything works is by actually knowing the setting. Which means you have to watch the shows, or read the manga, or play the games.

"oh but maaaaatt, this series works perfectly for my setting, I know because I read it on Wikipedia/tvtropes/it was in a SRW game"

NO. That is not a good enough reason. It is impossible to understand everything about a story just by reading summaries of the story, because they can and will miss important things that will come in handy. This is ESPECIALLY true for any MotW show, because a good thing to do with those is to include episode plots, and summaries of episode plots of most shows are typically rare things indeed. Older ones too.

Fortunately, there is an out for this one. You need to have watched a show before you do most of the plot, but when you're just planning everything, it's not always required. If I seriously got it in my head to make a post-apocalyptic SRW, and it was supposed to be an apocalypse that happened thousands of years ago, then throwing Turn A Gundam in is a no brainer, even if I haven't yet watched it. But then I would have to watch it to ensure it works well in my fan product, or else I'd get setting details, the character traits, and other such things wrong.

If you are attempting to include a series that you are unable to understand, because you don't speak the language it's from and it doesn't have subs or at least a dub in your language (relying on dubs is a bad idea, but it CAN work, especially if it's a European dub for a 70s/80s Super Robot show since those are apparently quite accurate), then do not include it. You're going to make anyone who likes that series annoyed as you get everything about it wrong, because you may as well not be using that series at that point - you're just using an original series that looks like it.

This should really be common sense - I mean, it's experiencing a product before you do things with it - but I've seen an unnerving number of people who DON'T watch their works before throwing it all in. And even if you don't intend to use the setting and just want characters, yes, you still need to watch the series - for the characters you intend on using, or a good look at the robots in action.

As an aside, for video game series, it's really best if you play and understand them yourself, as opposed to, say... watching an LP or somesuch. I'm not saying you can't do that, but it tends to be a bad idea.

Don't build big things, build small things and work to big things.

Let's run some math, ok? I have 30 series. Some of these series will only provide one robot with one form, perhaps, but others might provide 10 units or more. Most of them will provide 3 or 4 though, so on average, we'll go with 5. 30 series with 5 units means that if I were writing a fanfic, I'd need to keep track of 120 units every time, and if I were making a fangame, that's 120 units I need to balance, make sprites for, possibly make animations for - since some people only care about those - and everything else. Do you think you can keep track of 120 units at any given point? If you answered "yes", good for you, you're wrong. This is literally Z3's problem, they had to basically wholecraft a lot of units animations, and so most of them inevitably looked like crap (and when they didn't do it right, it looked bad too - Boost Nova Knuckle, looking at you.), but it applies to a lot of other works.

On top of that, if you're making a game, how many units will the ENEMIES have? Quite a few, I imagine. Probably at least 8 unique ones, if you give them decent due. You have to work on those too.

But it goes beyond how many robots and monsters there are - how many CHARACTERS do you think 30 series would contain, if you gave each setting their due? 500? 600? More, maybe? There's quite a lot there, after all. Can you write 600 characters, keeping them fairly consistent to the setting? Hell, can you even keep 20 consistent to their original setting? Do all of these characters get their due, as well? You'll probably have 150 or so people roving around on your battleships by the endgame at the very least, will you focus on one or two or will all of them get focus? And if they do that, then how?

Giant series lists are a trap. They look enticing, but the bigger they are, the harder it is to keep everything stable on them. And if you handle everything poorly, people are going to notice. Look at Z3 - it handled things poorly, people noticed, and despite it having all sorts of series and things people love, it's become an extraordinarily hated game.

So, you want it to be big? You want it to be extravagant? Then you can still do that, of course. But do it in 20 series or less. Trust me, even if you have a dinky cast list with 14 or so important series, you can still make it very big, just by choosing your series right. After all, some series come with big casts, and lots of opportunities for allies to join up.

(As an aside, a great thing to do is to look for series that SRW has had in the past, but either rarely uses the plot for - like Toei Mazinger Z or Getter Robo - or only uses certain bits of its plot for - like G Gundam and Braiger - and go crazy with them. One man's refuse might give you 10 full units and a truckload of "scenarios" worth of plot.)

Some of these can be partly ignored, IF the cast list works with it.

Remember how I said time skips potentially bring large issues into play? If every one of your series is built around the idea that at some point, a major time skip of a certain amount of time is going to happen, then it's fine. Remember how I said large cast lists were bad? They certainly are, but if you have a lot of individual movies or OVAs or bits of side things - like, say, including Tales of Neo Byston Well purely to provide your Dunbine work with Sirbine - then that can make your cast list very big without changing the number of core parts or scenarios that need work on that much. I brought up in the "things from alternate universes" section that some series make that an inevitability, so that's a thing, but do watch out that you handle it properly in that case.

That said, if you're going to do something that would normally be a bad idea, take a moment or two to think about whether or not it is actually worth doing this thing. Don't just blindly rush in and do it. That's a bad idea.

Don't make your fan work an extended character/setting bash.

That setting has FANS. It doesn't matter if it's the shittiest work to have ever been made, you will certainly find people who liked Tobikage whatever the setting is. Some "this thing is silly" is allowable, sure - people getting frustrated at the Geass cast ditching Zero when he definably didn't do all that much actual wrongdoing to them, for instance - but constantly shitting on a setting is wrong. If you're going to do that, don't even include the setting in the first place, you clearly aren't giving it any respect.

