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Survivor Series: Devil Survivor 2 the Animation

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So I’m back a little sooner than I thought but, I came across something that I just had to write about. There is going to be an anime adaption of the Devil Survivor 2 video game, which I reviewed on here sometime ago when it came out early last year. I kind of feel dumb for not seeing until a couple days ago given I’m a huge fan of the series. It’s slated to start airing in April sometime, and the episode count has not been announced yet. The anime is going to coincide with the release of the 3DS “remaster” of Devil Survivor 2 also coming later this year. So I’m very excited for this and after the Persona 4 anime, I’m hoping this will be as good as it was. I’m going leave a link to a site with all the trailers and photos for to peruse at your leisure:

 

http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26854/Devil+Survivor+2+Anime.html

 

 

Cheers,

Devil

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Survivor Series:Anime, Games, and Relationships

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Hey there, hope your having a great day. So this is a topic I wanted to touch on for while now, but I put it off in favor of other things to write about. However, recently something happened that made me need to rush out and write about how being an anime\video game fan can affect your relationships. I’m going to address this in general and add my own personal experiences. So let’s get into it.

Its probably pretty likely that most anime fans have a story of someone they know questioning their maturity because that person thinks watching and enjoying anime is only for children. Its a narrow minded view and it really annoys me that people I know have that view about something I really enjoy. Similarly, with video games some people take the view that if you play video games your a child in an adult’s body. I would always hear from my mother that games are a waste of time and that I needed to grow up, but I just told her it was something I enjoyed and would continue to do so. There is always times in anyone’s life when someone questions one of their passions because that person cannot do it as good as you or just because that person thinks its worthless. You just have to have the backbone and confidence to tell them that they are mistaken.

Now, I want to get into the romantic side of relationships and the effect being an anime of video game fan can potential have on it. When it comes to my personal experience with dating and being an anime\video game fan, its mostly positive. I do have some horror stories to share with you about some close minded women I had the displeasure of coming across. Since, coming to South Korea I have quite bit of experience dating Korean women, of which the majority has been good. That said, I have two stories of women that didn’t like the fact I played video games. The first one  didn’t last long because during our first chat on the website we met on she asked what were my hobbies and I listed them all along the fact I play video games, and she basically flipped out told I me was a child and then she left the chat. The other story lasted a bit longer as I dated this women for about two months. She was actually half Japanese and Korean, she was fine with me being an anime fan. However, when it came up I was a gamer was when she decided she didn’t want to be together anymore, and I never got a straight answer as too why she dislikes video games. This raises a question in my mind; when is best or right time to tell a women\man that you are an anime\video fan? Some people might say to not mention it, but its eventually going to come up, so I would recommend telling the other person  as soon as possible because you know almost from the start if that person will cool with your hobby or not. Honest is also important in an relationship and I’m sure the other person will appreciate it.

Well that’s all for now,

Devil_Survivor

 

 

 

 

 

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Survivor Series: PS Vita: Up Till Now

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Hey everybody! I hope everyone is having a good Christmas season out there in the AAA community. What I’m going to talk about today is the first year of the PS Vita with all the ups and downs (mostly downs), and what the future might hold for the pretty little handheld.

So the Vita launched a year and a day ago as in Japan as I’m writing this, and it had a pretty auspicious start in the lands of the rising sun selling 325,000 units in the first few days, a good launch compared to other systems like the 3DS. However, in the next weeks the sells cratered dropping to as low 12,309 units in the week of February 13th, and being outsold by the PSP. Now the sells have recovered somewhat in the following weeks averaging about 40,000 a week worldwide. This pattern followed with the North American and European launches, initial sales was great and then sinking down to low levels. The black Friday and holiday sales good, but this is likely a temporary bump as with all holiday’s seasons sales always rise dramatically over normal sales figures.

So now let’s look the games released for the system so far. There are currently 158 games as of writing for the Vita. Of these 25 were the launch titles, including Little Deviants, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Rayman Origins, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend etc. The best selling game is Uncharted with 850,000 units sold and will likely also be the first 1 million seller on the system. Not of the other games come close to Uncharted; however three games have about half the sales. Some of the games have been released to critical acclaim such as Persona 4: The Golden which is the highest rated handheld game in 2012 on Metacrtic. Gravity Rush has won handheld game of the year from some publications. So the Vita does have some games to answer that question people like to ask all the time about Sony systems haha. There are a couple games that came out this year that were suppose to turn the fortunes of the Vita around, the so-called “Killer App” that people are always talking about that sells systems, but neither Call of Duty: Declassified or Resistance: Burning Skies became the killer app as both suffered from bad controls and were a little short on content. One of the key selling points people were touting was the ability of Vita to play FPS on the go with the dual analog sticks. Now that two high profile FPS have come out and both have been utter disappointments and in my mind this has damaged the Vita brand.

