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.
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.