Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered PC review — Battling through the universe

After all these years, I never imagined any of the Artdink Gundam Battle games would get officially localised in the West, let alone get a multiplatform remaster. While the game that would receive this treatment was unfortunately not Gundam Battle Universe, Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is still very nice to have, despite how little I care for Gundam Seed as a whole. Certain aspects of the game are undeniably dated and limited by its handheld roots, but the quick, entertaining combat and huge amount of available mechs do a lot to keep this a very fun remaster, despite occasional balance issues.

As the name clearly suggests, Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is a remaster of the PS Vita game of the same name, which is very much in the vein of Artdink’s other Gundam Battle games, save for the fact that it’s completely centred around the events of the shows Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny. As such, if you’re not familiar with both shows (and they’re pretty bad, so you certainly aren’t missing much if you’re not,) then you’ll have very little idea of who anyone is or what’s going on at any given time as you play through the game’s 80ish main story missions.

One extremely positive change from the original release is that you don’t have to start more than one save file now, since beating one of the game’s routes lets you freely select the other side. You have a choice between starting as an Alliance or ZAFT pilot, locking you into that choice until you complete the story route. Partway through both the CE 71 and CE 73 routes, you’ll be asked if you’d like to switch to the Archangel route for both Alliance and ZAFT. It is not a good idea to choose the Archangel route until you swing back around, however, as it contains one of the most unbalanced, obnoxious missions in the entire game.

Depending on which faction you choose, you’ll have access to specific mobile suits to pilot. They all come with set weapons and some have transformations and the like available too. Completing missions with a mobile suit will net you points you can use to improve its capabilities, including those of the suits themselves as well as its weapons. As with previous games, this is a fun gameplay loop, plus it doesn’t actually take all that long to level suits up at all. This makes it easy to try out a bunch of them and grind them up by replaying a short mission or two. Suits have a max point allotment for much of the game that limits how strong they can get, but this is removed once you finish every story mission and get a handful of S ranks.

You start by creating a character, as well as a partner pilot, and then take them into missions. You can also set the game’s cast of characters as your pilot as long as you have them unlocked. Missions are decently numerous, but they’re also very short, with many of them being just a couple of minutes long. They mostly require you to destroy enemies or defend a target, but there’s a decent amount of variety. Mobile suits come with between one and three main weapons, along with a melee weapon (usually a beam saber,) and a subweapon. Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is decently responsive, but the gameplay here won’t wow anyone with any degree of complexity.

For the most part, you dash towards an enemy and slash or shoot them to death. The melee attack is kind of rigid and repeating the game’s short combos can get a little old in the tooth here and there, but the game is so fast and furious that it stays engaging for the duration. Completing all the story missions might take a dozen hours or so, but doing so unlocks over 20 extra hard boss missions (where the enemies often kill a maxed-out suit in two or three hits.) There are some optional missions to play through, so you could easily get 20 hours out of the game, especially if you want to max out and play with a bunch of different suits.

Difficulty-wise, Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is often either braindead easy or laughably unfair. Unlike previous games, enemy aces (strong, named pilots) take a huge amount of damage and can easily melt you if you’re not careful. This is a giant pain until you realise that you can just use the special attack that depletes half of your special metre and turns you invincible. There are also some missions here and there where you need to defend targets that enemies destroy far too quickly. The worst is the aforementioned one in the Archangel faction that can feel borderline impossible due to how many enemies are tearing apart the target.

Enemy AI can also get kind of screwy, as sometimes it just spends a ridiculous amount of time in the air or moves around so quickly you can’t really even hit them. This is extra annoying because their suits break the rules that the player has to adhere to, such as how much they can boost or how long they can remain airborne. On the other hand, this can help keep players on their toes, as it’s easy for fights to become a bunch of instances of mashing the melee button and stunlocking enemies. That is to say, it’s functional but could have been a lot better.

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered certainly isn’t the best game in its series to get this remaster treatment, but Gundam fans will still have a great time with it. Between all the fun mobile suits and fast-paced missions, there’s a decent amount to sink your teeth into if the gameplay appeals to you. I may really wish they’d done Gundam Battle Universe instead, but this game still catches most of everything that makes the series so beloved to fans of Gundam games. Being able to play a game in the series at high framerates for the very first time is something I won’t turn my nose at.

Take a look at our previous review:

Bloodshed PC review — Who will survive and what will be left of them? |