Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation 2

• Any character can be useable if you play to their strengths (within reason). Obviously some are better than others. It's not quite the same story with the mechs; some are much more broken than others, have higher-damage weapons that are just going to be more powerful, have higher stats, etc, but all of this can be mitigated some with just weapon upgrades/switching, stat upgrades, items, and so forth. There are a lot of different interlocking systems in the game that can be used to break it wide open, and the late-game of any SRW pretty much turns into, "just how hard do I want to break things?"

- Pilot skills-wise, SP Regen is a good default skill to put on anyone if you don't know what you want to do with them; it makes it so you can spam an avoidance "spell" every round, or use a morale booster and take the next few turns to regen to be ready to unload later in the mission. Attacker is a good damage booster for anyone who is going to ever, well, attack anything (which is most characters; a good rule of thumb is if a character never gets a damage boosting spell, they're more of a support pilot). Focus (or whichever one makes spells cost 80%) is also good, especially for characters with good-but-expensive spells.

- Unit-wise, there are two mostly-fan-determined artificial categories of robot; super and real. In game terms, a super robot tends to hit hard, have high armor, but not a lot of dodge or accuracy, whereas a real robot tends to be dodgier, hit a little less hard, use ammo instead of energy for most of its attacks and, in OG2 at least, is able to switch out weaponry. This isn't hard and fast, but mainly the point of this is to make sure you boost mobility on "reals" and armor/EN/HP on "supers".

- Some units have combo attacks that can be used when those units are adjacent to each other. Combo attacks ignore barriers, which becomes very important later in the game when most big enemies will have bad-ass barriers (and if you're avoiding spoilers or secrets you probably aren't going to unlock the way to cheese through those).

- I find that raising big main attacks to around 50% on your heavy hitters is enough, as long as you spread that out; I like having a team that can all mostly hit pretty hard rather than one or two really heavy hitters and a bunch of scrubs, and since upgrade costs rise exponentially it's a little more economical in the long run.

- Make sure to investigate items and what they do, and use them to round out areas where a unit might be lacking. If somethings getting hit really hard, it might be cheaper for you to equip an armor-raising part.

- Don't worry so much about skill points the first time through; I didn't find OG2 all that tough, but I'd played other games before it, and it can be pretty unforgiving at times, especially if you're trying to get skill points. The game also gets harder the more skill points you get, so it can be a vicious cycle.

- A lot of pilots have pretty obvious signature units, and most of the time they do really well in them, but part of the fun of the game is switching things around and seeing some characters use other character's units. Also, some characters don't really have one unit that's necessarily "theirs"; mix and match people until you find good combinations. If a unit's slow and someone has a movement up spell, match them up; if there's a high armor unit and someone else has the 1/4 damage for a turn spell, they'll probably be a good match.

- http://akurasu.net/wiki/index.php?title=Super_Robot_Wars/OG2

- Look up how to get the secret Wildwurger unit and then put someone with fury in it. Fury + stun shock is the most awesomely broken thing and you can completely trivialize some of the later bosses with it if you get frustrated trying to beat them normally.