There is isn’t much to say about what Sony has done to turn around the lackluster sales of the PS Vita because there hasn’t been a permanent price cut, the marketing has largely remain the same, and the Playstation Plus is now on Vita and that should help with sales, how much it will help remained to be seen.

 

Now I’m going to discuss some things that I think Sony can do to turn Vita around and get it selling good. Here’s the strategy I have conceived that Sony can follow to make sell well and make a profit. They cannot drop the price until the handheld can be redesigned into a form that makes a profit off each unit, otherwise Sony will be losing even more money then they already are on each unit sold. This could take a year or so, but in the end be worth it if they include the features I’m about to list. Include a drive to play all the PSP games; all of the people on the fence about buying a Vita that have a big PSP game library would have a huge reason to buy the system. Add an SD card slot; having only Sony memory cards as the only storage media on Vita has hurt the system even if its not the main reason people often point too. The Vita memory cards are expensive and are an unnecessary extra expense for buyers when they probably have a few SD cards they could be using to store games and data. Extend the battery life of the system; this is probably the easiest one to implement as it has been done many times for other handhelds. The most recent example being the 3DS XL, which added an extra 1.5 hours to the 3DS’s battery life, so it is not that hard. This could also be done through third party batteries such as the ones by Nyko, and that’s what I did with my 3DS and its battery life is actually better than the XL’s. Make games that are an unique experience to the Vita; I think the major problem with Sony’s ideology towards Vita is that they are trying to create scaled down versions of PS3 games for Vita instead of developing games from ground up specifically for Vita. In order to attract people to spent the money on a new hardware you need to have exclusive software that is found no where else. Marketing the Sega Genesis style; it would be extremely funny to watch Sony do some commercials along the lines of the ones done by Sega against Nintendo in the early 1990’s, and seeing how those worked well for Sega it could work for Sony as well.

 

 

Well until next time,

Devil_Survivor

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Survivor Series:The Over Emphasis on Visuals

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Hello to everyone out there in the AAA community, and a special hello to Mitsugi and Chiaki in Japan, nice to have you back in the same time zone as myself again, perhaps I can catch the live show now lol. Anyway, what I want to talk about today is the overemphasis some put on the visuals of media products and how it causes people to miss out on some experiences they might have otherwise if they didn’t focus so much on how something looks. The two examples I’m going to use are anime and video games, as those are two types of media where this is most apparent.

Let’s start with anime, and how some people cannot bring themselves to watch a show simply based on the animation. This comes in a few different forms, like if a show is old by a certain number of years. There are some people who cannot watch a show if it’s older than the year 2000, meaning hand drawn anime because that’s roughly when the industry transitioned to computer based anime drawing. Conversely, there are probably people who don’t like computer drawn anime and will not watch anything after the year 2000, but I have never met a person like that. Some anime fans will judge a series on just the art style or just for seeing a few magazine scans. Examples of this are Code Geass and Gundam Age, which were both prejudged on their character designs. One turned out great and the other not so much. Sometimes people say they don’t want to watch a show because there is too much fan service, which I could see. For me, I will watch old shows like the original Gundam series, which is from 1979, and other stuff from the early 1980’s, but I haven’t gone further than that. I have seen Astro Boy, but I’m not sure if what they aired in Canada was the 80’s version or the 60’s version. Art style to me is kind of whatever, I prefer story over the visuals of anime I’m watching so I usually give a show a chance no what the animation is like. Finally, I don’t mind fan service as long doesn’t distract from the story and fan service part of the charm of a given anime show.

