Taking a history class is rarely as fun as it is in SD Gundam Battle Alliance
You might not learn much without an existing Gundam knowledge base, though
Games Features Gundam Battle
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Picture it: You’re in the middle of the Civil War. The Union Navy has just rolled out the USS Monitor, an ironclad battleship, to face off against… a Nazi U-boat?! That’s the basic premise of SD Gundam Battle Alliance, but replace boring real-world history with the byzantine mythology of the entire Mobile Suit Gundam brand—dozens of TV shows, movies, video games, manga, novels, and stage plays. (I’m just assuming there are Gundam plays, and if there aren’t, there should be.) [Editor’s somewhat shocked note: There are absolutely Gundam stage plays, for some reason.]
Frankly, the premise might even be too clever for the game it’s tied to, which is a relatively straightforward (if competent and pleasantly satisfying) action game. But after putting a few hours into SD Gundam Battle Alliance, it’s that narrative hook that makes me—an unabashed Gundam nerd with maybe a dozen model kits within reach at this moment—want to play more. The game is broken up into chapters, with each chapter having a few levels based on a big moment from a Gundam thing (for example—assuming this means anything to you—the Gouf battle from The 08th MS Team), but with at least one big historical inaccuracy that is tied to a different level in that chapter (like a villain from a completely different Gundam show that takes place in a different universe joining the battle).
These are called “Break Missions,” and once you finish those, it frees whatever inaccurate thing was stuck there and sends it to what’s called a “True Mission.” In those, you play through the same events in the way they’re supposed to happen, which adds an extra challenge or a new gameplay quirk. In one Break Mission, an escaping ship is destroyed by a bad guy that isn’t supposed to be there, kicking off a boss fight, but in the True Mission, you have to defend the ship to make sure it successfully escapes like it did in the anime that the level is based on.
It’s a fantastically neat gimmick to hang the game on, especially for a franchise with as many interconnected (and not interconnected!) characters and storylines as Gundam. It feels like playing through a history textbook, fighting off any incorrect facts so you can pass a test… but in a cool way, because it has Gundams. I also love the fact that, for a game that’s partially about collecting robots and making them fight, it’s distinctly reverential toward Gundam storylines and characters—a nice change of pace from the annoyingly consumerist leanings of most Gundam tie-ins.
The problem here is that I’m not entirely sure if there’d be any appeal whatsoever for someone who isn’t at least vaguely aware of a majority of the various Gundam properties involved in the game. (Gundam has one canonical main timeline, which consists of tons of stories, as well as alternate universes that use the events and aesthetics of that main timeline to tell different kinds of stories. You can read more about it here.) If you don’t know who Mikazuki Augus, Allelujah Haptism, or Milliardo Peacecraft are even in their regular stories and timelines, why would you care if they suddenly showed up in a different place, doing a different thing?
I guess the answer is that you’d ideally be motivated to go seek out Iron-Blooded Orphans, Gundam 00, and Gundam Wing so you can learn about those characters beyond the little primer videos that Battle Alliance offers, but if the fact that it has Gundams in it didn’t already convince you to watch Gundam Wing, I don’t know if this will do it. If it does, though? Great! Gundam rules, more people should watch Gundam, and—from what I’ve played—Battle Alliance is a neat way to run through Gundam history.
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I saw this game on steam a few days before launch and I was planning to buy it, but after checking again last night, it was reviewed pretty low at 59%. Still debating on it but I’ll wait to see if that changes.
This weekend, I’m planning to dive into Soul Hackers 2, which I downloaded to my PC last night. I know the reviews were lukewarm, but I’ve been itching for some Atlus turn-based action, and at a lean 30 hours or so, this is exactly what I’m looking for.The reason I don’t want to sink too much time into a new JRPG is because I’m already playing a much larger, more sprawling JRPG in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. This one’s pretty great! Lots of content, loads of side stories, a lot of gorgeous world design (even if it’s not as visually striking as XC1 or XC2). One interesting thing about it, though, is that the battle system relies more on what you do outside of combat than inside it: you spend a lot of time managing your team’s class and equipment. Training up your characters in a class allows you to pull skills from it when you put them on other classes, so you can do wacky things like speccing a tank who can heal her allies. Lots of opportunities for cool party comp!
Haven’t seen any coverage of it on here or Kotaku but Guild Wars 2 released on Steam earlier this week, so now’s the time to try it if you haven’t before.
It’s been free to DL from the GW2 website for like 5+ years.
That’s true!And now you can get it through Steam, they’ve finally bundled up the Living World content so you don’t have to buy it all piece by piece too.
Oooh, okay yeah that sounds nice
And they’re giving away season 1 free. I wish the LW stuff had been bundled when I got back into the game over Covid.Updated world bosses, DirectX 11 and a couple other nice upgrades over the past year too.
