I love Mobile Suit Gundam, and I love a game I can beat in a single sitting, so Journey to Jaburo ought to be tailor made to my sensibilities. Yet, clunky controls and dull, repetitive gameplay left me with little patience for its whopping two hour long campaign. "White Base is under attack!" Yes, I know that, Sayla. I'd love to help but I'm a little busy shooting this Zaku with twenty fucking bazooka rounds.

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.