 

How this manifests in the video games industry takes the form of game graphics. Graphics are often pointed to by people want to claim that a certain platform is superior to another and it’s been this way for a long time. Examples of this today are; PC elitists who want everyone to drop playing games on any other platform in favor of the PC, PS3 or Xbox 360 fanboys who think their preferred console is visually superior to the other, and pretty much every other given game systems that have competed against each other. This is often the main or opening argument of people I like to call “graphic masturbators”, defined as people who favor graphics over every other aspect of game design. They seem to think that this is the atomic bomb of arguments and it automatically wins the debate. However, it’s my contention that these people miss the point of playing a game which is to have an enjoyable game play experience over eye appealing visuals. This syndrome has lead to game companies (at least the big ones) making trailers for games using just cut scenes form the and not actual game play graphics. This gives a false impression of the game’s graphics and leads to gamer alienation. The way a game plays is the most important part of the experience I get out of playing game, which is why I play games on various platforms.

 

The main thrust of what I’m trying to convey here with this article is the best summed up in the age old saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”. I think people need to go beyond just the eye candy in whatever media they consume. For us anime fans it means going beyond the new thing and checking out some of greatest entries in the anime genre. Because in the end visuals change over time and a good story transcends time, no matter what decade it is from.

 

Cheers and Beers,

Devil_Survivor

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Survivor Series: Finishing a Anime Series or a Game

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Recently, I been reading a lot of articles on game sites I frequent in which the authors lament the fact that studies show that only about 20 percent of gamers actually finish a game they start.  When I heard this I was a little shocked and thought no way that can be right but, then I started to see in multiple articles on multiple sites.  So in my mind this is a disheartening for a couple reasons; one that developers put so much time into making a game that only a very small minority of people that play games see the end and that people paid like 60 dollars for a console game these days and that’s like getting only a portion  of the value of what you paid for.  I’m the kind of gamer that must finish a game’s story all way through. I’m what you might call a “game finisher”, however I’m not a completiontist  by any measure as I don’t feel the need get every achievement or trophy in every game I play.  Its more about seeing that the job gets at the basic level by simply beating the game  because that is still is the base objective in any game even games that are multiplayer centric like Call of Duty and Battlefield 3. I finish a lot of games, this year so far I think I have finished maybe 20-25 so far this year, which probably puts me in the 1-5 percent of that 10-20 percent of gamers that finish games.

So that got me wondering what percentage of anime fans actual finish the anime they are watching? Now I don’t any figures for this like with game, but I’ll try to use what I know from anime fans I know have told me. The hosts of the anime podcasts I listen to will often comment that they have only seen a portion of a certain  that is in a given discussion. This is probably because they are also reviewers and they have a lot anime to watch and its just not possible to watch the entire series. Also another difficulty is access to the whole show which is sometimes hard because maybe you cannot find in your country or its not very popular and thus not streamed or fansubbed.  Then there is simply having not a lot of time to devote to watching anime, which is probably a problem we all have unfortunately.

So the point of me bringing this up is that I just think its a bit tragic that all these talented people put so much time and effort into making great anime and games and the vast majority of people never see them. Some tips I have to have to maximize your game and anime experience is to focus on perhaps a couple at a time and clear them out move on to the next game or series. In anime series skip the opening and ending credits as this can often save about 5-6 minute per episode of a series.So get out and actual finish a game of anime!

Here are some the articles taking about the low number of gamers that finish their games:

http://www.gameguru.in/general/2012/27/hitman-absolution-director-says-20-percent-gamers-will-finish-title/

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/08/18/cnn-report-only-10-percent-of-players-finish-games.aspx

 

Cheers and Beers,

Devil_Survivor

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Survivor Series: Devil Survivor 2 Review

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Recently, I imagine that you been asking yourself a question lately, ” Where the F#%k has Devil Survivor been for the last three months??” Well ladies and gentlemen I moved to South Korea and I’m teaching at a public high school. Its been a good time so far and finally I have time to write something. The topic this time is the second Devil Survivor game which came out in February. I have played through it twice now and I’ll give you a tour.

 

Background Story

The story in Devil Survivor 2 is a bit different then in the first game as the story this time takes place in different locations around Japan and in the first game you were locked down in Tokyo the whole time trying to escape.  Again your a boy in high school, this time a third year high student instead of a second year student,  who is coming back from an exam at school with his two friends. When at the subway station, they receive an email on their phones from a website that shows a video clip  depicting their deaths in  an explosion in the near future. The three students are able to avoid their imminent deaths because of a warning from an avatar from the site and then a train comes crashing and they run for cover. As they wake demons appear and a battle begins, after defeating the demons  the students form a contract with the demons and become demon summoners. Soon after the heroes encounter a mysterious government agency known as JP’s that is trying to protect the remaining Japanese cities that haven’t been completely destroyed by the disaster that  has struck Japan.  They ally with JP’s in order to find out what is behind the disaster that has befallen Japan  and find a way to survive.

