Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs Zeta Gundam - Bandai, 2004-2005
The Basics
This is one of the weirdest titles on my list, if only for one reason: It's probably the only licensed game on my list. Now, licensing games by and large leads to giant piles of crap shoved onto silicon chips (See also: Nearly every X-Men games made, all of LJN's output). This game.... Doesn't necessarily buck that trend. But it's also nowhere near as bad.
So, at it's core, the Gundam vs. series is a two on two action game, with the player(s) choosing Mobile Suits to fight it out with. These suits all have different abilities, weapons, and stats that all draw from their canon, and then the players shoot each other and slash at each other and blow everything up. It's cool.
The main objective during these fights is to drain your enemies' resource bar, which you do by killing your opponents. However, dying isn't necessarily the end, because you will respawn so long as there's some of your resource bar remaining. Each suit has a different value associated with the bar, so the better your suit is, the more you'll drain. So, for example, let's say you're pitting a team of Balls against a pair of Zeta Gundams. Now, in any ordinary game, the Balls are going to lose, and that's probably going to happen here. However! Balls are only worth 1000 resource points each, whereas Zeta Gundams are worth 3000. Since the resource bar has 9000 (or so) base points, the team of Balls can lose a total of nine lives, whereas the team of Zetas can only lose three. Mind you, because of how terrible Balls are, the Balls are still going to lose, but at least there's some semblance of balancing attempted.
If it were just this aspect, I'd probably still be choosing it, warts and all. The controls are really clunky, the areas extremely plain and boring, and the difficulty wildly vacillates between entirely too hard and way too easy. That said, there's one more reason why I'm including it.
Why It's Here
Ok, I lied, there are two reasons why I'm including it. First, there's a special single player mode included on the home version of the game, and it's one of the best modes of play in anything ever compiled by man. That would be the Universal Century Mode. While this doesn't change the basic gameplay at all, it gives the player scenarios based on both the Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam series. Every major pilot has a storyline that you play through, with mobile suits being acquired at the same pace that they acquire them (So Quattro Bajeena starts off with a Red Rick Dias and eventually picks up the Hyaku Shiki), and the you have to play through from start to finish.
That alone is cool, but not really revolutionary. Especially for certain pilots, who end up dying during the series' (Mind you, this is most of them. Tomino has a reputation for a reason.) So, to alleviate this, playing through certain missions especially well (such as by surviving a pilot's canonical death battle or not killing certain other pilots during their death battles) will unlock alternate routes to take, which in turn lead to alternate ends to the timeline. Sure, the AEUG forces ultimately end up killing off the Titans near the end of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, but their forces are drained and the first Neo Zeon army is in place for an immediate grab for power against the weakened AEUG and Federation forces (This is where ZZ Gundam happens).
However, by playing well, you can find ways to defeat AEUG/Titan forces earlier on in the series, which allows the remaining faction to fight solely against the Neo Zeon movement, leading to better endings for everyone involved. Ultiamtely, it's a fascinating thing to do with a licensed game. It pays the required amount of respect to the original source material by presenting that as the clearly canonical way to play through the game. Then, it offers the player a way to subvert that, and to find a different ending that's better for those involved while not overwriting the canonical materials. In other words, it's a way more respectful treatment of the series than, say, the Zeta Gundam movies, which is a rant for another day.
A day that is approaching, I promise you.
The second reason that this game in particular is coming along on my desert island vacation is because I love Gundam that much. I was not kidding when I said the other day that Mobile Suit Gundam: EXTREME Vs is my most awaited game of the year. That is because I fucking love Mobile Suit Gundam in (most) of its forms. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is the series that got me officially into anime, and so the metaseries as a whole has always been something that has interested me. I like it when it takes on the pseudo-realistic take on war through the eyes of someone who isn't necessarily at the top. I like it when the giant robots punch and shoot and stab each other. I like it when the over zealous drama ends up taking over at times. I just like Gundam and all it's eccentricities and warts. I don't think I'll ever stop being a Gundam fan, regardless of how many shitty series and movies it puts out.
And honestly, I don't really need much more of a reason. This lets me play with suits from three of my favorite series from the franchise. It could be a shitty cover based first person shooter for all I care. I love it, and there's no reason not to love it.
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