MS Saga: A New Dawn is a classic style RPG with giant mechs, awesome boss battles, and tons of customization.
MS Saga is a by the books, standard RPG. It takes elements of the old school Final Fantasies, some bits from the Dragon Warrior/Quest series, a smidge from Xenosaga, and healthy bit of customization from games like MechWarrior and Armored Core. In my opinion they roll this up into a nice, neat, well-polished package.
Combat is your standard turn-based combat. You have 3 characters fighting at any given time and can switch them out with up to 3 rear-line characters during combat with no penalty (which is nice). You have melee and ranged weapons. Melee weapons are more powerful but suffer a chance for a counter-attack. Ranged weapons are slightly less powerful but allow you to attack without fear of counters. Each character at base starts with 2 Energy. Every standard melee or ranged attack uses from 0 energy (a simple fist attack) to around 4 energy (a devastating ranged blast). Each turn your character gets 2 more energy, unless you charge then you get 3 energy but can perform no other moves that turn. Energy builds to a max of 10 which can then be spend on BOOST attacks which tend to be status causing or possess massive damage potential. To top all of that off, each character has an assortment of techniques which use Technique Points (mana) and can do an array of things from repairing your mobile suit to speeding up party members or lowering an enemies armor.
I've heard reviewers mention that the game has a lot of backtracking, well your main character very quickly gets two abilities which nearly make this a moot point in my opinion, those are ESCAPE and AUTO-DRIVE. ESCAPE let's you escape any dungeon like area and AUTO-DRIVE let's you return to any town or town-like area you've visited previously. So, honestly, backtracking is not the issue people make it out to be.
As far as too-common random battles go, well, I have no idea what they're talking about. I run into random battles in this game just the same as any other of it's type. Maybe even less. You can control this however. If you want to fight enemies more often you get an ability later to CALL ENEMIES, which forces you into random combat much more frequently. Or if you are fighting too much, you can use a STEALTH SYSTEM or the INVISIBLE ability to lower or eliminate the number of random battles you run into for a set period.
I'm a big Gundam fan and probably like this more than people who aren't would, but it's still a solid RPG. And in my opinion, in days where the old-school RPG's are dying and everyone feels they need some unique and esoteric combat system to make their game special, games like MS Saga: A New Dawn and Dragon Quest VIII are a massive refresher... but hey, that's just me.