 

Gameplay

The gameplay hasn’t changed much from the last game which used a turned based system combat system on a grid of squares. The combat system also featured teams of three, two demons and one of the human characters, and the game allowed you to use up to  4 teams at once.  You can carry up to 24 demons in your party at any one time and a great feature of this game is the ability summon a new demon if one of your demons lose all its hit points. Another feature from the first game is ability to create more powerful demons by fusing two less powerful demons. A new twist has been added to this feature called the demon compendium which saves all demons used or created in the fuse application, and for a price you can immediately summon that demon back to your party as long you have a free space. A completely new feature is called the Fate System which is a social relationship system that uses a 0 to 5 scale to rate the bond between the main character and the other characters. The benefit of having a high level bond with another character is that it grants you certain special abilities  that can only be used with that character.  Again present is the branching story lines like other SMT games, although it seems like there are as many  paths as was in the previous game.   The demon auction also still in the game, but is less important now with the demon compendium in the game.

 

Graphics and Cutscenes

The graphics in some ways are not much improved from the original game. The environments looks more detailed and the bosses look quite nice. However, some of the artwork from the first game was reused, but if you haven’t played the first one then you probably won’t notice that. The cut scenes are where the game shines  because the first game doesn’t have nearly as many as DS2. The cut scenes all look graphically bright and vibrant. Overall the game is an improvement in most areas in terms of graphics.

 

Audio and Music

The game’s soundtrack is exceptional, which is a hallmark of any of the SMT games.  Each song seems to fit the scene its being played in. The sound effects for the different demon attacks and other actions fit nicely with the overall feel of the game.

 

Closing Comments

Comparing this game to the original devil survivor it holds its own, while bringing some new gameplay elements to the table. I think Atlus could have put some more effort into making some more new artwork for the character interactions instead of just reusing some of the character models from the first game. Overall, the game is improvement over the first incarnation. One final note, if you haven’t played the first game yet, don’t worry because you can jump right into this game because the two stories have no bearing on each other at and are completely separate stories in effect.   

 

 

 

Cheers and Beers,

Devil_Survivor

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Survivor Series: Japanese Attitudes Towards Sex and Implications for the Future

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Hey all you crazy anime addicts out there, its me coming at you once again, the most interesting man on the AAA network, Devil Survivor. I have an extremely interesting, yet disturbing, and maybe humorous topic for you today. Recently, a survey was commissioned by the Japanese government on the attitudes of Japanese men and women aged 16-49 towards sex. So let’s take a look at the results of this study. Starting with the men 16-19, 36.1 percent said that have little interest in sex or even despised it altogether. Wow, I’m shocked that a teenage boy would ever say he hates sex, its like a Republican politician saying he hates  cheating on his wife then claiming he is a family values candidate. That figure is almost double the figure reported in a 2008 survey. This survey, which was conducted in September of 2010, also found that 83.7 percent of Japanese men that are turning 20 this year are not dating anyone, and a further 49.3 percent said they have never had a girlfriend. The findings for girls in the same age group unfortunately are no better; 59 percent of them felt similarly like the young men about sex, which was up 12 percent from 2008.

So what does this all mean, you might ask. Well according to Kunio Kitamura head of the clinic of the Japanese Family Planning Association says it seems to confirm  the notion that Japanese younger men are becoming ” herbivores” meaning men who do not actively seek out women or sex. What we are seeing here I think is the collision of two social phenomena  at play in Japanese society creating a tsunami of sexual apathy. Women in Japan have been gaining empowerment in society in the past couple decades  making more money and getting higher on the professional ladder, and this has caused Japanese women to raise their expectations of what their potential husband should make at his job. This has in turn caused Japanese men to believe that the expectations of women are too unrealistic and they cannot possible make enough money in their jobs. So more and more men are turning other means of romantic engagement such as dating sims, anime character figures, sex dolls, and other such things.  Add to this the already extremely low birth rate in Japan and the high average age of the population, which is 44.8 years old, and things are not looking good for the future of Japan.

