[108]

I, tim rogers, am officially the first person in the world to play Gundam Musou, so here are my impressions.

First of all, the game case is surprisingly small. I'd say an inch shorter than the DVD cases we grew up with. I asked for the game by name at the counter of the Yodobashi Camera in Ueno, and the girl put it down on the counter and stared me blankly in the forehead.

「ガンダム無双はプレーステーション３専用ソフトです。ご確認お願いします。」
"Gundam Musou is a game exclusively compatible to the PlayStation 3 hardware. Please confirm?"

I'm not even kidding.

I looked down at the game. There it was, in its little case. I opened my mouth, closed it, and looked up.

"Um. Yes?"

She immediately flipped it over and scanned it.

"Do you have a point card?"

"Um, yes, actually."

I struggled with my wallet for my point card. My wallet these days is turgid as a garden hose, fat with money. It was hard to get that point card out of there. The girl gritted her teeth at me. She took the point card and scanned it.

"Would you like to use points, or store points?"

"I'll use points," I said.

She pressed a button.

"That'll be 6,200 yen."

"Excuse me?"

"You have 800 yen worth of points on your card."

Wait, I thought, didn't I have like 40,000 points stored up?

Ohhhh, I realized -- that's my Bic Camera point card.

"That'll be 6,200 yen."

"Wait, can we, uh, not use points? Can you store points instead?"

She sighed, ripped the whole transaction, and started over. I thought she was going to ask me to confirm that I was buying a PlayStation 3 game again. She didn't. She went on in silence. I thought I should say something.

"It's just, I thought I had points. I'm sorry. I was thinking about my Bic Camera point card--"

She cut me off: "You can't use your Bic Camera point card here at Yodobashi Camera."

"Yes, I know that--"

"That'll be 7,029 yen."

"Oh okay--"

"By using a credit card, you sacrifice two percent of points. Is this acceptable?"

"Yes, yes."

She didn't even tape my bag shut.

I was carrying my guitar (long story) so I had to struggle to get the game into my backpack. While I was doing this, a girl strutted up to the adjacent register and asked for Gundam Musou.

"Gundam Musou is a game exclusively compatible to the PlayStation 3 hardware. Please confirm?"

The girl looked down, and then up.

"Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? Really!?!"

She folded up her wallet and stammered for a few seconds.

*

Gundam Musou sure feels a lot like a PlayStation 2 game. I guess that's kind of nice. The Famitsu spreads initially bragged that the game would TELL THE FULL STORY of Gundam, with the HISTORICAL KNOW-HOW ONLY OMEGA FORCE, DEVELOPERS OF DYNASTY WARRIORS, CAN POSSIBLY POSSESS. I guess, huh? "Historical know-how", I suppose, means that before each battle there's a long dialogue scene consisting of talking heads and a map over a shitty blue/gray gradient background. I suppose this is how Napoleon planned his conquests. Maybe if he'd ditched the gradient in favor of a solid color, he'd have won Waterloo and we'd be speaking French over here, right now.

I had hoped the game would teach me about Gundam. I am hopelessly behind on my Gundam mythology, and when I heard this game would tell THE COMPLETE LEGACY (also THE FULL LEGEND), I got kind of excited, and anticipated big epic struggles with tasteful, minimalistic cutscenes dripping with drama. Instead, it's talking heads before the battle and bleating radio chatter during the battle. I honestly can't tell who's who. Oh, well.

The game, as a game, is still pretty solid. I've mostly ignored every Dynasty Warriors game since Dynasty Warriors 2 on PS2, which I considered at the time to be kind of the grunge rock music of videogames -- it created a genre out of parts that had existed forever, only it did so with a certain kind of satisfaction-oriented crunch. Dynasty Warriors 2 is all about just killing everything. I'm sure that, as the series developed, they added all these strategic elements and stuff. You run from sector to sector, zone to zone, killing enemies and "securing" territories. This means that the color of said areas on the map changes from red to blue or what have you. It's not a bad deal, overall. In Gundam Musou it works even better, because the characters are all piloting robots, and it makes weird sense that if you kill enough of them in a sector you can weaken their "forcefield" or whatever. When you're just dealing with guys with spears and/or horses, it doesn't make any logical sense. What would it be, then, "morale" or something? I mean, I am in no way condoning research into "defensive" technologies that would make the giantest robot in a squadron two hundred strong explodable by a single low-level pea-shooter bullet if his captain and forcefield bearer had been destroyed. As a game gimmick, I guess it works.

