Dynasty Warriors: Gundam

"Let's face it, you know if you want this game or not already"

Some reviews are important. Sometimes it's because a big name game has fallen flat on its face. Sometimes it's because a big name game has truly delivered. Sometimes it's a ruling on a brand new IP. This is not one of those reviews. 90% of you already know if you're getting Dynasty Warriors Gundam. The title is pretty self-explanatory. It's Dynasty Warriors, with Gundams. But let's go through the motions anyway….

Hey! This isn't ancient China!

There are some who accuse Bandai of creating new Gundam series simply for the merchandise. I'm not one of them, but I see where they're coming from. What with dozens of different models, toys, and video games being released each year. But hey, if the source material isn't entertaining, there won't be any interest in the products. Dynasty Warriors Gundam is simply the most recent Gundam merchandise to hit our shores.

As I mentioned in the intro, Dynasty Warriors Gundam has a self-explanatory title. For the the uninformed, Dynasty Warriors is a series that features the player picking one Chinese General from the War of the Three Kingdoms and wrecking havoc on a battlefield by killing hundreds of soldiers in a battle. Dynasty Warriors Gundam is just like that, only with Gundams instead of Chinese generals and enemy mechs instead of soldiers.

The gameplay is simple, pick a mode, pick a character, and pick your stage. You'll be dropped into battle and tasked with capturing enemy fields and defeating enemy commanders, the exact objectives will change during battle. Capturing enemy fields is done by defeating enemies within the field. Defeat enough, and you may have to fight a Field Commander, which may or may not be a special unit, defeat that, and the field is yours, move on to the next one, or, if it's the victory condition, you'll finish the stage and unlock the next one. Simple enough.

Gundam Wing vs. …Turn A Gundam?

Gundam features two modes of “campaign” play, as well as a vs. mode. The two campaigns are “official mode” and “original mode”. Official mode takes you through the story of the character that you pick (Initially: Amuro Ray, Kamille Bidan, and Judau Ashta), which for the initial three, just takes you through the big battles of Mobile Suit Gundam, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, and Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ. Interestingly, while both Amuro and Kamille's modes have four missions, Judau only has two. I suppose they could only think of two battles that qualified in ZZ. Official mode tries to stick close to the story of the original anime series, but does take liberties when it feels needed. The other mode is “Original Mode”, which is….quite a bit more liberal with the franchise. Original mode features an original story about a planet that has appeared in space on a collision course with Earth. Various groups have come to try to take control of this planet, as legends say that whoever controls it will have the power to make anything possible. As in official mode, three characters are initially available, this time being Heero Yuy, Domon Kasshu, and Loran Cehack. Original mode will see you fighting just about everyone who isn't on your team. Teams are rather haphazard and interesting. For instance, Domon (of G Gundam) is in a team with Milliardo Peacecraft (of Gundam Wing), and Elpeo Puru (of ZZ), while Heero(Wing) is in a team with Master Asia(G) and Jerid Messa (of Zeta Gundam). Each team has their own unique storyline, with a few tweaks depending on who you're actually playing. New story paths are also available when certain other characters are unlocked.

Vs. Mode is better than I would have expected. There are three individual modes, the first where you and a buddy pick fighters and try to beat each other up, another where you compete to destroy the most enemies, and finally, an interesting mode where you first beat up a bunch of enemies to get power-ups, and THEN beat each other up.

Of the two campaigns, Original Mode is far bigger. For one, every single character gets five stages. For another, while official mode has six character (3 initial and 3 unlocked), original mode has sixteen (three initial, the six from official mode, and seven other unlockables). Really, there's a lot of content in Dynasty Warriors Gundam. There's numerous paths/characters to unlock, and then you can level them in various mechs. That's right. After you beat a path with a character, you can then switch them to any other mobile suit.Each character levels up as you defeat enemies (increasing their power), and the mech has its own levels that increase the same way (though at a different rate). There's also a lot of customizable potential here as well. While each character has two set skills (one unlocks at lvl25), they can set up to four additional skills that you've picked up from battle. As for your mech, you can set up to three different parts to increase its performance. So there's a lot here. It took me about seventy hours to complete everything, though I didn't level everyone to max level, I simply completed all the story paths.

999 battered mechs on the wall, 999 battered mechs, take one down, pass it around...98 battered mechs on the wall!

Of course, all this content brings me to Dynasty Warriors Gundam's biggest flaw. Repetition. While it is true that each mech handles quite differently, having a wide variety of attacks, much greater than their Chinese general predecessors, the basic gameplay can get stale quickly. The enemy is nothing before your might, and the bosses exist as challenge only because they have a lot of armor (read: health). Most of the enemies will stand around and do nothing a majority of the time, and the “challenge” of the bosses comes from the fact that they're actually active participants in the battle. I've invested dozens of hours into this game, but I've done so over several months. Play this game too much in a row and you're going to get bored of taking out that 2348th mech.

The other major problem is your teammates. The idea of allies is that they're supposed to help you along your goal, but the ally NPCs in DWG seemed to have missed the memo. Oh, the grunts you have are fine and serve their purpose of holding fields, but the NPC characters don't fare too well. They're ok a lot of the time, but numerous occasions will come up where they'll seemingly lose the ability to fight and will get themselves killed, and this tends to happen on the maps where you can't let them die. Nothing is quite as frustrating as having to repeat a level when you're at the end because your teammate on the other side of the map got themselves killed. When they're fighting with you is almost as bad. At best, they get in your way and mess up your combos. At worst, they'll get that last hit in after you've done all the work and rob you of your boss kill. If only Koei had given us the ability to command our allies in a limited fashion, the entire mess could have been avoided. But instead, well, we get junk.

There are additional minor gripes I have as well. Skill acquisition is random, and this tends to break all the customization you can do, because characters with only one mode to go through will tend to only have about 5-6 skills by the time you finish the game. Plus, since you have no control, you could end up with things that are nigh useless. Choice would have gone a long way here. I also would have liked a few more mobile suits to be playable. There are a lot here, but it there are a few notable missing ones (the Rick Dias and Zeong, for instance).

There's no doubt that this game is focused more on the single player idea, but don't let that stop you from getting a buddy to join in. This makes maps go much faster and really helps with the repetition. Rather than just clearing out all the enemies, you're pushing to kill more than that other chump in the room with you. The game handles the co-op play quite well, and I heartily recommend it as it dulls the repetition factor.

Summary

Pros
+++ Wide variety of unique mechs
++ Lots of content
+ Many story paths to traverse

Cons
--- VERY Repetitive
-- Characters have little to distinguish themselves outside of the different story paths

As I said in the beginning, you already know if you want this game or not, and nothing I'm going to say is going to change that for the vast majority of them. I would also like to say that I love this game, but objectively, it's mediocre at best. There's a lot of content and each mech fights with its own unique style, but it's just too repetitive. It would be forgivable if this was the first game if its kind, but there are numerous dynasty warriors games that play almost identical to this one. It IS more than just a re-skin, but the core gameplay remains the same. Bottom line, it's a decent game, but too repetitive. Fans of the material will get a kick out of it, everyone else is going to enjoy it for a day or two and then probably get sick of it.


6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/05/08, Updated 05/08/08

Game Release: Dynasty Warriors: Gundam (US, 08/28/07)