Some other findings from the survey that are of note; 40.8 percent of married couples answered that they had not had sex in the last month, up from 36.5 percent in 2008. Almost 50 percent married couples older than 40 also reported that they had not had sex in the last month. Thus confirming the widely held belief that getting married kills an otherwise healthy sexual desire haha.

This is a major social problem for Japan in a number of ways. In terms of the workforce and having a ready a supply of new young workers it would be disastrous as the birth rate is well below replacement. National defense would also be compromised as its hard to maintain an armed forces without young people to fill out the ranks. The population is projected to shrink to about 95 million by 2050 and this would cause the Japanese economy to suffer worse than anything before. Correcting this isn’t easy will probably take a generation or so to see signs of change.

Here’s the original article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/japanese-men-losing-sex-d_n_809271.html

 

Cheers,

Devil

 

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Survivor Series: Holiday Handheld Wars: Triumph and More Predictions of Doom

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Greetings and salutations, all you anime crack addicts anonymously looking for your next fix of  deliciously, deviant, and decadent  animated narcotic. Today I’m going to return a topic I talked to about in a previous post way back in September of last year; the Nintendo 3DS. However, this time I’m going to add in another element, the Playstation Vita now that its out.  I’m going to be a comparison of the two on certain levels, but also an update of somethings I addressed last time and some extreme claims about the Vita.

Last time I discussed how a lot of people on the internet where predicting the doom of Nintendo and the 3DS because of the massive drop in sales about 5 months after the launch which was mishandled(if anyone can point to a really solid launch for a game console please mention it the comments). So time has shown that either is true, of course although I’m aware that the Nintendo prediction is kind of open ended because a company’s future is always up in the air, however the 3DS one has proved to be very wrong. Over the Holiday Season the 3DS sold almost 1.6 million units and the weeks following have been strong as well. Add that to the fact the 3DS sold more units in the first 8 months in the U.S. than the DS. One thing I was wrong about in the last article was my prediction of a possible redesign of the system which didn’t come about(yet) maybe because the sales have rebounded.  I around thing I predicted was if a bunch of quality first party games would come out they the sales would go up; and that’s what has happened with the Mario and Mario Kart games. There are also some great three party stuff like the Monster Hunter game and more coming.

Ok on to Vita, and with its recent release in Japan on Dec.17th out of the way it looked pretty impressive with first weekend sales of 320,000. However, after that the sales have dropped off a lot and have been below the PSP. So now people predicting the end of Vita already. I really wish people would not make such wild and unfounded predictions about the future of a product that just came out. I think I Vita will pick up in the coming months, it might take a price cut, but I’m sure it will in the end. The launch library was kinda underwhelming even though there was an Uncharted game, but I think was better then the 3DS’s launch line up. Just give Vita some time.

 

Cheers,

Devil

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Survivor Series:Spotlight-Aura Battler Dunbine

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Hey triple A community, its me Devil Survivor, the most interesting man on the AAA Network, and I’m finally back with a new blog entry. Today I’m going to shine the anime spotlight on the 1980’s classic mecha show Aura Battler Dunbine. Dunbine was directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino, who is best known for directing the original Gundam series and a lot of other great anime series. Dunbine was the first fantasy\mecha series which inspired other series such as Escaflowne. It ran for 49 episodes and spawned three OVA sequels; Aura Battler Dunbine: Tale of Neo Byston Well , Tales From Byston Well: Garzey’s Wing, and The Wings of Rean. However, it should be noted that all three are considered to be of inferior quality to the original series.  Let’s get into the story.

The setting for the story is in the parallel world of Byston Well which is kind of similar to 16 century Europe, but with one major difference; Aura technology, which allows machines to be built using life force as a power source.  Chief among these machines are the Aura Battlers, insect like robots with great destruction power. The story centers around Sho Zama, a Japanese motocross racer who one night is pulled into Byston Well by a magical fairy called a Ferario to serve as pilot of a Aura Battler called the Dunbine. One of the several monarchs in Byston Well, Drake Luft has been maneuvering for sometime to attempt a power play and seize control of the surrounding kingdoms. Part of his plans involve transporting people from Upper Earth, including Sho, because they have strong aura power. Another person brought down to Byston Well to pilot a battler is Todd Guinness , the trash taking, racist, ace pilot from Boston. He becomes the main rival for Sho. Burne Bannings is Drake’s right hand man and the general of his forces,however he does not have must in the way of piloting skill. Sho eventually discovers the evil intent of Drake’s plans and defects to a group led by a noble opposed to Drake, named Nie Givun. Among this group is another person kidnapped from Upper Earth, Marvel Frozen a former cop from Texas. They along with their allies embark on a guerrilla war against Drake and to gather other kingdoms in an alliance to thwart the ambitions of Drake. After a long war in Byston Well, the story shifts to Upper Earth at the mid point of the series. Some people have criticized the series for the slow pacing in the Earth arc, but for me I think the second half of the show moves along fine, albeit with some rough spots.

