Gundam Battle Universe

"The Quintessential Gundam Game"

Overview:

Gundam Battle Universe is the fourth iteration in the Gundam Battle series of games for the Playstation Portable, and easily surpasses the previous three in terms of content, depth and fun. Gundam Battle Universe is a stunningly addictive action-combat game that can be played in either a third person or first-person perspective, where players assume control of giant humanoid mechs, called mobile suits, in battle after gut-wrenching battle.

Offering more than one-hundred and thirty different mobile suits, all with multiple weapons, optional equipment and infinitely-customizable stats, Gundam Battle Universe provides an unprecedented degree of player freedom. Covering the entire first half of the Universal Century, from UC 0079 to UC 0093, Gundam Battle Universe is guaranteed to make any Gundam fan let out an unrestrained howl of glee at the sheer spectacle. Make no mistake, Gundam Battle Universe is a game with a massive scale—but even if you choose to ignore the ambitious size of the game, you're still face to face with a lighting-fast action game that will, I promise, demand hours and hours of your time.

At its heart, Gundam Battle Universe is an astoundingly engrossing experience, and certainly stands at the top of any list of the best Gundam-themed games of all time. Even beyond the franchise, Gundam Battle Universe stands proud as an excellent game that belongs in every PSP gamer's library.

Gampelay:

Although Gundam Battle Universe provides both an “instant action” single-player versus mode and the ability to connect with another PSP for either cooperative or competitive multilayer matches, the glistening core of the game lies in its single-player campaign mode.

Because Gundam Battle Universe covers such a vast expanse of the war-torn history of the Universal Century, each campaign mode is divided into smaller sub-groups defined by the year, and each player-created pilot is only able to ally with a single faction during any of these years. For example, in UC 0079, durring the infamous One Year War, you can choose to side with either the Earth Federation or the Republic of Zeon—and once you've made your choice, there's no going back. Once you move into the 0083 campaigns, you'll be able to choose your faction again, so you're never locked into a single faction for the whole game. For example, you could choose to be an Earth Federation pilot in UC 0079, only to side with the Zeon remnant in UC 0083.

Mobile suit combat can be a chaotic affair when you first start out. The battlefields are filled with enemies and allies, giant beams of ignited gas burn through the air and immense volleys of missiles streak through the skies. The key to victory lies in being fast—if you don't take any hits, you can win. This is especially true later in the game, when several of the enemies possess special attacks that can blast through all of your armor with a single hit. You have to constantly boost up and down, dashing from side to side, all the while switching between weapons, watching your objectives, and taking out multiple hostile units. It can be quite a handful, particularly for new players. Luckily, the game's customization feature allows you to tweak the stats of your mobile suit and its weapons, doing anything from increasing your mobility, armor and thruster speed, to increasing the accuracy and firepower of any of your different weapons.

Each mobile suit has a lot of different ways to attack—either with one of its main weapons, a secondary weapon or ability, a charged attack, or an impressive special attack. Most of the different attacks can be a lot of fun to play with, but, unfortunately, the melee attacks are rather underwhelming.

The idea of using a super-heated battle-axe to cleave through your foes, or a giant spinning beam-naginata to dice them up sounds really bloody cool, doesn't it? The problem is that Gundam Battle Universe seldom provides an opportunity for the player to use these kinds of attacks. Because you're almost always engaged in combat with numerous enemy units, you're always in a position to be shot at. To use a melee attack you have to get in close to your target—very close—all the while hoping that the guy you're swinging at doesn't start shooting at you, and that all of his (or her; there are plenty of female enemies that want you dead, too) friends don't shoot at you, either. Melee attacks rarely succeed without the player taking substantial damage, so it's usually best to focus on evasion and take out as many foes as possible with ranged attacks. I was never put into a position where I needed—or felt compelled—to use a melee attack. More than anything, the inclusion of the melee system feels like an after-thought that the developers never really put any work behind. Other gundam-games have implemented a feature where the player's mobile suit will dash forward when executing a melee attack, greatly increasing the range at which such attacks can be used. It is rather unfortunate that such a feature was omitted from Gundam Battle Universe.

