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Review: Gundam Battle Assault 2 |
The first thing to keep in mind is that I’m reviewing this as a Gundam fan, not a fighting game fan. If you don’t like giant robots smashing the hell out of eachother in general and Gundam in particular, the chances of you enjoying this game are slim.
Okay, for the two people still with me after that, let’s move on.
Gundam Battle Assault 2’s premise is fairly simple: Make Bandai Money. The game, overall, has no overarching story. Someone said “You know, if we stuffed a whole shitload of mechs from completely different Gundam universes into one game, we could wallpaper the boardroom with money.” And so they did.
The first and foremost thing anybody remotely interested in this game will want to know is: What’s available? There are 30 suits, 12 of which are available from the get-go. They’re pulled from the Universal Century (original Gundam), After Colony (Gundam Wing), and Future Century (Mobile Fighter G Gundam) continuities. 15 suits from from UC, 7 from G Gundam, and 8 from Wing. Each mobile suit also has its own pilot, who will pop off with a retarded personalized or random quote after every battle.
Combat is set up a bit differently from your standard Capcom or SNK fighter.
The actual fight mechanics are similar- you have weak punch, weak kick, strong punch, strong kick, up jumps, back blocks, double-taps make you dash, and each mobile suit has a variety of special attacks, executed with quarter or half circles or occasionally dragon punches. Some of the attacks are fairly homogenized (QCF+P is usually an ammo-devouring projectile attack, HCB+P is almost always a slow-but-powerful-and-unblockable beam saber/melee weapon attack).
Resource management is a bit different though: Each fight lasts one round, not best out of 3. You have the following to manage: Your Armor Gauges, super blocks, ammo, and thruster boosts.
Instead of one lifebar, each mobile suit has three ‘armor gauges’ (except for the Mobile Armors, Big Zam and Neue Ziel, who have five and can’t block to make up for it) stacked one on top of the other. An armor gauge is, of course, basically a lifebar, except if you stop attacks with your face it empties really really fast. When an armor gauge is empty, you get knocked down, and the armor gauge you just lost disappears and the next one beneath it starts taking damage. When all three gauges are gone, you lose.
Unlike most games, management of your super stocks is not a pressing issue here- every mobile suit starts the fight with three super stocks, which can be triggered off at any time. Once you use up all three stocks, you’re out of supers for the rest of the fight.
Super attacks are one of those things that horrible, hideously, pathetically break this game at any gameplay level for the serious player. Every mobile suit has one super, and it is executed with QCF+any two attack buttons simultaneously. Some of them are jaw-droppingly, hideously powerful, such as Wing Zero’s aerial double buster rifle beam attack, or God Gundam’s beam hadoken, or Heavyarms’ super attack, which I have personally dubbed ‘Fuck You.’ Others are completely worthless in comparison, like Zaku II’s ‘throw six cracker grenades that explode inches in front of my face’ or Dragon Gundam’s “three very long-range, very slow punch attacks that are so slow they won’t combo on the ground.” Fuck, Ball doesn’t even get super stocks, neatly toppling Dan out of his place as the biggest intentional jobber in fighting game history.
Managing ammo is definitely a new experience. Almost every suit has an Ammo counter. They all have 500 ammo, which means absolutely nothing and might as well have just been replaced by a bar, because there is no relation whatsoever to the number of ammo depleted and the number of hurty-things on the screen. Most of the suits’ QCF+P attacks burn up ammo (generally the HP variant uses up more, but does more damage), and from suit to suit, this can either be a very original gameplay mechanic, or the worst fucking you’ve ever gotten in a fighting game. Ammo’s a very large factor, for example, for Heavyarms, because every time you go crazy with its main chaingun armament, you burn up lots of ammo. On the other hand, if you get caught in a full QCF+HP burst, you take hideous damage. Fair trade. Char’s Zaku, on the other hand, gets fucked. QCF+HP does a moderate amount of damage, but burns through 100 ammo every time you use it. So you get to use his good-but-not-great machinegun projectile five times, then you’re down to close range fighting, in which case he’s screwed. Ammo single-handedly fucks Tallgeese, because almost everything it does burns ammo, and once you’re out, (generally 20 seconds into a fight) you’re left with a crappy shield whip and normal moves.
Not all projectiles use ammo, either- it’s fairly inconsistant. To go back to Heavyarms, QCF+P burns up a huge chunk of ammo, but DP+P causes Heavyarms to slide along the ground, kick you into the air, and suspend you there with a barrage from its quad chainguns, and costs exactly zilch.
Thruster gauges are fairly simple. You have three stocks of them. Normally, mobile suits, being 100 ton machines, suck at jumping. If you want to get some major height and distance going, use a directional button and Thrust once you’ve jumped (or on the ground, but this tends to be clumsy and get you hit), which is done with the R shoulder button. You can keep going or change your direction in midair with additional Thrusts. Once you’re out of Thrusts, thud, you’re back on the ground. Thrust refills rather quickly as long as both of your feet are planted on terra firma, and its effectiveness varies from suit to suit-the Bolt Gundam just kind of makes a clumsy lunge through the air, while a single boost of Char’s Zaku II will send it sailing clear across the level. The other use for thrust stocks is dodging. By pressing any two attack buttons, you’ll sidestep, KoF95 style, and use up one thrust gauge in the process. This can also be done in the air.
