Thoughts on... SD Gundam game series

A new section for me, where I get to geek out! Yeah. Long time, lazy blogger - is my excuse.

So there's this TV series - anime - called "Gundam", right? Produced by Sunrise, sponsored by Bandai, usual tie-in stuff. Giant robots, piloted by military types, used as weapons of war similar to fighter jets and tanks. Good show, ran for 39 episodes? In order to fill plot holes and assign fridge logic, radar is made mostly ineffective by a certain zero-rest-mass particle that also powers compact helium-3 fusion generators - giant robots that are invisible to long-range radar, and must be confirmed by other methods. But I digress.

The original show kicked off a series that runs to this day - I find that they get more and more commercial (literally! - a certain handheld game console shows up in a recent one) as time goes on - which tries to be the "realistic" Giant Robot Show(tm) on TV. But, mecha means models, and models mean the designs are specific, which means they can by used in a video game.

This takes me to the SD Gundam series of turn-based strategy video games. I own SD Gundam G-Generation F for the Playstation, and more recently SD Gundam G-Generation SPIRITS - I'm going to review them here, for your reading pleasure.

SDGGGF was released in 2000, about when I first got a PS - in fact, it was one of my first games, the other being SRW Alpha. The gameplay was pretty basic overall, but its selling point was the inclusion of virtually every Gundam-related mecha thus far, up to and including side-stories, manga-only stories, and Turn-A Gundam. I think it was the first to include the excellent Crossbone Gundam, and gave us the rockin' Crossbone Gundam Battle Theme.

It also tied into a certain collectible card game, through which the player could construct new units using 7-digit codes found on the cards (and - very easily - online). There was also a multiplayer mode and a single unit tournament mode - both of which could be abused to gain credits (you could do an mid-game save just before winning during the multiplayer, win, then the money would go to your system save. Open up the mid-game save, and repeat...). This made the game easy in terms of unit acquisition, and thus far more about playing/grinding through the strategy part of it. Because it used two separate save types, the amount of units you could have was... pretty high.

SDGGGF suffered from a few flaws, though. There's a particular story called The Blue Destiny. The units featured in that story rely on something called the EXAM System - in the original story, this gave the pilot using it empathy on a psychic level, allowing them to seek out enemy pilots directly without having to wait for visual confirmation, very frightening if you think about it - but in-game this is simply a certain attack pattern. There is also a stage in this story, where the main character has to take out an entire (nuclear) missile base by himself. In the novel, this is accomplished relatively easily, as he is an ace pilot in a high-end Mobile Suit with a special System built into it. In the game, this is bloody near impossible (too many enemy units spread too far apart, with a time limit besides) and the player has to back him up with a battleship of some sort.

Clearly, some of the game mechanics needed work, but it was otherwise something I spent many, many hours working on - beat the game, but because there are so many distinct units it's very difficult to get 100% of them.

And then there's SD Gundam G-Generation SPIRITS, capitalized because it looks friggin' cool like that. PS2, but limited to the Universal Century series only. No G-Gundam, Gundam Wing, etc. - and Turn-A appears to be the final boss. The included units are severely limited, probably due to physical space issues, but the graphics are leaps and bounds above SDGGGF - full voice acting as well, with some limitations due to certain voicers having died (Suzuoki Hirotaka especially - yes, Starscream = TenShinHan in Japan).

The multiplayer mode has been removed, the card game code system has been removed, the tournament mode has been removed, most of the side-story units have been removed, the duo save types have been removed - it really begins to feel like they put a Dalek in charge of programming (EX-CISE! EX-CISE!), until you see what they included to make up for it. The game has been made smaller and tighter, and the capital you earn in-game is based entirely on how much damage your units do.

Virtually all units can be rebuilt into another unit once it gains enough experience (where previously, about a third were fairly limited in their rebuildings), which means it's considerably easier to fill out your database. A lot of the combinings (works out to: the schematics of units A and B combined yield the schematics of unit C), especially the ones involving Turn-A Gundam, make annoyingly little sense - example: G-3 Gundam (Magnet-coated joints to improve response time) + Zaku II = Act Zaku (high-performance Zaku w/Magnet Coating). Act Zaku can't be combined with any other unit, I think, and the only way to combine up a G-3 involves Turn-A. Of course, it's simplest to say that they _never_ made any sense in this game series...

But, again, someone in Bandai's Customer Service dept. was taking notes, and this is a much tighter game all-round. It's gameplay-centric, so the challenges are now in figuring out how to get 7 units in one place at once, so you can rack up credits with Overkill (in essence, every unit is now worth a certain amount of credits. Killing it gets you those credits. Ganging up on it gets you a bonus, as does getting a critical hit in. Doing more than double the enemy's total HP gets you another Overkill bonus, as does triple, quadruple... all the way up to ten times). Oh, and the maps are designed around Mobile Suit-scale - larger units take up more space. Battleships are now _very_ unwieldy, but they (and most other non-group unit on the map, friend or foe) slowly recover HP and EN.

Which brings me back to the Blue Destiny test of playability. The BD units now have the EXAM System as a separate transformation in addition to their Magnet Coating - meaning they go from an overpowered-for-its-time MS to a slightly-underpowered God-o'-war at a whim (balanced by the system's increased energy consumption). And this time, someone read the novelization, played the game it was based on - Yuu Kajima can now one-hit Zakus, and single-handedly take down a missile base, with the game very emphatically refusing to allow your forces to help. There is still no time limit on the system (originally necessitated because overuse would cause the MS' armor to _melt_, even in space), which means it can be switched on at the end of the player's turn for the evasion bonus alone. No complaints here!

So yeah. I rather like SDGGG SPIRITS, if only for the name. It's an awesome name - you make anything 3x more awesome by adding SPIRIT(S) to it, kinda like "Char Aznable's Personal/Customized..."