There are tons of different types of missions spread through the various campaigns, some more fun that others, ranging from infiltrating an enemy fortress, defending a warship to breaking through enemy lines to destroy a building or warship. One of the more interesting—and also more irritating—types of missions involves moving large supply crates from one area of a map to the other—often while fending off waves of enemy attackers. While these missions do provide a welcome change of pace to the battle, they can also be very frustrating. Because the game's auto-targeting feature will instantly flip to another target once you destroy a hostile, you'll often find yourself staring down the barrel of your rifle at one of the crates just after shooting down a hostile. It's all too easy to press that attack button one more time, and watch your crate explode. There are a few of these missions where the crates are invulnerable to attack, but for the most part they have limited health and can be destroyed by most weapons with a single hit. It can be very irritating having to protect these crates not just from the enemy attacks, but your own attacks as well.

Most of the missions are pretty fast-paced: you can complete the objectives inside of a minute or two, if your fast. To spice things up, mission environments can have different gravities—there's the zero gravity and full gravity battles native to most Gundam games, and low-gravity areas as well. To add to that variety, though, there are several missions that are spread out over multiple stages—many of which include branching paths depending on which objectives are completed. These are a whole lot of fun to play, if only for the added length and sense of desperation they inspire. New to Gundam Battle Universe, you can now restart a multi-stage mission from the most recent stage, rather than starting the mission all over from the beginning—a feature that was inexplicably absent from the trio of previous Gundam Battle games. For branching missions, the areas you have to get to in order to proceed to the next stage are marked as either, “A,” or, “B,” on the mini-map, and it seems like it'd be a simple thing to simply run to the area in question and move to the designated stage. Unfortunately, the faster you mobile suit is, the smaller the stages seem. I would often find myself accidentally moving on to a stage I didn't want to go to simply because I was too pre-occupied with fighting the enemies in the current stage. Mistakes like that can be infuriating when you're trying to finish off that one, last S-rank.

I've tried to cover the gameplay as best I can: in the end, Gundam Battle Universe is an insanely fun, atrociously addictive game. It can be a bit daunting at first, I'll admit, because the controls aren't your typical third-person action game controls. Instead of moving around with the analog stick, you use the D-Pad for movement and the analog stick is used to switch between different targets. Add the unfamiliar controls to the fast-paced and well-populated battlefields, and new players will quite often feel overwhelmed. When you first start out, it can be a hard game to get used to. Fortunately, the more you play Gundam Battle Universe the more comfortable the controls become—soon, they'll be second nature. It'd be a shame to write off this excellent game because of its non-standard controls—trust me, once you get the hang of it, you'll never be putting this game down.

18/20

Difficulty & Replay Content

Gundam Battle Universe is a gigantic game. There's tons of content right from the start, and an unthinkable quantity of things to unlock—and all of that unlocking will expend an immense quantity of time, even outside from the simple act of defeating all eleven campaigns. It's a lot of work, but a lot of fun, too. You can unlock all kinds of nifty things other than new mobile suits—new pilots (drawn from the various manga, OVAs, anime and movies) new special weapons, new operators, infinite tuning points and more. The coolest thing to unlock would have to be the era-restrictions. When you unlock era-restrictions, you can use any mobile suit from any time period in any other time period. The performance difference between mobile suits of different eras is breathtaking. There's nothing suite like seeing a Zssa, a mobile suit that could barely hold its own in UC 0088, suddenly become the single most destructive unit at the battle of Solomon in UC 0079. Era restrictions are especially cool if you unlock some of the extra mobile suits from the “Extra” missions—these mobile suits are drawn from the various manga and novels taking place in the latter portion of the timeline—which can normally only be used in the Extra missions. Of special note, you can unlock the Xi and Penelope Gundams from the side-story Hathaway's Flash, the Hi-Nu Gundam from the novel Beltochika's Children, and the Gundam F91 from the movie of the same name. Most of these units are simply not availible in any of the other Gundam games, so most Gundam fans will be itching to blast through the game as fast as possible to unlock them.