The game has six modes: Street, Versus CPU, Versus 2P, Time Attack A, Time Attack B, and Survival. Street is initially going to be the important one here, because that’s where you unlock most of the hidden suits. Street Mode turns out to be somewhat of a disappointment- each of the suits has its own mini-storyline with custom dialogue before and after battles to go through, but initially only the RX-78-2, Wing Zero Custom, Deathscythe Hell, God Gundam (re-christened Burning Gundam for the American release, because humans are gay), and Gundam Maxter are available for this mode. By beating it with these suits, certain other suits are unlocked. By beating it in Hard mode, three more suits can be unlocked for Street Mode- Char’s Zaku II, Master Gundam, and Tallgeese III. Beat it on Hard with those and you’ve got just about everything, including a sound/voice test.
This sounds simple, and it is- I had everything unlocked the same day I bought it- but can be torturously frustrating all the same, for the simple reason that Tallgeese III, Deathscythe Hell, and Maxter are three of the shittiest mobile suits in the entire game.
Oh, and in this mode and this mode only (thank God), when you perform a super, not only does the screen pull a dramatic freeze, but a giant, frightening portrait of your character pops out of the side of the screen and delivers some stupid line of dialogue.
If you think you hate Heero Yuy now, wait until you’ve seen him come lunging out of the side of the screen to utter “…I’ll kill you” 25 times in the course of ten minutes.
Still, that leaves the other modes. Versus 2P is exactly what it sounds like, ditto Versus CPU. These are where you’re going to spend most of your time after unlocking everything. Go in, pick your suit, (and the suit you want to fight, and its difficulty, if you’re fighting the computer), pick your stage, knock yourself out.
Time Attack A puts you up against 8 mobile suits, and challenges you to beat them as fast as possible.
Time Attack B runs you through the game’s bosses, ditto do it fast.
Survival Mode is about what you’d expect. Your armor gauge refills totally after every fight, but if you actually lose a gauge, you don’t get it back, and you get one super stock back after each battle. The Time Attack modes and Survival are used to unlock bosses.
The game’s music is nothing to write home about, being generally generic.
There are no real classic Gundam tunes on hand here. The sounds are about what you’d expect/want, and come straight from the animes- the hiss is there for beam sabers, as is that trademark ringing sproing for a knockdown, and there are a series of satisfying clangs and bangs for when you kick Epyon straight in the pelvic thruster.
:D
The graphics take a fairly novel approach. They’re 2D, and look fairly good for a PSOne game, but the machines are not made up of one sprite- they’re multiple sprites stuck together, which I was afraid would result in a bobbly, disjointed look, but it doesn’t. It allows a wider, more ‘free moving’ range of animation on some of the machines, Zeong in particular, and isn’t noticeable on others (most of the G Gundam machines, Ball, etc). One of the best (and strangest) parts of the game is that it keeps track of which part of the other machine’s body you’re attacking, and if you hit it enough, the armor will either deform badly, or break off, revealing the internal mechanics beneath. I’ve actually stripped a Zaku down so that its leg was busted wide open, most of the armor was scraped off of its shield, both arms were displaying pistons and hydraulics, the entire chest plate had been torn off, and the armor plate on top of its head was ripped off. It gave me a stiffy.
The strange part is that the UC suits show damage MUCH more readily than the Wing or G Gundam ones. Any given RX-78-2 vs Char’s Zaku battle is probably going to end with both machines torn to shit. However, the entire time I went through Street Mode, I thought the Wing and G suits simply didn’t deform. Darkpriest assured me repeatedly that they do, so I went in and did nothing but pound on Maxter’s legs as hard as I could, and sure enough, one of them broke open. But other than leg shots, fucking up the AC/FC suits is nearly impossible- I’ve managed to crack open Wing Zero’s chest once, and that’s it. It’s strange, and a bit gay- a lot of the fun of the fights comes from seeing how badly you can mess up your opponent.
As far as pure fun and game quality goes- this game is broken. Badly. At any level. Wing Zero is capable of rolling pretty much anything, as are Heavyarms and the Full Armor Double Zeta. Deathscythe has NOTHING that can inflict serious damage. Rose Gundam’s beam saber comes out about three times
faster than anyone else’s. It’s apparent that they went the route of making the machines true-to-show, which is admirable- the suits do NOT feel homogenized in the slightest, and many have unique gimmicks all their own- Epyon’s lack of any sort of ranged attack is made up for by a rushing attack that, while it takes damage, cannot be stopped or knocked back.
Deathscythe’s standing and crouching HP are attacks with its beam scythe, and are consequently unblockable. Nu Gundam, Quin Mantha, and Sazabi are able to send out their bits/funnels to act as remote-controlled engines of destruction, even if they’re knocked down. The cost of this uniqueness, however, is that some suits are hideously unbalanced. “Cable in MvC2″ unbalanced. And the ease of getting out supers means that if you pick your spots well, you can carry matches with them alone.
As a technical fighter, it clocks in somewhere just above Guilty Gear 1. If you want to get some retarded friends over, however, people who will appreciate the sight of Hy-Gogg with its entire front glacis plate ripped wide open because you just pounded a 30 ton spiked mace with rockets attached to it into its face, it works for that. And it’s only $20, new.
As a Gundam fan, I give GBA2 a 90%. There’s a whole lotta Gundam going on.
As a fighting game fan, 70%. It works, and it’s fun, but its flaws are too blatant and glaring to write off.
Oh, and the side of the CD case spells it Gundum Battle Assault.
God bless you, Bandai.