People have been telling me vaguely that Dynasty Warriors has added "strategy elements" in recent installments, and I think I kind of get what they mean -- instead of just running from one end of the battlefield to the other and killing the boss, in Gundam Musou you have to run back and forth between sections as enemies reclaim them. Only the context works better here than it could in Dynasty Warriors, because here, we're all in robots, with communications systems, so it's feasible that we would know there's trouble "all the way over there". Also, sometimes your allies will fall under attack and need to be rescued, so you have to soar to their location.

"Under attack" is a bit misleading, though -- it's kind of frustrating and out-of-trance-snapping when you soar across a battlefield under honking messages that your teammate is ABOUT TO DIE, only to see that he's got 75% of his health left and is standing there in front of a guy who's not even attacking. Likewise, it's hilarious as hell, when you claim an enemy area and your troops drop down from the sky to take up defensive stations, and there are no enemies there, and you stare at a lone ally for fifty seconds until, out of nowhere, he swings his sword, and then resumes standing guard. If the enemies show up, they'll all stand around looking at each other. It's a little fake and weird; they have the graphics right, though the dynamics are still way, way off.

Now, the enemies that do attack do so pretty well, yeah.

Knowing nothing about Gundam, it's hard to say, though yeah, apparently there are a lot of popular characters, and it seems that they're all here, all riding painstakingly rendered mecha. They talk over the comm, they yell at you and taunt you. You might attack one only to see the screen freeze and a dialogue pop in. Yeah! That's more like it! The dialogue progresses over a freeze-framed, super-zoomed-in image of your robot slashing the bad guy's. Yes! They taunt each other, as their swords are clashed, and then it snaps back into the game, and you have some kind of armor bonus. Man, the rival captains are tough, too. They actually hit you. You have to defend, and jump, and shoot.

Shooting is nice, by the way. The more powerful your guns get, the nice it gets. I'd like to see Koei make something a tiny bit more inspired by Earth Defense Force, even.

So yeah, sometimes you run away from these tough bad guys, because you don't have the energy to take them on. You can always see them as the big red square on the map, usually moving around in circles and not conquering the planet or whatever.

And sometimes, through some miracle we might as well call "strategy", you manage to get three of your captains / generals / whatevers around the big bad guy and you whip his ass.

I will tell you this -- as a man who majored in Chinese historical literature in college because he liked it, and as a man who really doesn't know jack shit about Gundam, I can consider Gundam Musou more successful an endeavor than Dynasty Warriors. This is because the Chinese generals of legend that appear in Dynasty Warriors have never been seen, in the flesh, by any living human. They can only be represented in the game by men with imaginations. When you see their icon prowling on the map, you know their name; when you approach them for battle, well, there they are: It's Koei's Lu Bu. In Gundam, when you encounter Ray Amuro on the map -- hey! There he is! That's his robot, "Gundam", exactly as it looks in the manga / animation / model kits / other videogames. Lu Bu or Cao Cao are renderings -- these Gundams are the real thing, because they were always fictional to begin with.

I love the skill system. It's really great. You get parts for killing major opponents, and then you can just plug and play them prior to a mission.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this game (aside from the fact that there are two modes called "Official Mode" and "Original Mode" and they both seem to possess the same flow, just with different characters and missions) is that the box shows these high-resolution CG Gundams, and as soon as you open it up, the disc art is hard-edged, high-contrast, primary colored 1979 Gundam character designs. It's a really excellent clash.

Anyway, yeah, three out of four stars so far.

And . . . way better than that zero star piece of trash they released on launch day. I can't believe that shit got fucking released. What's more, I can't believe Musou and that garbage (2 frames per second, yeah, TWENTY menus before you can enter a single battle) got the same score in Famitsu. For the Lord's sake.