So the campaigns are huge and numerous, there are hundreds of different mobile suits to unlock, there are extra missions, there is an immense customization system for both mobile suits and weapons, different pilots to unlock—pilots that level up as you play depending onhow you play. Oh, and lest I forget, there's also a multiplayer mode and single-player instant action. If that's not enough replay content for you, you must have been seriously disappointed by every single game you have ever played.

I've never been too comfortable reviewing the difficulty of the game—more often than not, it's too subjective of a thing to go into—so I'll be as concise as I can while offering my two cents: Gundam Battle Universe is a challenging game, that never really suffers from being too easy or too hard. There is a strong difficulty curve, but it's nearly equal to the learning curve, so as the missions become more difficult, the player is also becoming more adept at playing the game. As such, you will constantly feel a pressure (cue newtype flash and swan imagery) when playing, and will almost always be challenged in one way or another, yet you'll rarely find yourself in a situation where the game is too easy—you'll never be in a situation where you get bored. A lot of that stems from the fast-paced nature of the game, which requires the player to always be on his or her toes, always moving around, during a mission. A lot of it also comes from the fact that the artificial intelligence is actually intelligent, something of a novelty in games these days. Enemies will eject dummies, toss up smoke bombs, spread Minovsky particles and use the terrain for cover. Nothing in this game will disappoint you, least of all the difficulty.

20/20

Sound Effect & Music:

The sound effects in Gundam Battle Universe are, frankly, top-notch. Virtually everything you hear in the game is authentic to the anime, movie or OVA. Missions that occur durring Char's Counterattack, have the music and audio effects from the movie playing. The same for Gundam 0080, Zeta Gundam, and all the rest. I found myself tingly with goosebumps dancing up and down my neck when first I played a mission in UC 0093 and heard Char's Neo Zeon theme playing in the background as Char and Amuro fought each other to prevent the Earth's imminent demise on the set of a crumbling Luna II asteroid. Beam rifles sound like beam rifles, mobile suits exploding sound like mobile suits exploding—and yes, even the trademark newtype chime is there. In a very appropriate twist, if you choose to play with a newtype pilot, you will hear the telltale chime each time an enemy targets you—giving you just enough warning to avoid the shot. It's little touches like that which make Gundam Battle Universe such an insanely cool game.

I should also mention that all of the voices in the game (other than the new voices of custom pilots and operators, who are not present in any of the anime or movies) are voiced by the original Japanese actors. There's nothing quite like listening to Shuichi Ikeda and Tohru Furuya shouting at each other during a frantic battle to get the adrenaline pumping. Authentic voices, authentic sound effects and authentic music really help to create an atmosphere for the game that's very true to the source material—and nearly flawless.

Unfortunately, the music taken from the anime and movies is limited solely to the instrumental variety—this means that some of the rather emotional vocal tracks from Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam—even the infamous “This Is Not Gundam!” from Double Zeta—are absent from the game. I think it was a huge missed opportunity, as many scenes—particularly those in missions durring the One Year War—seem rather flat without the music we've all come to recognize. The climactic three-way battle between Amuro Ray, Char Aznable and Lalah Sune, for example, has very little tension. It's a real shame, particularly considering how other gundam games (such as Project Pegasus and Encounters in Space) have used the original vocal tracks to incredible effect.

18/20

Graphics & Presentation

For a PSP game, the graphics in Gundam Battle Universe are pretty good, but they're not the best. The other big Gundam title on the PSP, Rengou vs. ZAFT Portable, certainly looks better, but I'm inclined to forgive Gundam Battle Universe it's lack of prettiness in light of it's sheer size. To be fair, the mobile suits, mobile armors, warships, planes, and other models in the game look spectacular. There's some nice lighting effects going on that make everything look really cool. The weapons effects, too, are top notch, and really help make the battlefields feel alive.

