There are a ton of fantastic Gundam games that never saw an English release, and I am hoping that Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered is the first step in an initiative to bring some of those titles to the West. This Vita title was chosen to give new life, but was it the best choice to pick as their best foot forward?
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered
Developer: Artdink
Price: $39.99
Platform: Steam, Switch
MonsterVine was supplied with PC code for review
I have fond memories of the PSP, despite not getting into the Vita, I got mine from the Playstation Store in San Francisco on a family trip, and I remember getting a bus pass and feeling so cool cruising around with headphones on, playing games, listening to the limited music that came on it and being independent of my family on that trip. I remember playing SOCOM in bed online on the tiny handheld and thinking, “It can’t get cooler than this.” But playing this game has brought back some reminders about the idea of “handheld” design at times and how it feels removed from that intended environment.
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny was originally released on June 7th, 2012, in Japan for the PlayStation Vita but never made its way over here. It’s a third-person mission-based game where you pilot a wide variety of giant robots to accomplish different objectives in each of them. They are all pretty short and mostly confined to smaller spaces, so they are generally pretty snappy. You go through the story of SEED, its sequel SEED Destiny, and I was surprised to see a lot of the side content for SEED, like the Astray manga stuff, was also available. I am an outspoken SEED hater when it comes to the anime, but I love a lot of the designs in the SEED universe, so this was a great thing to see for me since I’ve never really delved into the events of that side story content.
There is a huge amount of variety in Mobile Suits to choose from in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered, and that might be one of its biggest strengths. From grunt suits that get destroyed en masse, all the way up to the suits that the main characters across the series use, most of them from SEED get proper representation. Suits that have the gimmick of transforming can actually do it and cruise the battlefield, some suits can switch out their backpacks to change their equipment loadout mid-fight to fit the situation, and other suits generally have their gimmicks.
Beyond the fun of experimenting with different suits, the combat is a bit middling. It comes after the era of Gundam games that felt like proper mecha with some weight, but before we started to really hit the extreme speeds of things like Gundam Versus, and landed somewhere in the middle. Sometimes it felt reminiscent of smacking together toys as a kid, where things just move without having any real momentum or weight. The ability to tune your bots to increase their stats adds a nice touch of customization, but I was able to quickly just max out everything for the suits I wanted to use quickly so it was rare I was making choices that felt meaningful and more like I was checking off marks as I filled the stats up.
I was cruising along through the story mode at a pretty good pace, watching story segments of static 3D models being scooted around, destroying enemies, and saving the day for a few hours. The short missions didn’t give things time to breathe occasionally, but like I said, at least it was snappy, and it was introducing new suits for me to play with at a decent rate. You play as a nameless self-insert pilot that doesn’t contribute too much, but hey, you get to level him up and customize him. But as I neared the end of the first anime’s story, things started to have weird, big spikes in difficulty that felt disproportionate.
Ok, so let’s pivot to some of the side missions I’ve unlocked, maybe that will give me some new suit or something to give me the edge I need. Even quicker than before, I was met with oppressive battles that didn’t even give me the chance to progress. I’m pretty good at action games, I like to think, so I started to think about what was going on to cause this weirdly imbalanced sense of progression.
Of course, it’s a handheld game. It’s built for those morning commutes, those short under 30 minute gameplay sessions. That is why the missions are so short and snappy, something you often saw in handheld games from that era. Another reason they are is that Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered wants you to grind. These big jumps in difficulty basically force you to just make your numbers go up without much chance to do otherwise, due to how slugging the battle system begins to feel under the lightest bit of pressure.
I love Gundam; there is an absolute treasure trove of Japanese-only games in the franchise that are ripe for a translation and a touch-up. Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered looks great, but suffers from the intended design being brought to a different platform. I really want to see them do more of this, but I worry that this wasn’t the best first choice to make a splash in the gaming community to fund more.
The Final Word
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered provides a decent enough framework for fun, but the battle system’s flaws become more and more apparent under any amount of pressure. Pressure you will most assuredly feel unless you feel comfortable grinding out hours of short missions required to level up and pass the numbers check to do things like finish the story of the first anime. It’s not a bad game, but it’s a game that should mostly be considered by big-time enthusiasts of this kind of game with time to burn.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average