How Bandai could have failed this badly, I'll never know.
I’m dead serious, the series lost the last fourth of its episodes and funding and the ending was compressed insanely. However, as the shows went through syndication, the fanbase slowly started to grow; much like Star Trek did in the United States. By 1980, there was a movie trilogy being made that re-told the events of the TV show with a better budget – and that would lead the way to a sequel series in 1985.
From there, Gundam has gone on to 10 sequel television shows, at least six Original Video Animation works (released in Japan one episode at a time as they were completed), 18 movies and countless video games, novels and manga spin-offs. One of the more recent offerings was Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, a show that wound up being extremely popular in Japan…
…but actually did very poorly in America when it came to the ratings, and was moved to a 5am time slot on early Saturday mornings…
…once every other week.
Of course, since the show did extremely well in Japan, Bandai decided to release numerous video games based upon the Gundam Seed franchise. While some of them were unique and solid releases, others were based upon previous Gundam games and drew from the older game engines and were just plain recycled and put out in seconds in order to take advantage of the popularity.
Unfortunately, this game is one of the latter.
Mobile Suit Gundam Seed: Never Ending Tomorrow follows the storyline of the anime through numerous levels and bonus missions. In fact, those who were avid watcher of Gundam Seed will feel more than at home with this game.
The game gives you the choice of playing through the Seed storyline from the focus of either Kira Yamato (the main protagonist of Seed) or Athrun Zala (the main rival, who joins up with Kira later). However, there’s a slight problem with the way this is set up.
You see, Kira’s story mode only has 15 missions in it. While this isn’t all that bad, many events are just out right ignored in the series and other events are plain compressed from what could be multiple levels into one single level. And if there’s a rare occasion where an event could make a good level, or a good one could be inserted, it’s ignored. Shamefully, it doesn’t get much better when you go to Athrun’s story mode – which has only 11 missions to it! But that’s not all.
You see, Athrun spent more than a fair amount of Gundam Seed with his team mates chasing about Kira and fighting against him… and about 2/3rds of the way through the series; Athrun joins up with Kira anyhow. This just plain does not translate well into a story mode, because Athrun’s missions are just a slight change upon Kira’s missions with but one or two small exceptions. Luckily, these 26 missions aren’t everything.
Drawing from the Seed-MSV (standing for Mobile Suit Variation, where unique designs not seen in the show are found) and Seed Astray (where MSV also resides) storylines, Never Ending Tomorrow actually contains an impressive mission mode. Well, mostly impressive. Sorta.
You see, each character has only one mission dedicated to them. While it’s nice to see characters and mecha that are almost always ignored (such as Earth Alliance ace Rena Imlia and her Buster Dagger), the missions are often quite short and are either insanely easy or insanely hard. While there are about 20 individual missions for this mode, it just doesn’t feel all that impressive all together.
On the plus side, the story and mission modes contain animated sequences and CGI moments, which make some fun for fans of the series – but it’d just be better to own the DVDs at this point. On top of all this, the player is also given an unlockable mode: Survival Mode. Within this mode of play, the player can either choose to survive for a set amount of time against a never ending assault of enemy opponents, fight in a sudden-death match where only a few hits will kill the player or even try to take down 100 enemy units all at once! Once you complete them as best as possible, there’s a fourth mode unlocked… which has to be seen to be believed.
Now, I’ll admit, this actually sounds pretty good. However, if you’re reading this review, you probably noticed the score I gave this game. Well, we’re about to get to the problems inherent in this game.
You see, the main point of this game is fighting between two (or more) giant robots. Now, this actually sounds pretty easy, if you ask me. This is something Bandai’s been doing in video games since the Famicom (later known as the NES) in 1986 with a Zeta Gundam game. However, something went horribly, horribly wrong.
For the main combat, Bandai decided to borrow a game engine from a previous Playstation 2 game: ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: Encounters in Space.’ While it wasn’t the best game ever, it was a solid release and quite fun to play. While this was a good decision, what was done with the engine was far from a good one.
Not content with doing the usual ‘slight modification of a previously existing game’ release that Bandai loves to do, they extensively changed the combat system – also adding in the ability to fight on Earth for once. Another addition to the game was a close range ‘duel system.’
Once a player engages in melee combat with the enemy, they’re sucked into a completely different mode of combat. Instead of being able to move freely, the player and his opponent slog slowly around one another and make awkward sword swings at each other. For some reason, ranged weaponry also works here; but the game arbitrarily decides what ranged weapon to fire.
While the idea of this duel mode is a good and solid one, the execution is just horrid. Despite being extremely fast and zippy in regular combat, all mobile suits slow down to a crawl for the fight; not even the boost button can firmly move you around the battlefield properly. Swinging the sword, which is also of heavy importance, is almost in slow-motion here as well – giving the illusion of space somehow being more like nearly-frozen water. And on top of all this, despite the fact that the player and enemy circle around one another, the chances are excellent that the player won’t even be FACING his enemy!