This should be extraordinarily obvious, but there exists a SRW fanfiction right now which is literally 50% a setting bash, and most of it not a horribly accurate one either. So clearly it's been lost to some people. (Of course, even if the author were to read this, I doubt they'd make the connection.)

The more you attempt to make your story AWESOME!, the less actually awesome it is.

(or "one man's AMAZING is another man's Chuuni.")

SRW is a franchise in which a bunch of various robots get together to punch other robots and giant beasts and similar insane things. It has characters from all sorts of settings interact with each other, heroes working together to fight villains, lives being saved, settings being made happier (usually), and is altogether a fun, great environment. But you will find that some people don't enjoy that sort of thing, and will find the idea of the series stupid. Most of those people find the concept inherently dumb, trying too hard to be great, or whatever, and from their point of view, it is. This is because all people view the world through the prism of their experiences and knowledge. (That's also the central bit to literally every UNDERSTANDING series so if you somehow don't get those, there you go.)

Fair enough. You're not designing your work for them. Entertainment does not need to be entertaining for everyone everywhere. But it is important to learn from the fact that these people exist, because it segues into the bulk of this point.

A lot of people who actually take the time to write extensive amounts of SRW fanfiction seem to believe that it doesn't really need to make sense, as everything can run on how AWESOME the stuff going on is! Bigger upgrades! Bigger fights! Constant big moments! Everything is as big as it can be!

This is dumb. Don't do it.

I'm not saying, however, that big, flashy events are an altogether bad thing. That's false. I want to see the big moments from whatever series are in the work, and I want to see them get their big break. That's great, and I love it. But the minute you start trying to make your entire work about how many AWESOME things are going on is also the minute you start forgetting important things, like not making basic writing flaws, and not screwing up all of your settings horribly.

Big, flashy things might be fun for the readers - or game players, or what have you - at the time they first experience it, but you can be absolutely ascertained that people are going to come around who aren't so impressed by your big, flashy things, and are going to focus on the fact that flash typically implies lack of substance. And eventually, your big, flashy moment wears off, and people will forget about it. Contrawise, some people may not be won over by a more utilitarian work, but if it's solidly built and everything works together, people are going to remember it.

Remember, SRWs that try to be big and flashy but fail become big and flashy failures - there's a reason K is so disliked - but if you make something fairly solid but not flashy, you'll at least succeed as a cult hit like GC. Of course, there's also OE, which is neither flashy nor good, but that's entirely a different issue altogether.

As the antithesis of the Don't Bash Things bit, don't wank them either.

No, this setting is not inherently superior to all the others, and no, its characters are not godly heroes who everyone looks up to and always are right. Stop it. It doesn't work that way. Not only are you now annoying everyone who came for the other shows and have to watch one setting take over everything they were going to do, you're also annoying some of the fans of that show, who wanted everyone to be in character, which you likely are failing at if you're wanking this hard.

This is also fairly simple and I haven't seen it TOO much, outside of the general "USE THESE AWESUM CHARACTERS PURELY BECAUSE THEIR BAD DONKEYS" and whatnot.

If a setting actually IS that much above the others, why the hell is it on your cast list?

I get that low and high power series get mixed in SRW all the time, but if your solution to literally every problem can and should just be "throw X thing at it" where X is the same thing from the same series every time, that's bad balance. Same with having series that basically require everyone to be in a shit state (like early Gundam SEED) when in fact you have a small army consisting of... I dunno, Mazinkaiser, Shin Getter Robo, Dygenguar, the V2AB Gundam, 00 Quanta, and Gaiking The Great amongst other things. It just straight up doesn't follow.

UX had the issue where most of its series would have MC robots far and away from everything else in the setting, but by the endgame, no setting was superfluous, at least one unit from all of them were able to stand up to things like Deus Ex Machina and the Vajra Frontier and Liber Legis and Kali Yuga. That was fine. Of course, UX had like half the setting be either using power that can be most accurately described as godlike (Celestial Armor, the OG hax, Demonbane in general, Linebarrel Override, Mark Sein in general, MAXGOD, that sort of thing) or just be really absurdly powerful (the Aura Battlers, Ninja crap, SEED Destiny's units, 00 Quanta, Valkyries in general by the Frontier era), so maybe that's not your best idea.

Note that some big powerful things can be played around. Like, for instance, Gunbuster is easy to play around. Half of its attacks would absolutely destroy the biosphere if they were realistically used in it, and it's a massive 250 meter tall behemoth that can move at fractions of c so that can't be good either. Of course, in space, the issue of "can't Gunbuster just literally start each fight with Homing Laser and basically win?" is notable, but oh well.

By the way: If your setting includes beings at an actual Capital G God level, and you intend to let the player have these for more than three or four stages, you've screwed up, because by that point, why haven't they just written the problems out of existence? Surely Ayato could just glare sharply at the Galaxy Fleet ringleaders and end the entire Vajra malarkey, being as Shinrei Rahxephon is reality rewriting level of power.

Overall, just know what you're doing.

You don't need to have 100% of everything planned out in your fic ahead of time. But know where you're generally taking each plot, how everything is going to flow, and have a general idea on some of the events before you really get started. Sometimes, it's best to just let the settings bounce off each other as you move from event to event, to figure out what all needs to be done.

There's countless other little tips and tricks to making a SRW work, but part of the process is discovering things on your own, and I'm starting to run out of ways to put things, so I'll leave you off here. Now go on, get to work on your stuff! Or, if it interests you, read on, as I do a detailed look at the creation of a cast list.