This week I cleared Cadence of Hyrule, the vastly easier of the two Necrodancer games thanks to persistent inventory items (especially weapons), non-randomized dungeons, and just a tendency not to have 6 different enemy types in the same room, all with different movement rules. It’s a good game for getting familiar with the rules before attempting to take on the actual actual Necrodancer.After finishing that, I went back to Crypt of the Necrodancer and got a run to the Necrodancer on half a heart and still made it a hair away from the final phase, so I think I’ll be able to take him down this weekend on a run with a titanium spear and some decent health refills. Then it goes into the “circle back to when I feel like being a nutty roguelite completionist” pile with Death Road to Canada.Also going through all of the alternate-rule challenges on the new Everdell app. Everdell is absolutely my favorite board game, and having 13 different variations on the rules that favor the AI opponents, with two difficulty levels apiece, is a great way to sharpen my strategies and make me absolutely miserable to play against when we get back to larger, more consistent board game nights. The detection on worker placement is fiddly and selecting cards for an ability to affect sometimes takes several clicks before a card will highlight. Then there are some issues *deep* within the weeds where a Miner Mole is supposed to be able to trigger a Chip Sweep to activate a production card in your own city, and I know that’s legal because there’s like a whole paragraph dedicated to this interaction in the rulebook.So there are some small improvements to make still, but the game’s 4 weeks old, so these things are likely to be fixed in patches before too long. I still feel comfortable giving it a strong recommendation for people who want a good moderate-complexity worker placement/engine building/resource management board game.
Still playing Xenoblade 3…
New Patch for Final Fantasy XIV dropped! I’ve only just now gotten an item level good enough for the new dungeon so much of the MSQ remains unexplored, but I’ve also dipped into the new Island Paradise thing they’ve added. Basically anyone who’s finished Endwalker gets a private island to explore, you can gather materials and build buildings and set your minions free to roam about the land, it’s a chill downtime thing. Really expansive, so far pretty fun. The one issue I have is because of the aforementioned need to get better items, there’s some grinding of the new raids and this is where the game gets tricky. The raid bosses all feature some very elaborate mechanics you have to dodge quickly and I have died *a lot*. And I’d be tempted to steer totally clear but they’ve also got story stuff attached that I want to see. Other than that I’ve played a bit more of No Man’s Sky and there’s some interesting stuff going on here. Normally gameplay is extremely “episodic”, you do a little of one thing then go off and do another, but I managed to have an interesting series of pirate encounters around a single planet- a mix of being targeted, being at an observatory which came under attack, and happening across fugitives- which made later fights more suspenseful as I’d already taken some damage. Also I rode a dinosaur and that was neat. Even if the reviews have been not good for the new Saints Row I feel like I may take a chance on it. May wait and see just a bit longer.
Trying to get through all the new story quests added to Genshin Impact with the Sumeru region’s release (ver. 3.0)….but after lamenting the battle-pass-icization of gaming lately, I spent some time last weekend with a welcome throwback in Dragon Quest XI.I play the game intermittently, and have progressed beyond what would appear to be a halfway point (if you’ve played…you know). The battle system being basically the same as it was 30 years ago is more of a benefit than a detriment, since turn-based combat still gets the job done. I have resisted the temptation to play it like an 8-bit RPG, by not taking manual control of the other members of the party, which of course, means my NPC party blows through MP like it’s not a finite resource. (Do they not understand all those inn visits have a price tag, and the protagonist isn’t made out of money? …it’s like they don’t want me to end the game with near-infinite resources!)Story’s not great, voice acting makes…some choices….but there’s some real retro fun to it.
So, I’m a bit of a digital hoarder. I buy wishlisted games when they a good sale price, even if I know I won’t play it immediately.
One such game I finally got round to playing was Slay the Spire, and it is very good. It’s even fairly playable when I’m tired and run-down, which has been a boon to me lately since I’ve been feeling like shit all week. But man, the unlockable characters are nails – it’s a good thing each run is under an hour.Elden Ring continues to be great. I’ve a sneaking suspicion I’ve been missing questlines by exploring ahead so NPCs don’t trigger properly, which is annoying – half the NPCs I’ve met seem to have simply disappeared. I’ve gotten strong enough now though to take down two demigods that I was stuck on for a while though, so I finally feel like I’m making concrete progress again. I love how different the demigod fights have been so far, it reminds me of Demon’s Souls in how distinct and creative they’ve been. If the game has one flaw, it’s that it could use a bit more variety. The soldiers in Limgrave are little different from the soldiers in Liurnia, and Caelid, and Altus. The catacombs all look and feel pretty much the same, as do the caves, and the tunnels. It’s not as bad as Breath of the Wild, which had one tileset for all the shrines and didn’t even give its mooks different uniforms; but it’s repetitive enough that I find myself just running past most of the overworld enemies.The coming weekend is for some kind of multiplayer bollocks, probably Gartic Phone or Jackbox. People like to shit on social media and Discord, but it’s so hard to get people together in person when you’re all in your 30s and live in different towns.