Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 (Review)

Being a fan of something often carries a lot of bitter moments. Especially when you own a PS3 and get an opportunity to play a game based on a franchise which was with you since you were a kid. I’ve already experienced the downfall of Silent Hill, Ace Combat, Armored Core and Resident Evil, to name the some. But I always try to find something worthwhile like a dumbass blind to the truth he’s fully aware of and still keep getting disappointed. Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3, made in 2011, is yet another game that made me feel like my head has just turned into a lollipop with “Jackass” written on it, like in the old Looney Tunes shows. Without wasting more time, let’s delve into the third entry of one of DW’s Spin-Offs.

Why do people fight? (Or make games like this?)

The story of this game is as simple as it can get. Knight Gundam, a character from one of the shows made in Super Deformed fashion, starts questioning the reason behind people fighting. To solve the problem, he summons the heroes of Mobile Suit Gundam franchise into the world he created as a simulated battlefield and then observes the outcome, hoping that people will make the right choice and learn their own reasons of fighting. I’m going to be honest – I wasn’t expecting this story to be deep or anything, but what could carry it well would’ve been the character interactions. You get a lot of opportunities while working on title like this. Char meets his clone, Full Frontal, created by Neo Zeon to be his exact copy. A grown up Mineva Zabi has the opportunity to see her father, who died in battle back when she was an infant. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely ZERO interactions between the characters. They form four groups which later turn into two bigger groups and start fighting with each other. There’s no references to the show, no interesting dialogues between protagonists from various timelines. If I could’ve known that the meeting of Domon, Heero and Loran would’ve been so empty, I would probably make a right choice of ignoring this game alltogether. Everyone behave as if they knew each other already, and even in this case, everyone are simplified. Why? Because you’re a dumb fan who paid for the game and KOEI knows that it’s all they need to stay in the business. It goes without saying that DW franchise is one of the most pathethic and desperate franchises existing nowadays. Every single entry is just an update which takes away one thing and throws in another, and by shuffling the parts they use or not, they produce more entries with the speed of Mozilla Firefox updates. And just like those, you cannot see any difference between the new updates. I remember the times when DW was actually a fun game worth your time, but that’s not the case nowadays, as it already turned into a shameless milking cow. It’s even worse when KOEI starts using others’ works just to fuel their wallets – we’ve gotten Gundam, Fist of the North Star and One Piece, I really hope that they’ll never touch Kill la Kill.

At least this piece of junk is painted nicely,

Graphics-wise, the game looks very good. The cel-shaded Mobile Suits look just like you would expect them to look on a PS3 game. Their animations are good looking and every single one moves and handles a little different, staying true to their animated counterparts. If there are things worth praising in this game, graphics are one of them. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the environments. They are much better than we could see in Ken’s Rage, with its marathon of deserts and ruins, but they lack any memorable appeal or destroyable pieces of scenery. To put it simply, they’re looking like something from a PS2 game. It really collides with good looking mechs, but because of the game’s nature, the player can close an eye on this shortcoming. The framerate usually keeps up nicely, except the times when a giant enemy starts spamming lasers while the field is full of enemies, then the game has to slow down for a moment. The character portraits present in the game are well drawn and even with all characters being bringed down to one art style, they still keep their distinctive looks from the shows spanned throughout the years. Unfortunately, in terms of storytelling, the visual presentation falls flat on its face. The dialogues between the missions are presented via Visual Novel segments that will most likely fail to get your attention after short time. They’re short, amateurish looking and in most cases not even voiced. I never liked such lazy storytelling, while it is understandable to use such form on portable systems because of their limitations, it’s intolerable on PS3. Hell, at least BlazBlue had some quality put into its own VN segments, despite many reviewers also calling this presentation lazy. The dialogues present in game reviewed here are short, often only six sentences long, and they all can be summarized as: “We’re suspecting this strange Mobile Suit (Knight Gundam) to be the culprit, by the way, we’re under attack.” Pathethic. As far as the sounds go, the overall SFX has been taken from the show in terms of weaponry, so it sounds good. You get the option to choose from English or Japanese dubbing, and it goes without saying which one is better. English dubbing lacks actors who voiced the characters in Western releases and simply sounds amateurish. Japanese on the other hand is really solid and basically the only way to enjoy the characters talking. In terms of music, the game is bland, to say at least. Generic guitar songs will leave your head as soon as you’ll finish the level and they’re being reused constantly. Japanese version of the game had more tracks, containing remixed versions of the songs from the anime. After listening to these on Youtube though, I can’t say we’re missing much – they all sound inferior to the originals. What’s worse, the game lacks the Custom Soundtrack support, so in order to not fall asleep, you must go out of your way and either use Winamp or any other means to listen to your own music, because KOEI’s sound department screwed up.

