Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo is an action game based directly on the Mobile Suit Gundam films and series. The game begins at the start of the series and ends at the ending of the second film. The game plays in an action game format with a standard third person view. It features newly hand animated cutscenes that depict events from the original television series as well as a CGI opening depicting a space battle from the One Year War and then a scene of the Gundam destroying several Zaku IIs before being attacked by Char Aznable. It is also the prequel to Mobile Suit Gundam: Encounters in Space. The English dub of the video game features the voices of the actors who were cast for the Mobile Suit Gundam television series as with most games subsequent to the series' dubbing, rather than the English cast of the films. Journey to Jaburo takes place during the One Year War, and depicts the crew of the White Base making their way from the Side 7 sector of space colonies to the Federation headquarters at Jaburo. The game starts at Amuro Ray's home of Side 7, where three Zaku mobile suits attack the Federation's prototype mobile suit weapons. Amuro, in the confusion, fights the Zaku units in the Gundam, and is assigned to the White Base as the Gundam's pilot. After the White Base leaves the colony, it is pursued by Char Aznable, "The Red Comet". Char attacks the White Base during re-entry (where the power of the Gundam's beam rifle was revealed), which diverts them into the Zeon-controlled territory of North America. After going through many Zeon defenses (including Garma Zabi in Seattle), the White Base heads into Asia, where they battle Ramba Ral, an ace pilot who raised Sayla Mass when she was a child. After Ramba Ral commits suicide by jumping into Gundam's hand with a grenade, the White Base crew makes their way to Belfast for repairs. After they leave Belfast, they eventually make it to Jaburo, where Char's "Mad Angler" squadron finds the location of the base, and launches a massive attack to conquer it. The Zeon forces are beaten back, and the White Base, now dubbed the "13th Autonomous Mobile Squadron", heads out into space.
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There are good points. The visuals are more than up to snuff 20 years down the line, thanks to some graphical tricks. The haze in desert levels is awesome, foliage in forests is thick and adds a layer to the usual rhythm of combat, and the in-game cutscenes are just cool overall. Music from 0079 is present, and gives the whole game some authenticity - playing through the anime's story is one thing, but hearing its tracks while you're charging through enemy mechs makes it all a little more bearable.
Journey to Jaburo is not that fun, but it is a faithful adaptation of 0079. It's also a companion piece to the much better Encounters in Space, and suffers as a result. Worth playing? Probably not, unless you're a big fan of the Universal Century timeline.
Journey to Jaburo covers (roughly) the first half of the original anime, starting with Amuro activating the RX-78-2 Gundam on Side-7 and concluding with the defense of Jaburo on Earth. Although the game is only 9 missions long and arcade-like in pace and structure, a decent amount of key battles are covered and animated cutscenes do a serviceable job of connecting them. Sure, you're missing stuff like the salt arc, jumping onto white base, Chad Aznable laughing, and some major moments are touched on so briefly that they might be difficult to parse for the uninitiated, but when you're trying to truncate a space opera to fit in the confines of a PS2 game, you gotta make some cuts.
You could make the argument that Journey to Jaburo should've been more comprehensive by covering the White Base crew's return to space, but given how awkward the controls are, I do not want to think about how the Gundam would handle in zero gravity.
The RX-78-2 feels like a tank, and on some level that's appropriate. The whole "real robot" genre is built on these mechs being actual pieces of military hardware, so moving around should feel laborious to some degree. That's fine, but it starts to come apart with how often inputs are misread and eaten, a result of all control styles mapping movement to the D-pad. If you don't ride the very edge of a directional button, you might turn when you don't want to, and sometimes double-tapping to dash in a direction just doesn't work and your mobile suit stands in place like a dumbass. It is somehow both too sensitive and not responsive enough.
Slight errors when orienting yourself mid-battle is punished hard. The Gundam can't take much of a beating, and is thoroughly outclassed defensively and offensively by Zeon's frontline grunts. It is certainly the case in canon that Zeon was putting out suits that were sturdier than the Gundam by the end of the One Year War, with Amuro's talents as a newtype compensating to such a degree that he eventually became bottlenecked by the machine itself. That said, a Zaku-I should not take 30 seconds of mashing the attack button over and over again to blow up.
You can't lead your shots either, which effectively renders the Gundam's beam rifle useless, especially against fighter jets. You can be perfectly locked on but whiff every shot because you're stuck shooting where they were, and in missions where you're tasked with defending the White Base, watching its health tick down because of a limitation in the way the game is designed is irritating. Maybe I'm more irked by this than I ought to be, because playing this off my PS2's hard drive resulted in numerous crashes, particularly when trying to reload a mission after a game over.
This came to a head with the final mission, which despite how brisk all the others are, feels like it drags. You have to clear out several basic mobile suits over two attack phases, then go toe-to-toe with Char who hits like a truck and is so squirrely you can scarcely keep a lock on him. When you do take him out, you're (literally) smacked with another boss fight against a mobile armor that can stunlock you to death with its main canon. Fun. There's a whole secondary gameplay mode that unlocks when you beat the story and despite the fact that the core campaign is so short, I don't want to play it. I've been told it's better and requires more strategic thinking, but like, it's going to control the same and I've had enough of what Jaburo is putting down.
I rented this when it came out and at the time could only stomach up to the second mission before I took it back. As an adult who has been micro-dosing bad games to build up a tolerance, I was able to beat it and find some appreciation for its arcade-like structure - I don't even mind its length and view it as a positive quality - but it's so rough and unrefined that I can't see myself picking it up ever again.
One of these days, I'm gonna end up decking Bright.