That’s right, trying to circle around the enemy just gets the player’s suit all screwed up in orientation. Just trying to fire a weapon, whichever it may be, often finds the player either missing or shooting at impossible angles and hitting the enemy anyhow (I didn’t think a projectile shell could be fired at a 45-degree angle from a straight barreled weapon)!
Oh, and did I mention that mecha will never obey the laws of physics in this mode as well? Instead of being weighed down by gravity or just orbiting one another, the mecha will often wind up upside-down on Earth for no reason – or moving through one another!
Combine these obvious flaws with a camera that moves in this mode like an ADHD-addled five-year-old on crack and you have a melee mode that punishes the player every single time he or she tries to get even remotely close to melee combat!
And to make things even worse, as if they could? Some enemies are really only capable of being taken through melee combat. Yeah.
Outside the melee combat, though, the game plays pretty averagely. The player can zip around a 3D battlefield, though with limitations on where they can go. Certain key events will show up from time to time, shown by a yellow orb onscreen. Going there will often stay with the events of the show, and it’s nice to have them. It also should be noted that, much like the rest of the ranged combat from Encounters in Space, the multi-lock system returns and works well the entire time.
However, the gameplay is just dragged down to the levels of the abysmal by the horrendous melee combat. Really, it’s just a pain to play.
On the plus side, the visuals are better than the gameplay, but that’s not saying much. While there’s a lot of lens flare and fancy flashy effects for the combat and backgrounds, the actual arenas in which the combat takes part in are just… lackluster, at best. All the space battles mostly look the same, with some vaguely different background objects from time to time, and combat on Earth is just plain bland and boring. However, you won’t notice it much because most of your screen is cluttered with almost an entirely useless HUD system that tells you far less than it looks like it should.
The mobile suits do look nice, especially when in combat… but the designs themselves are heavily jagged and just plain iffy-looking overall. Really, it’s just plain disappointing overall when the mobile suits sit still for a while.
Where the visuals and the gameplay failed, the audio tries to pick up the slack. The voice acting is very solid, with all of the voice actors returning from Gundam Seed to voice their characters. Unlike Battle Assault 3, the effect is very nice. On top of that, the new characters are voiced pretty well by new voice actors… though some of them were seriously miscast (Elijah instantly comes to mind).
Also, because Bandai knew this was a bad game, they actually refused to use the background and vocal music from Gundam Seed for use in the localization of this game. Instead, Bandai decided to recycle music from Encounters in Space and a few other older Gundam games. However, while the music isn’t the best, it works.
The only real problem, though, is the fact that the music will often override the vocal audio for no reason – and this is something that was easily fixable in the play testing stage. Certainly, it wouldn’t be that hard to make sure voices would be louder than the music. However, they didn’t bother to make sure it worked right.
And now, here comes the biggest problem with this game.
You see, when someone purchases a game, quite often they’ll desire some reason to come back and play through it again for some reason or another. In some cases, it’s unlocking new characters and in other cases it’s a harder difficulty level. Here? There’s very little to bring someone back.
You see, most of the 50 advertised mecha will play exactly the same (the GINN, for example, has five or six forms that are treated as separate mecha) or similar enough that unlocking the other version just isn’t worth it. The only thing that comes of benefit from replaying the modes is leveling up a partner character – about the only feature I really liked in this game.
And since I brought up the best part, I’ll bring up the part that just confuses the holy hell out of me as well. The load times and wait times. While the load times are somewhat understandable, it’s just not right to have loading screens in the middle of a mission – much less load times that last up to 30 seconds mid-game.
And when a mission is completed, the game will often leave you sitting in an arena with nothing to do for up to a minute. Several times, I thought my game had completely frozen or locked up – but the game was just taking far too long to process and figure out what the heck it was supposed to do. This is another flaw that could have easily been fixed in the play testing – and smacks of laziness completely.
In fact, that’s actually the best part of this game. Among the shoddy controls, cluttered screens and meh sound is the partner system. Basically, before starting off a mission, the player can select another character to assist you in combat. By clicking in the right control stick, they’ll use one of their skills to help you out – from healing you, to boosting your attack and defense, or even assaulting the enemy for you!
However, despite this, the game still remains an overall disappointing mess that really should not have cost $50 when it was first released.
If you’re a fan of Seed and don’t mind what I’ve described, this game is for you (though why some of you fans describe this game as a ‘10’ is beyond me).
If you’re a Gundam fan, consider the game wisely.
If you don’t follow into either category, stay away from the game.
Bandai had a chance to make a pretty good, but not perfect, game. Instead, all we got was a cheaply-made game on which the only purpose was to make a quick buck. And yet they also failed in that for the most part.
Unless you absolutely need a Gundam Seed fix that can’t be supplied by importing, playing Super Robot Wars/Taisen or owning the DVDs, just avoid this game completely. It’s just bad and qualifies as ‘barely playable.’ I paid $20, and I still feel ripped-off.
Gameplay: 3
Graphics: 4
Sound: 6
Value: 2
Tilt: 6
Score Average: 4
Points removed for load times and excessive nothingness: .5
Final Score:
3.5 out of 10