Mash Square to win, don’t fall asleep.

Gameplay of this game is pretty much what you expect – you land in one of the fields and then move on along with your AI controlled teammates to take control over other fields. Each level is made out of few fields connected to each other by narrow passageways. Neutral, grey, fields immediately turn blue (allied) or red (enemy) as soon as one of the aces of the respective side enters the field. To take control over the field, you must keep defeating the enemies spawning in this field until the meter at the top of the screen falls to zero, then all remaining foes get stunned for few seconds and your troops will keep respawning in this area. Aside of empty fields, there are strategic locations you need to take over to cripple your foe’s strength. Newtype Labs enhance the powers of aces of the side in control of them, fortresses fire barrage of rockets at the opposing side when it enters the field, communication centers generate reinforcements and advance bases slowly replenish your Partner Strike meter. There are also facilities regenerating your Morale meter and, of course, the HQ. As interesting as it sounds, it’s definitely not Command & Conquer served as a 3D Beat ’em Up. The facilities never matter much, because the fights are so short. Catapults which are used to travel fast from one place to another are obsolete because of the maps being small anyway and all bonuses you gain don’t matter at all, giving you a mere illusion of a game trying to be deeper in terms of mechanics than it actually is. Every single mission has got the exact same goal – beat the enemies up until the general spawns in the enemy HQ, then beat him up and that’s it. There’s no rescue missions, no getting somewhere before the enemy does or any interesting assaults. Sometimes the game throws a secondary goal in your face, like a dirty rag, wanting you to rendezvous with a selected character in the alloted time or beat the General before the time runs out. In the second case, you can increase your time limit by taking over the fields. Just like you’d do anyway to make him spawn in the area. Failing the secondary goal reduces your Battle Morale. When you fall in battle, you can come back at the cost of losing more Morale and when you’ll get defeated when the meter is empty, it’s game over. It is an okay mechanic, but because the battles have almost no thought put into them, it just doesn’t matter.

As for the AI, I’d say it does the job just right. Your teammates move to the enemy fields and actually take them over, instead of following you around and not doing anything, like in Ace Combat or Ken’s Rage. And that’s a good thing, because I can’t stand useless AI teammates. From time to time, they will have problems and start asking for your assistance. Helping them out increases your Friendship (more about it below) with these characters and opens up the opportunity to launch a special attack when they’re nearby. If they’ll fall in fight, no matter. They’ll come back after few seconds. If you really want to have any fun in cooperation, invite a friend to play with you on Split Screen. As far as the actual fighting goes, I’d say that the game handles it pretty well. The controls are responsive, Mobile Suits don’t have ridiculously long recovery animations as opposed to Ken’s Rage and combos are fairly easy to use. You mash Square for regular attack and press Triangle at certain part of combo to launch the alternative attack. By beating up your enemies, you fill up your Special Attack meter. You launch it by pressing Circle and doing so when your health is critical launches the more powerful attack. Defeated enemies sometimes drop power ups like health recovery or bigger Speed/Defense/Attack for 30 seconds. Simple, but works well enough to be entertaining. By collecting certain item or taking over the Advance Base, you will be able to fill up your Partner Strike meter. By pressing R2 you can summon the said partner to launch either a supporting ability or powerful area attack. From time to time the game throws a large enemy at you. In this case, you can fill up a special meter by dodging its attacks and attacking him to break off a part of its armor, shortening its health bar. And that’s basically all you can esperience in this game.