Overall, Aura Battler Dunbine is a classic piece of mecha anime and one of better works of Yoshiyuki Tomino, which is saying a lot considering all the exceptional shows he has created and directed. I really enjoyed in when I watched it in 2009. So I would recommend it to any fan of mecha or fantasy anime. You can find reviews of each episode on the MAHQ website at this link: http://www.mahq.net/animation/dunbine/abdunbine/dunbinetoc.htm

Until next time, say addicted my friends.
Devil_Survivor

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Survivor Series: Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 Review

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He once watched an anime called MD Geist  and said its the worst ever, Once he drank a Dos Equis beer and it was exceptional, and once listened to another anime podcast other than AAA and said never again…… he is the most interesting man on the AAA network.

Ok lol, so that’s going to the new intro to each blog entry because I love those commercials and the beer. In this edition of the series I’m going to talk about a musou games; Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3. I know the hack and slash genre has a lot of critics and fans at the same time which leaves it as one of the more hotly debated game genres, and I had never played any until this game, but this game has new features that set it apart from the previous entries in the series. That said, lets take a look at the game.

Background Story:

The story devised for this game is that a number of characters from the various Gundam series are transported to a location along with their mobile suits. The location is never really spell out, perhaps some alternate dimension or whatever. Some of the characters met up and form groups and began battles against other groups of characters. Some mysterious signal is being broadcast and the characters follow it, and this drives the story. Not much of a story :P, however a story isn’t really the main focus of this game.

Game Play:

The story mode of game is broken down into chapters in which two or three characters are playable at first. Each individual character is restricted to his or her signature mobile suit until you buy a license in the game shop which allows all playable characters to pilot it. Each chapter has a number of missions that all have the same end conditions, that being killing the end boss character of that mission. How you go about getting to the end of each mission is really the difference in each mission. There are over 300 different missions within the story mode in 8 different categories. The combat is much the same with other DW games, a lot pressing of the A button to create chain combos to perform different special moves and the unique signature attack of each character. A new feature is the addition of the Partner Strike, which is an attack performed by a partner character set at the start of each mission, which can used to turn the tide of battle. There are a number of other new map features that add a more strategic atmosphere. The Emergency Dash is a new option that allows players to get out of danger if timed right.  There 81 different units to choose from in the game to be collected  by acquiring MS plans and building them in the MS lab. The plans can gained whenever you finish a mission and you typical get 4 or 5 after each mission

In the online mode up to 4 players can play together in 15 unique missions. There are reports that more missions on the way at some point, although no date has been given.

Audio\Music:

The music in the game is average at best, not horrid and not exceptional either. The characters are voiced in certain parts of game, but not in all dialogue between the characters. The voice actors are the ones that portray the characters in both the Japanese and American versions of the shows, so that’s some good continuity between anime and game.

Artwork:

The art style is an upgrade over the previous two DW:Gundam games. The graphic artists choose to render the characters and mobile suits in a cel shaded style which is bright, well detailed, with great environmental effects, and visually pleasing. The background environments are enough in number without getting too repetitive.

Closing Comments:

DW:Gundam 3 is most importantly an improvement over the previous games in this series. It does all the things the other games have done in a better way that made the others a success. That said it still has the issues of other Dynasty Warriors games, almost completely devoid of anything resembling a story  and sometime repetitive combat. This game is almost just for Gundam fans, however it may appeal to fans of the hack and slash genre, which is a viable business model in Japan and not so much in America. Not many Gundam games get released in the West, well at least not many of the good ones, leaving not much to play if your a Gundam fan in the Western world, so its a question of take it or leave it. For myself its just good to have a decent game to go and blow up things with my favorite mobile suits.

I give this game 3\5 beam sabers slashing up grunt suits

 

Cheers and Beers,

Devil_Survivor