Shit.

Anyway, yeah, that's my epic review, typed up over the course of five minutes before lunch.

In closing, Gundam Musou runs at 720p resolution only, and is exclusively compatible to the PlayStation 3 videogame hardware, until they make an Xbox 360 version, which I suppose they will.
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[Endless]

I'm interested. But can we please just turn this into a "we hate the ps3 thread"? It's easier.

Also, I never understood why people liked Dynasty Warriors games. But for some reason, it seems more justified when Gundam is involved. Is that odd?

[v84j3gs2uc7ns4]

[Mr. Mechanical]

I enjoyed reading this, though I can't say I've ever really enjoyed Dynasty Warriors (only played part 5 with some friends) that much and I'm not really into Gundam, like, at all. Still, nice to hear that you're enjoying it so far. Be sure to update us when the final crushing third of the game sets in and it somehow becomes unbearably terrible. I have no evidence that this will happen, just a hunch that I'm pretty sure of.
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[Mr. Business]

[108]

[108]

And you would be right, because what you think is what you are, yes.

Yes. This game is a wonderful framework for more production values to be poured into, resulting in a spectacular game. Koei, Bandai, and AGENCY SUNRISE are just not willing to do that, however. To them, it's a business first and a piece of entertainment third. (I don't even want to say what it is second.) They could include hours of full-blown hi-def anime cut scenes between battles to connect the stories together, though that would, firstly, violate certain agreements that exist to keep the animations available in super-expensive box sets for years to come, and secondly, it would ruin the game for people just wanting to smash shit, and thirdly, it would raise the shit-smashing up onto a pedestal which would ultimately make the whole enterprise look kind of dinky.

The best we can get, then, is the aforementioned character rivalries. The deepest levels of appreciation of this game are simply not accessible to the uninitiated. You need to know and love all of the characters to fully "get it", I guess. Though yeah -- the cut scenes that splash in when you first clash swords with a rival are pretty great. They're more than enough for, uhmmm, the Super Robot Wars crowd. And there's another voiced cutscene when you defeat said rival. These pop in and out seamlessly during the battles.

As cheesy as it seems on paper, I really love that you never see the characters outside their ROBOTS aside from when they're talking heads by dialogue windows. I love the contrast between the "REALISTIC" look of the game and the, you know, smooth anime portraits.

In other news: You know what would elevate one of these MUSOU games to a whole new plateau? The concept of friendly fire. Like, seriously. If I could accidentally kill my own guys (and be heavily penalized for doing so) it would add a new layer of groove to the game.

In closing, the music in this game is fucking great. It's Fucking Videogame Music if I ever heard fucking videogame music.
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

is it fucking video game rock music or fucking video game techno music or do they just go all out with whatever seems like it would work at the moment?
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[Persona-sama]

Requesting pictures of HD Gundams and samples of music.
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[v84j3gs2uc7ns4]

[108]

[droog]

[psiga]

"The more powerful your guns get, the nice it gets."

Slip an extra 'r' in there somewhere, though, yeah: Good job talkin'bout that game, there.
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[Maztorre]

[Hubz]

Sounds like good stuff to me, maybe I'm the only one but nothing like coming home from a day at work to slaughter a hoard of azn's in any of the Dynasty Warrior games. But to be honest I don't feel like 4 or 5 really added much if anything "Strategic" to the games as I still just run around and basically slaughter anybody that moves.

The most important question I think we all know is.. does shit explode? Cause if so I'm all over this game. And I thought MGS4 was the only reason to get a PS3.

[google]

My favourite part:

[icycalm]

I had planned to be the first person to review this, but Rogers beat me to it. However, his review is still not finished, and it doesn't have, you know, SCREENSHOTS and VIDEOS and a cool header, so I'd say that when I write mine I'll end up getting MORE HITS. :)

[Mr. Mechanical]

[icycalm]

You've opened up a big can of worms with your post there, Mr. Mech. I am not sure whether this forum can handle the ramifications of my reply, but I will post it anyway.