One mission multiplied by three hundred.

The creators of this game like to use big numbers to make you buy their product. And they’re not lying, the game has got a wide choice of pilots and Mobile Suits you can use. However, it goes without saying that pilots do not differ from each other too much aside of appearance, voice and statistics, the last one being a slight difference. Mobile Suits are plenty, but many of them are your typical mooks you won’t bother using more than once just out of curiosity. By beating a mission with certain pilot, you gain experience points and level up, increasing your statistics and allowing your character to use longer combos. You also get plans for developing new Mobile Suits or the ones you already own, but with better statistics and more upgrade slots. You can also spend money on experience points for your pilot, if you can afford it and don’t want to replay the same missions, even if simply playing through the game can count as the same exact thing. By progressing through the storylines, you unlock more characters and opportunities to befriend them. This is yet another grinding mechanic of this title. Once you can become friends with a character, your friendship will increase by playing as them, using them as your Partner Strikes or by providing assistance during the missions. As the Friendship increases, you get more meters for Partner Strike, which are pointless, given that you’ll use one up before the second one will charge anyway. You will also be able to set the said character as your mission Operator, but as cool as it sounds, it’s not the same thing as in Ace Combat: Joint Assault on PSP, where you could choose one from four Operators, each one of them having different lines and personalities. The character chosen by you repeats the same 6 phrases over and over, making the whole Operator mechanic yet another thing that is supposed to make you think that this game is full of content. And it’s not. It’s really short on it, in fact. To max out the friendship level, which is level 5, you need to finally beat a mission designed specifically for the said character and then you get your maximum level. The only merit that comes out of it is that non-Newtype characters become Newtypes themselves, allowing them to pilot Mobile Suits which can only be used by the characters of such type. While your usual mooks are avaible to everyone all the time, each pilot starts off by being able to pilot only his/her own Mobile Suit. To allow them to pilot the other unique machines, you need to buy Licenses. To unlock a License for certain Suit, you simply need to beat five missions while using this machine. Then you can buy the License at shop, which immediately allows everyone else to pilot it. The worst offender in the regard sof content though are the missions themselves. While the amount of these trully is impressive, it matters little when you take into consideration that there’s only about 10 maps in the whole game and they’re being reused all the time. You get the desert, space, ruined city, canyon… and that’s it, each of these locations has got 2-3 variants of filed placement and that’s all you get. This, mixed with no interesting twists in the gameplay and characters, makes this game trully pathethic way to cash in on Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. The missions are divided on categories – you get story missions, which are self-explanatory. Then there are missions you unlock by raising your friendships high enough, which allow you to reach level 5. The next categories are Tutorial missions (same stuff, just easier), Relationship missions (generic missions with specified factor the enemies and allies are generated, like females only), Collection missions (same missions, just with specified conditions, like white Mobile Suits only). There are also missions set as waypoints of your achievements like total fields taken over or beaten aces, these are the same missions like everything else, but you get prizes like more skills to buy at shop, if you’ll beat them. Finally, there are History Missions, which are the thing I was waiting for the most. These are the battles based on the fights from the shows, accumulating battles from the original Gundam up to Gundam 00 and Unicorn OVA. As great as it sounds, it nearly gave me a mental breakdown. I’ll explain based on the Unicorn missions. The first one is your typical space map (yes, these missions don’t have ANY unique environments, taking place in these 10 generic maps you’ve seen) where you must beat up mooks while playing as Banagher until Full Frontal shows up. Then you beat him up and win. The second mission takes place in the second space map, but you cannot leave your starting field. In other words, it’s one-on-one duel against Full Frontal. A half-assed one, on top of that. People who played Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes and reached the fight against Nobunaga know that games like this can have good boss fights, but this is not the case. Mash Square to win. After that, you get the Visual Novel ending (already!) with Mineva saying one sentence and that’s it, you get the Trophy for being a naive fan who expected a good Gundam game from people who make Beat ’em Ups since PSX ruled the industry. Of course, there’s a third, “bonus” mission. In this one, you deal with a female pilot who got brainwashed into thinking that Gundams are her enemy. If you’ve just smiled at the memory of Marida Cruz, who SHOULD be the character we’re talking about here and which should they use, you’re wrong. Just to show how lazy they were, you get to beat up more mooks to trigger the boss to appear and it turns out that you’ve got to fight… Puru Two (who died back in Zeta). Granted, Puru Two was a clone of Puru just like Marida, but there’s no way to deny that this is false advertising. History missions don’t have anything to do with the actual story, making you play the same half-assed stages. What, have you though that maybe they were keeping them as aces up their sleeves? Screw you, then, KOEI knows what’s good for you, you naive moron! The game does have more maps in the Online Multiplayer, which is okay for what it is, but the same few missions and lack of function to play regular missions with your PSN friends makes it rather forgettable feature.

