Flake has been talking up Dynasty Warriors Gundam Reborn for ages as one of the best Musou games, and I'd been looking for another fairly mindless de-stressing game to play now that I'd finished Starlink, so this game was too perfect to pass up when I came across it for under 800 yen. While I wouldn't say it surpasses Hyrule Warriors as the best modern Musou game, it is a damn close second place that deserves all the praise it gets. I settled in for my first ever PS3 platinum trophy with this baby. In an effort I cannot possibly recommend, I spent over 140 hours getting 100% of the in-game collectable cards (A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF WHICH was grinding the same missions over and over to just kill a certain amount of troops with every single character XP). Couldn't recommend it, but I enjoyed the game enough to slog through that, which says something in itself I suppose XD

As with the other Gundam Musou games, you can play as a myriad of pilots and even more mobile suits. The pilots themselves don't really do anything but add certain passives and skills. Think of them like the character and the mobile suits like the weapons in a normal Musou game. The characters have levels that increase base stats of fight, shot, and defense, as well as certain passive skills that skillpoints can be put into. Every character is different in this way, ultimately, as their max stats and possible skills they can learn are different for every pilot, and each pilot usually has a certain Gundam only they can pilot until you unlock it for free-play with other pilots.

The mobile suits themselves are among the other titanic Musou games for just how many there are. With the exception of one boss character who can't physically move (so there's a good reason you can't play it), every single mobile suit that appears in the game can be unlocked and played for a total count of over 120! They all have quite a bit of difference as well. The big-name Gundams have quite unique and well animated movesets, sure, but even a lot of the smaller, unimportant enemy stooge mechs have meaningful movesets that make them just that much more different to play. Sure, some characters feel quite similar, but on the whole there is a really surprising amount of depth to the differences between each mobile suit, and that is far and away the shining star of this game.

Where the game falls a bit behind Hyrule Musou for me is the stage and map design. The game has an "Official Mode," where you play stages based on the stories of 6 different Gundam series, as well as an "Ultimate Mode," where you play through over 20 "what if" crossover stories between the characters from many series beyond those represented in the Official Mode, usually revolving around some special gimmick for that scenario (like defending an allied ship, or only playing as Newtype characters). While the Official modes are fully VO'd and have some very pretty 3D-animated cutscenes as well, none of the story bits in the Ultimate Mode are voiced, so it's a bit of give and take there.

Official Mode basically has every stage on a different map, or a different take on the same map (different starting locations, restricted to a certain section of a larger map, etc), and while Ultimate Mode doesn't introduce any new stages, it does a pretty good job of not making any maps feel like they're repeating. However, I wouldn't really say this is a good thing, as the biggest reason for this is because so many of the maps are fairly empty and replaceable with one another. It's a symptom the first Gundam Musou game suffered from quite badly as well, and the 4th entry in the series does not escape from.

The combat is as excellent as it's always been, but it's really just as it's always been. The same blocking, dashing, boosting, and melee/ranged attacks that made the first Gundam Musou game a blast are still here, as rockin' as ever, but with a far-expanded cast now. Not really a plus, but certainly not a negative when the game has added like 30+ new characters compared to the 3rd game in the series: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Verdict: Highly recommended. If you're gonna play just one Gundam Musou game, let it be this one. It's easily one of the best spin-off Musou games, and was definitely one of the best Musou games, full stop, at the time of its release. It doesn't quite hit the high of Hyrule Warriors, but it was a Musou entry of a quality heralding the great quality of Hyrule Warriors, and is definitely worth checking out if you need some more Gundam or some more Musou in your life.

The worst sin a musou can commit is making the mere act of bludgeoning peons to death uninteresting, and in this regard DW Gundam Reborn is the antichrist.

DWGR's tutorial introduces you to charged shot attacks (executed by holding down the charge button and releasing) that instantly kill peons and start chain reactions, on top of doing respectable damage to officers. They are, unfortunately, the best tool in every single Mobile Suit's kit, which leaves the entire game feeling super samey and the suits themselves feeling like extraneous little skins.
Not helping this is that, perhaps due to most suits using beam weaponry, the actual combos available all feel decidedly weak even by the standards of early-mid 2010s musous. Especially on a sound design front, where everything is diet Star Wars wooshes. Not sure what happened; I used to rate this higher than DWG3 but combat in THAT game feels like Monster Hunter in comparison.

There's also that trademark Bandai Namco cheapness on display that leaves this feeling like a port of an arcade title.

There's a lot of archive dialogue in use, meaning characters whose sole narrative contribution is 'dying' will often scream their heartfelt tragic final words in the midst of you clearing through like 300 dudes a second on your way to murder a teenager and end the level.
Dialogue from the main cast was done by the VAs and it shows because not a single sole providing voices to this game gives a shit. Shuichi Ikeda either wasn't being paid enough or simply stopped caring, because all of his voicework here sounds like he's been AI-synthed.
Lastly... God the music is so bad. I know licensing music from animanga properties is hellish unless you're called Cygames, but what they gave us is impactless generic music that tries to vaguely recreate the mood of Gundam music and fails miserably.
Genuinely, when I say 'it's bad' I don't just mean that I dislike it, I mean that on a technical level it's a mess that's barely fit for TV commercials let alone Gundam. It's cheap, repetitive music without any sort of motif or cohesivenes that sounds like each track was made by separate composers.

DWGR features a whole bunch of story modes recreating official Gundam stories and they're all terrible. Only the melodrama of Gundam is preserved, nothing else, and the stories are so truncated that their inclusion is somewhat baffling. The SD Gundam arena fighter has a better story than this.
DWGR's format does not support Gundam very well, with each stage just being a series of capture objectives interspersed with bored/archive dialogue and the odd officer fight. In attempting to retell Gundam stories - especially MSG - they've inadvertently made it funny. It's telling then that the format only really works for Unicorn.
Looping back to the music, each story reuses the same 5-6 tracks so you'll get TIRED of that one exact 'sad song' by the time Zeta Gundam's arc has concluded, and it's only the second story arc.

I'll admit that this game's quality or lack thereof is fascinating to me, because the last game was quite frankly the kind of opulent vanity project that I wish more anime franchises got. Not quite Koei's Attack on Titan 2 levels of insane (or enjoyable), but up there.

This, though? This is ChatGPT's Universal Century.

Official mode clear - again, this counts because it's the mode which actually has proper cutscenes, voices and the like. For someone who isn't familiar with the Gundam series, it's a surprisingly good introduction to the story, though the later stories are a bit convoluted. The game itself is a lot of fun, though it lacks challenge because the charged shot is far too powerful. I liked the Gundam 3 system of small energy bars and Extreme Versus-style "forces remaining" gauges, keeping you on your toes. The music this time around is pretty bad too: not because the music itself is bad (it's mostly classic Gundam themes) but because they're weak arrangements. That said, there's a finite amount of TM Revolution I can take per day...