Tim's review was indeed fun to read, as are all of his reviews. The problem, however, with this review is that it's not so much about this PARTICULAR game, as about some observations that Tim wants to make about videogames in general (which would be better off going in a separate article), as well as some random comments about the circumstances of his life (which would be better off in his blog).

Now some people find that sort of thing interesting, but the appeal is extremely limited. If someone tried to write 5,000 reviews in that style they'd run out of random observations long before they reached the 100-reviews mark. That's why Tim has only written, what, two dozen reviews over a four-year period?

Now a few people, like yourself, like to read reviews for fun, and that's why you find Tim's reviews enjoyable. Most people, however, get their fun from actually playing games -- not from reading about them -- and I count myself as one of them. (The kind of enjoyment you derive from a, let's say, NGJ review, I get from reading a short story collection.)

I do not write reviews with the goal of amusing people, although I like to think that there are parts of my reviews which readers find amusing. My goal is to dissect the game as expertly as possible, and reveal to the reader which parts of it work and which don't, and the reasons behind that. So I don't expect anyone to read one of my reviews if they have no interest in the game in question, or if they never plan on playing it.

Those who are really into games and want to understand them are my target readership. I am not trying to attract those who are only looking for amusing anecdotes to pass the time.


edit: I wrote the above with all due respect to Tim. I hope he'll be able to see the sincerety in my opinion, or else simply ignore it.

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr Mustache]

I enjoy reading the numbers.
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The people are like wool to me

[alice]

that was an awfully cute story.

I'd hate to see how the dubbers at ADV would have murdered it.

[Levi]

I don't understand how this game could work. Gundams are...clunky, and not as nimble as warriors from ancient China/Japan embued with preternatural combat skill.

[icycalm]

[aerisdead]

[Toups]

For the record, I find icy's game reviews to be entertaining, well-written, and insightful.
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[Cryo]

icy got me wanting to purchase a 360 for virtua tennis 3.
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PS3 - Cryoh
X360 - Cryoh

[Rud31]

Now I feel totally justified in owning a PS3.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[v84j3gs2uc7ns4]

[Cacophanus]

Tim's pretty much spot on with this, it's good fun. Simplistic but eminently satisfying. The Gundam aspect of the game is treated well though and they wisely made the choice of not going to town on the mobile suits and instead focused on rendering a fuck load of enemy mecha. It's still fundamentally a Musou game though, just Gundam themed.

Oh, Gundam mecha do move super ninja fast. Not sure why people were thinking they ever moved slowly.
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[Toups]

[Cacophanus]

[aerisdead]

Invariably?
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"Did you read that mr. ignorant new games journalist? YOU JUST DON'T FUCKING GET IT. "
-Alex Kierkegaard, better known as "Pikachu", irrationally responding to the wonderful gentleman who wrote the post you just read.

[Maztorre]

invariably

[Hubz]

Tim's reviews might not be everyone's cup of tea but I myself always enjoy his writings. I think to say the appeal of his stuff is extremely limited is a bit unfair. In the end, it's to each their own I think. If you enjoy his writings then read them, if you don't then stay away. I think we all by now know what we're getting into when we start reading something written by him. I enjoy his style, I enjoy other styles, I don't have to subscribe to just one theory of thought.

Not really directing this at Pikachu either just kinda felt the need to put that out there. Because really from his post I am understanding that he's not so much criticizing Tim as he is explaining his style compared to Tim's which I'm sure has a following of its own.

[icycalm]

[icycalm]

[aerisdead]

[icycalm]

aerisdead, I don't seem to be able to help you with your question.

I am sorry.

To be honest I don't even understand what you are asking anymore, and to be even more honest I don't really care.

[Hubz]

Solid points. You're right about many games don't really need much written about them as they usually are just a clone of some sort with a new feature or two thrown in that can be discussed shortly. I think you should go for it just to experiment. Hell what you describe is one of the main reasons I've pretty much killed all my gaming magazine subscriptions... far too much fluff not to mention bad writing and jokes. When I was a kid I had the time and didn't mind using it to pore over the reviews and articles that could've been dramatically trimmed down. Nowadays I'm a quick glancer so what you're talking about could be very good if done well.

[aerisdead]