Overall…

This game is a disappointment. I’ve been waiting to play it for a long time, being hyped over a thought of my favourite Gundam characters meeting up in one big cross over. What I’ve gotten was an average product, made simply to cash in on the franchise and served as another washed up Dynasty Warriors game. It lacks the speed and energy of highly enjoyable Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes (Hands down, Capcom has beaten KOEI at their own game) and does nothing to appeal to fans like me, who aren’t blindly buying every single Gundam product. The gameplay can be enjoyable thanks to good looking Mobile Suits and a lot of enemy mechs blowing up around you and you may have some fun with the game, but it will always strike you as flawed and rushed. Pitiful amount of missions, no character interactions (forget about dialogues during fights, instead, everyone keep repeating the same sentences over and over, including anime quotes out of context, like Katejina’s reference to Uso and Asher fighting in palm of her hand), bland music and no objectives except of beating everyone to make the boss spawn are just unforgivable. It’s not a completely bad game, but to enjoy it fully, you’ve got to tolerate KOEI laughing at your face because you’ve paid your money for it, just like they wanted. And who cares that you’re not getting your money’s worth, if Gundam isn’t your entire world? Hell, if you’re blind enough, you can pay for DLC characters you can’t even use Online unless the other players have them installed too. You like Marida? Well, you can now pay extra to get her as a character to play the same repetitive missions. Hell, you can even set her as an Operator, if you feel like listening to the same stuff over and over, as long as it’s your favourite character talking. Long story short, DON’T buy the DLC. You know what’s even sadder though? The newest Macross game, which is exclusive to PS3 and released only in Japan to celebrate the franchise’s 30th anniversary, does the same setting, but completely right. The characters interact with each other, the gameplay is a whole lot better, but… Namco Bandai will never release it here. Being a fan of mecha anime in the West is trully painful, especially when you need to put up with games like the one reviewed here just because this is the best you an get, just because you’re not living in Japan. How long do we have to still put up with such lack of respect? Especially if companies like KOEI release their games here just to laugh in your face.

Pros:

 – Cel-shaded Mobile Suits look really good.

 – Blowing enemies up by the hundreds can be enjoyable.

 – Japanese voice acting.

 – Lots of content (?).

Cons:

 – No mission variety in terms of objectives and levels themselves.

 – Bland Soundtrack.

 – Average story doesn’t mean you can ignore the characters and their interactions.

 – Pure mockery towards the franchise and its fans who aren’t blind.

Overall score: 4.0/10