Hogan Reviews

After the marathon that was Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, and before the equally long game I’m playing now, I wanted a couple of smaller games to wind down to. As if hearing my call this game was dramatically reduced to the point where it would have to be REALLY bad to not be worth the price. The “gamble” paid off, as while I wouldn’t rank the game as a great it did keep me entertained for a couple of weeks. Let’s take a look!

Background:

SD Gundams be battlin’!

SD Gundam Battle Alliance was released on August 25^th 2022 for the PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, XBOX One, XBOX Series and PC. It’s among the first SD Gundam games to get a proper worldwide release but far from the first SD Gundam game as the series dates all the way back to the 8-bit generation…

Gameplay:

Death Army grunts running around underneath an ELS ship?! Madness!

The core gameplay is a simple hack and slash style experience, with three categories of melee, ranged and somewhere in between and each having regular melee and ranged attacks that are always available with each suit having special attacks in either category that needs to either be recharged or reloaded, along with a big flashy ultimate move that you charge up by doing damage to opponents. Nothing ground-breaking, in fact the whole UI looks like it’s copied and pasted from the Extreme VS. games, but it’s fun enough to travel across and map and take out mobs / other “ace pilots” or giant mobile armours. You get bonus damage from attacking from behind and can reduce or avoid taking damage all together by blocking or parrying / perfect parrying respectively, and the bigger boss units has a stagger gauge that’s all the rage nowadays, giving you more damage if you manage to deplete it. Every Ace you down you get some blueprints for their suit, or a rival suit connected to it, allowing you to unlock them for play (though some of the bigger ones require a lot of blueprints, so prepare to grind the same missions a fair few times to get them!)

When you unlock a suit you can assign it and its pilot to be one of two partners, who go out into battle with you, potentially revive you if you’re KO’d and level up “bond points” the more you take them out. Outside of combat you can upgrade your favourite suit with points collected during gameplay to make them stronger as well as give them upgrades in slots that give them boosts in HP, boost, melee or ranged attack. So if there is a suit you really connect with you can spend a good while making it as good as possible, though much like the Extreme VS games melee units are at an extreme disadvantage compared to ranged ones unless you REALLY know what you’re doing…

The only real mode is the story mode, where you play through missions of various types (I’ll get to that in the story section…) and can replay harder versions of them when they appear randomly in timed events or by spending yet another collectable resource to access them when you want. They all drop you in and tell you to go somewhere a few times until you defeat the boss, there isn’t a great deal of mission variety, and to be honest not a great deal of level variety either. There is online co-op as well, not that I partook. That’s your lot! It’s why I kind of drifted away from it quite quickly after finishing the story mode, despite there being plenty of suits left to unlock still.

Graphics and Sound:

Cut right in half and yet they’re still having a lovely conversation…

Graphics are… fine. Obviously all the suits are “super deformed”, as the SD will tell you, but the models and lighting do the job. It does feel like it was built for the PS4 and mildly upgraded for the PS5 rather than the other way round though so they won’t impress. I will say some city levels have an impressive amount of destructible environments though.

Sound is good, though as always with this kind of game the soundtrack is mostly songs from the various anime and the voicecast are all veterans again from the various anime shows, so it’s kind of like cheating, but in a guilt-free unavoidable way!

Story:

Mmmmm…. Must have. *sigh*… what the hell are you talking about?!

The story focuses in on a nameless Commander and a programmer called Juno Astarte, both from a made up division of the Earth Federation during the One Year War (original Gundam series) dubbed the “GR Corps.” The two of them are somehow sucked into a digital dimension called the “G Universe”, created by a super intelligent A.I. that has collected data on all the various Gundam timelines and stored them separately in order to create the ultimate Gundam but things start to go awry and pilots and machines from one “data universe” start to cross into others, changing the established history of the timelines. These “Breaks” start to cause errors and too many errors from changing established history with cause some sort of catastrophic collapse or something, so our lead duo are told by an A.I. construct dubbed “Sakura Slash” to head into these anomalies and set history straight.

This is where you get the two different mission types in the game, “Break Missions” allow you to undo the damage to established events, and when they have been fixed you then get to play the “True Missions” of the events (though surely you taking part in the True Missions is just as much an anomaly as the breaks from other timelines, but whatever….) It features all the major UC eras (MSG, Zeta, ZZ, Char’s Counterattack and Unicorn) plus G Gundam, Wing, Seed, 00 and lots of Iron Blooded Orphans, plus some Turn-A but not a lot. Other suits, like from Victory, F91, Crossbone, X and Reconquista in G, are unlockable in the randomly appearing extra missions but don’t actually factor into the story.

Spoilers start here, I guess…

Eventually they start getting attacked by what they assume is another A.I. construct called… I can’t remember, but it later turns out he too is a real human digitised into the G Universe and together, after many “we have to go to the next set of missions like opening another folder in a computer!” scenes, they defeat the A.I. system itself and get send back to their real times.

Spoilers end here, I guess…

The story is the opposite of interesting, the sheer amount of made up jargon they created to justify the “G Universe” idea and concept is staggering, there were paragraphs full of so many phrases and words made up just for this game that it became comical. The fact it’s mostly played straight is impressive really…

Downloadable Content:

Moon Moon is the name of a space colony near the moon, in case you’re wondering… as I would be if I hadn’t played this DLC level up to this point!

There were three DLC packs in total, one featuring Gundam AGE and Gundam Narrative suits and characters, one featuring older SD Gundam suits and suits and characters from Moon Gundam (which was the first I’d ever heard of the series, sounds fun actually!) and finally one that features Graham Aker from a spin-off manga or short story (can’t remember) set after the 00 movie where he’s partially metal thanks to the ELS (another one that was new to me, love it when these big crossover games introduce me to a new part of the series!) and pilots and suits from Gundam Hathaway, which is always fun, love the Penelope Gundam, as I’ve mentioned on this site before. Each pack has two missions, so not an amazing amount of bang for your buck but each mission is on a unique map at least.

There was also a cheaper bonus pack that gave you Suletta Mercury and the Aerial Gundam from “The Witch from Mercury”, making this the first time I’ve played that series in a game, which given how much I liked it was a real treat!

Thoughts Now:

The Witch From Mercury arrives in the Gundam games! … and will appear there pretty much forever, judging by other far less popular shows continuing to make appearances…

SD Gundam Battle Alliance was a fun distraction for a couple of weeks, though if you have more free time than me you may be bothered to unlock all the suits if you really get into it, but honestly it’s pretty shallow. Given I got it for about £10 (or £18-ish post DLC, which was also discounted) I feel like I got my money’s worth but the story is pants and the combat hardly worth mentioning. Not bad, not great. Firmly in the middle.