Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3

Let me just begin with one of my favourite, rather hilarious quotes from Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3. It goes like this: “In Japan, before a battle, I hear a solider spends the night alone with his weapon.” That’s just an example of the game’s laughable dialogue – this title is a bizarre mix of cringe-worthy narrative wrapped up in what should be a repetitive gameplay experience; however this title instead draws you in with extensive levels of customization, the ability to kick several hundred enemies squarely into next week all at once and ultimately provides a  passably fun, but extremely flawed, experience for Gundam fans and other players alike.

My Suit's Mobile.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series of both Gundam and Dynasty Warriors, the former is a highly popular anime series involving ‘mobile suits’ (giant mechs that people use to fight one another) while the latter is the highly popular battle-simulation series where you hammer the buttons of your controller into submission and squarely beat everything in sight within an inch of its life. Combining these two together provides an interesting combination – the mobile suits of Gundam are a perfect fit for the Dynasty Warriors experience and there’s a real sense of satisfaction to be had from jumping in your favourite mech and raining down death upon your enemies using laser swords.

That’s exactly what you’ll be doing for the meat of the gameplay experience too. In practically every mission your aim in this game is to secure several different ‘fields’ that are currently occupied by enemies. To do this, you’ll pilot your mech, enter a field, battle around 300 enemies, deplete the enemies’ field gauge and then take over that field before moving onto the next one. It sounds like it should be immensely repetitive (and, at times, it is) but the customization and the plethora of different mobile suits available to you to play around with (each with unique attacks) means you can experiment and upgrade as you see fit. This in turn helps to keep the gameplay quite fresh – most of the time you’ll simply be bashing square and triangle to take over areas, but over time you can unlock new skills, attacks and even components that up your strength, speed etc for your favourite mobile suit.

To give the gameplay some semblance of structure, Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 includes a significant amount of different mission types, each with their own purpose. Truth be told they’re all pretty much ‘drop into battlefield, kill everything in sight’ missions, but there’s several different categories that do different things. For example completing a ‘Special’ mission might net you a lot more experience/pilot points than a story mission might, whereas a ‘Friendship’ mission helps to improve your interactions with a partner pilot in game. These interactions with different pilots allow you to call upon them in battle and unleash a timely ‘partner strike’ – ideal for getting out of those tricky situations by calling in your friend who then proceeds to blast everything with his laser cannon.

The Game's Mechs Look Pretty Sweet.

Along with your partner stike, your Gundam also has the ability to unleash a special ‘SP’ attack that is far, far stronger than any of your other moves. This is unleashed by filling up your SP gauge by attacking enemies, closely followed by unleashing the move by pressing circle. Most Gundam pilots have a unique attack assigned to their SP gauge, which is also further upgradeable into much more powerful versions of the attack as time progresses. When it gets more powerful, unleashing this move is brilliant to see as it literally can wipe out a hundred enemies in a second. There are also along with these moves your standard combos (also upgradeable) as well as a boost jump/dash move and also quicktime clashes with other mobile suit pilots. This occurs when you both attack each other at the same time – the screen will then flash and you must input a string of commands in order to knock your opponent off balance.

The enemies themselves are an extremely weak point in this game. They’re all pretty much exactly the same, and all can be beat by simply spamming a combo over and over again until they’re dead (and this includes the vast majority of the bosses as well). The game really suffers in terms of variation here, but I assume this is to allow you to kill massive amounts of enemies at once without much trouble, making the game quite a breeze to play at times.

Characters are upgraded through three different ways. The first is to actually use that pilot in battle and achieve as much experience as possible by eradicating enemies. At the battle’s climax (even if you lose) you’ll then earn some experience points, along with some of the game’s currency. This money can then be used to buy new Mobile Suit parts, Mobile suit upgrades, new skills and also can be used to buy training for your character, which will bump he/she up a few levels depending on how much you spend. To be honest the currency system is extremely flawed as you seem to get hardly anything for a lot of effort, but it is nice to have the option there to customize pretty much everything as you see fit. You’ll also earn plans for new suits as you go along, which can be sold/upgraded as you see fit. However in order to use these you’ll need to buy the correct license, and these do not come cheap at all. You’ll also need to unlock the license in the first place by playing as a certain pilot, so prepare for some significant hard graft as there are a lot of characters and missions within this title.

When There's a Robot With a Samurai Sword, You Know You're In Trouble.

It is here that one of my major gripes lies with the game – the ability to gain new mechs is completely marred by the fact that you can’t pilot them once you’ve bought them, creating a frustrating experience as you wait for the right license to appear in the shop. Until that time you’re simply stuck with your currently assigned mobile suit, which can only be upgraded in terms of specs about three to four times before it tells you it’s fully upgraded. It feels stifling, and could easily have been much better as a system.

I must admit, I have absolutely no idea about Gundam lore. The series is an entirely new experience to me, and this, to be honest, draws me away from having any clue on what’s going on in the game’s narrative. This game is made purely with the Gundam fan in mind – there’s no backstory, no introduction to characters outside of about two sentences worth of bad dialogue and it can leave you feeling quite out of your depth in terms of the storyline.  Naturally the main type of gamer interested in this title will be the typical Gundam fan, however if you’re not familiar with the series this can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around, as the game assumes you know what its talking about at every turn.

This in turn leads to a whole plethora of different characters that are all strangely named, talking in some rather dull cutscenes between battles. It’s literally just pictures of the characters and a dialogue box, and most of the time whatever they say is so cheesy it practically reeks of farmhouse cheddar.  This extend to within the battle where characters will inexplicably talk to each other via their Gundam suits, with their messages never seeming to be related to what the other is saying. One such example would be a character stating ‘We are Gundam!’ before a mechanic scolds him for no apparent reason, sounding angry. They simply don’t work as a concept and it makes the entire narrative feel incredibly disjointed and confuses at pretty much every turn. I imagine you’ll pretty much have to know Gundam insight out to have any hope of following it – for me I just sat there with a blank look on my face, not quite knowing how to grasp the concepts being presented to me.

In terms of presentation, Gundam fans will love the new ‘cel-shaded’ look that really captures the essence of the Anime within game. The Mobile Suits themselves are excellently presented and really differ from one another (and there’s a lot of them), but the environments the battles take place in can only be described as bland. Each one is literally just an environment made up of metal, sand or ice, covered in invisible walls and about eight different fields which you must take over. There’s also a small number of anime-esque cutscenes included within the package which are pretty good to watch, but then you end up straight back in your bland battlefield ready to fight the boss whom you’ll easily kill by repeatedly pressing square and triangle.

If you’re not satisfied with 300 missions plus of doing pretty much the same thing constantly, Gundam 3 also allows you to jump online and play missions with a friend. These are pretty much the same as any other mission except you have the added bonus of being able to communicate with your ally as you wish, instead of it being handled by the AI. This allows for some strategy to be deployed but to be honest you can easily take over all of the enemy areas simply by entering them and raining down hell using the dreaded square/triangle combo closely followed by an opportunistic circle attack.

The Verdict

While Gundam 3 has some addictive qualities such as upgraded your mobile suit/feeling superior on the battlefield, the game itself is repetitive and has an incredibly confusing storyline. Invisible walls, bad implementation of menus and a strange currency system also help detract from the fun. For Gundam fans, they’ll lap up all the references within, but for others (unless you love being a giant robot with laser swords) there’s not a whole lot to offer you here.

Written by GamerGaia Senior Editor Dan 'Mobile Suit Master' Curtis

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