The fog effects (seen as a mist aspect to certain terrains, or as a limited area-of-effect special ability) is particularly cool. A white mist blanketing a level and decreasing visibility really increases the tension in battle, so it's a shame there are no other environmental effects. All of the suits have lots of animations and unique attacks, and everything looks great. The problem with the graphics rears it's ugly heat when you stop looking at the mobile suits and start looking around them. Though there are many different mission areas, all of them are small and relatively uninspired. The textures used are particularly bland—particularly in the Axis and Jaburo levels—and can sometimes make it impossible to see the shape of the terrain. I could be charitable and chalk up the unappealing mission areas to simple hardware limitations, but I'm inclined to think that, as is common with Gundam games, the terrain of the battlefield was simply left as an afterthought.

Because Gundam Battle Universe is (tragically) only available within the islands of Japan, those of us importing are likely concerned about how well it is to load up the UMD and start playing. Luckily, the menus in the game are very simple and clear, and are no trouble at all to understand, even if one is wholly ignorant of the Japanese language. As a major plus for English-speaking fans, all of the information in the HUD is written out in English, which can be a major boon.

Now, it seems like few people care about this, but I'd also like to point out that Gundam Battle Universe includes one of my favorite features: a gallery. You can look at any model of any mobile suit, mobile armor, tank, ship or aircraft in the game, and rotate that model to any angle you desire. If you're literate in Japanese, you can also read brief descriptions. You can also use the gallery to browse through the different pilots, listening to voice samples, and play any of the background music you like. It's a minor detail, but it's one of those little polishes that I absolutely love to see.

17/20

Final Comments:

As a dedicated fan of the understatement, I have to say that Gundam Battle Universe is a big game. It is an Gundam fan's dream come true. So rarely do I play a game where I find myself utterly satisfied on every level—so rarely do I find a game that makes me take a step back, and ask myself, “could this possibly be any better?” So rarely do I find a game that's so fun and enthralling that most of my limbs fall asleep before I can pull my head up to a clock to see how long I've been playing. Gundam Battle Universe is such a game, and when something like this comes along, you just have to sit up and pay attention.

Certain fans may be a bit miffed that Gundam Battle Universe doesn't include any of the signature mobile suits from any of the alternate universes—or even later into the Universal Century. To be honest, I don't think anyone can really look at the lengthy roster of playable units (again: more than 130 different mobile suits) and wish for more. Gundam Battle Universe draws from a wealth of material, far more than anyone could ask for, and delivers itself as an outstanding game. I've been playing Gundam games ever since I first witnessed the phenomenae that was Gundam Wing on television, years ago, and I'd like to say that I've played nearly every Gundam game that's been released in the past thirteen years—it may be partly hyperbole, but such a statement does contain a degree of truth. Gundam Battle Universe is, by far, the greatest Gundam game I have ever played, and any fan would be remiss not to purchase a copy.

Unfortunately, Gundam Battle Universe is the sort of game that won't really appeal to non-fans. Particularly in the West, Gundam has very much a niche audience, a niche that is further narrowed when it's forced to overlap with the gaming niche—though the latter has admittedly become less of a niche in recent days. Gundam Battle Universe would be a hard game to love if played absent from the context of the source material, but it is, nonetheless, a fantastic game. The sheer amount of content and customization present ought to appeal to anyone, and I'm more-than-certain even the most apathetic gamer will find a lot of fun with it.

As for the Gundam gamers—it's a done deal. This is the game you were born to play. It's as perfect as we've seen in four decades of Gundam—it is, make no mistake, the quintessential Gundam game. What are you waiting for? The time to act is now—lest I remind you, the infamous Haman is in the game, complete with those tasty little animal cookies you like so much, and Neo Zeon is more than willing to provide cake.

20/20

Final Score:93/100

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/08

Game Release: Gundam Battle Universe (JP, 07/17/08)