Even Phase-Shift Amour isn’t invincible.
You know what this means, boys and girls, yet another cheap cash-in game made for a handheld console!
Yes, sadly, there is little to this game from the actual series. While it wouldn’t have taken too much to boil the plot down to a small fighting game, as we’ve seen in ‘Battle Assault 3: Featuring Gundam Seed,’ the game here contains no plot from the series whatsoever.
Instead, we get the typical fighting game modes – normal, vs, training, survival, time limit, time trial and free battle.
Normal mode is like your typical fighting game’s arcade mode. You choose one of eight suits to play through the so-called ‘story’ and fight against all 12 of the game’s suits. This mode, which is closest to the actual story of Seed, provides you with a brief opening about how war is happening. Then the game throws the plot away and has your character fight every character in the game – even a clone of your own character.
Unfortunately, the game really starts to cheat after a while into the arcade mode. After you get about midway through those 12 fights, even easy mode becomes a struggle and a prayer rather than a fight.
On top of that, if you’re a stickler for following the plot, this part of the game will give you an aneurism – characters like Nicol (pilot of the Blitz Gundam) died midway through the series, but he fights against the suits who showed up in the end of the series...
…only to fight against the Strike Gundam in the end of his arcade mode rather than the much tougher Justice or Freedom suits.
Yeah, it’s confusing.
Vs mode and Training mode are practically useless. As hard as this game is to find in the USA these days, Vs mode requires two copies of the game as well as a game link cable to play against a friend. Considering that there are three different varieties of the Game Boy Advance (one of them, the Micro, requiring an adaptor) and the DS/DSLite that can play this game as well, it’s a crapshoot overall.
And training mode just lets you fight a helpless opponent, so that’s also rather unnecessary.
Survival mode has you dive headlong into round after round of enemy combat. If you survive without your starting health bar (of up to 3 bars of health, depending) wiped out, it will be refilled to maximum after the round is over. Of course, you continue fighting until your health just plain runs out.
Time Limit and Time Trial mode are essentially similar ideas. While time limit has you fighting to the end of Arcade mode before time runs out, time trial has you fighting as fast as you can to create a new record.
Unfortunately, the record is never saved anywhere, so there’s not much of a point to it.
Free Battle Mode is a ‘player vs computer’ mode, which is the same as Vs mode, only with one person. There is nothing new here.
As for combat… there are some unique things here. Much like in the anime, each mobile suit has Phase Shift Armor, which absorbs damage from physical attacks – punching, kicking, Astray Red Frame’s katana, ect. However, other weapons like the beam rifles and beam sabers ignore Phase Shift and eat right through it. When your Phase Shift is gone, some of the suits will change colors to a gray color scheme. Others won’t, but that also depends on what suit had different forms of Phase Shift in the anime. Also worth noting is that the Astray Red Frame and CGUE suits do not have Phase Shift, so any attack hurts them outright.
Also of note is that you can ‘pre-program’ your mobile suit’s ‘operating system’ before you start any mode of battle. Essentially, you can adjust how much health, Phase Shift Armor, and thrust capacity you wish to start off with. Each starts off at 100%, and you can adjust them, but moving one up moves another down.
Finally, instead of a Street Fighter-like super move, each character has a ‘Berserker Mode,’ which is activated with a simple button press. The character chosen then poses, and each attack is now slightly more powerful than before – but it also drains Phase Shift with each attack. As an added twist, this is the only way to unlock the Super Move for the suit – all of them somewhat different, and some of the attacks even require timed button presses.
The characters you start off with in the game are:
Strike Gundam, piloted by Kira Yamato
Aegis Gundam, piloted by Athrun Zala
Buster Gundam, piloted by Dearka Elsman
Raider Gundam, piloted by Clotho Buer
Calamity Gundam, piloted by Orga Sabnak
Forbidden Gundam, piloted by Shani Andras
Duel Gundam Assault Shroud, piloted by Yzak Joule
Blitz Gundam, piloted by Nicol Amalfi
And you unlock four other suits along the way by beating the game with certain characters:
Freedom Gundam, piloted by Kira Yamato
Justice Gundam, piloted by Athrun Zala
Astray Red Frame, piloted by Lowe Gear (Mistranslated as Lowe ‘Guele’)
CGUE, piloted by Rau le Creuset
Now… there’s something funny about this. Two of these unlockable characters are the strongest in the game. One of these is a powerful suit, but has a major flaw. One of these suits suck.
The Freedom and Justice, being Gundam Seed’s final upgrade mecha for the main characters, have been obviously designed to be the strongest in the game. The Astray Red Frame, a guest-star from the side-story manga Gundam Seed Astray, is also a powerhouse… but is melee-only.
This leaves the CGUE – which has the weakest weapons in the game. The CGUE has absolutely no beam weaponry – forcing the player using it to hack through the Phase Shift levels first before cutting into the health bar. Strangely, the CGUE is also piloted by the end-series boss in the anime.
Like I said, it’s confusing.
As another important note, a thirteenth character will show up on occasion in the timed modes – Mu la Flaga, piloting the Strike Gundam, who cannot be used in the game as a playable character. While the move set of Mu’s Strike is the same as Kira’s Strike, Mu will literally shred your suit to pieces before you can react. In a way, Mu’s Strike is the hidden boss of this game, even if it’s almost impossible to find him at times.
As for the game itself… it looks decent. The game itself would look right at home on the Sega Genesis, which is a drawback considering the Genesis died out almost 8 years before this game was released. Admittedly, it’s a handheld game, but it’s still a serious flaw when you’ve got far superior games out there on the same handheld.
Another problem is that all of the characters play almost exactly the same. While the moves all look different, each of the button presses required to execute the moves are exactly the same for all. This makes a serious problem in making the player want to play more after unlocking all the characters.
As for the music and effects… well… they’re there. That’s about all I can say for it, actually. None of the music even remotely sounds like it’s from the show, and is some of the most banal noodling on a synth keyboard that I’ve ever heard. It sounds like someone banged on a Casio Keyboard for a few hours before recording it all onto the cart.
And the effects aren’t even that good – and mostly drowned out by the music anyway.
Add onto all of that, a complete lack of a ‘save’ function… and… wait, there’s no saving? At all? Oh, for-
Yeah, there’s no saving in this game. Instead, we get to ‘hack the Operating System’ of the game itself. Here’s an example of the passwords given out by the game:
WLJK7SD0S
This password unlocks every suit in the game, as well as the Very Hard mode. It’s also the only one you’ll ever need. Have fun putting it in over and over again, though.
In short, the game is rather dull, doesn’t pay enough attention to the source material in the first place, and… well… it doesn’t do anything wrong outside of the music area, but I’m hard-pressed to think of something it did right, too.
And to think I searched all over three towns to find this piece of mediocrity when it first came out…
Final score:
4.8 Out of 10.