Gundam Breaker 3 (PS4/Vita)

This week I wanted to talk about something Anime-related again however there is a bit of a twist this time around, I’ve been playing a PS4 game called Gundam Breaker 3 a lot at the moment and I dare say it might be one of my favourite Gundam related games to date. I’m a huge fan of Gundam and love making Gunpla models when I find the time, my room is littered with them.

Recently Bandai and Sunrise have been pushing the Gunpla aspect of the franchise a lot more as they have had three separate animated series relating to it in which the characters are normal everyday people who just participate in tournaments in which their custom models battle it out. With the popularity of such, sales naturally went up but a lot of people yearned to be able to make custom units in the same way they do in the series, now there are many talented people who can do this in real life but for someone like me it’s quite difficult to go beyond just snap building.

That’s why I love that they made this game, the game pretty much follows the idea of those Anime I mentioned above in that you place your Gunpla in a virtual environment and pilot it in battles against other users or the CPU, but with this game you can totally customise your unit with any existing parts placed in the game. So for example you could make the original Gundam but give it the tank tread legs of the Guntank, or you could give your standard Zaku II a huge ass Gunblade, the possibilities are somewhat endless and I find myself spending more and more time just making units and uploading pictures of them to social media rather than progressing in the game itself.

The reason I got this game so early rather than waiting until it was much cheaper was because it was actually translated into English fully (with the voices still being in Japanese), this has become the case with a few titles on the PS4 recently and is such a great idea, I mean the PS4 is region free so why not? I used to import a lot of titles on the Vita and PS3 but they were all in Japanese text and therefore pretty difficult to get my head around in some cases, I would generally shy away from any game like this title which relied heavily on text to explain the mechanics of the game (Like an RPG for example) but by having this option available I’m more willing to import.

I think it’s funny that they didn’t do this sooner to be honest, Bandai knows that many fans buy Gunpla online from Japan and import their games so why not offer this option to them and get the most out of their sales, so far I’m about halfway into the game and have not noticed any spelling or grammatical errors so I would say they have done a good job translation wise for the text, I have had absolutely no trouble in figuring out what I am meant to do objective wise or what the effects of certain equip parts are.

This gives me faith as there are about three more Gundam or Mecha related games coming out in the next year that are going to offer the same English language option, it’s going to destroy my wallet but I’m so happy Western fans are being taken into consideration, it is important to remember however this is the Asian release of the game (Singapore,Taiwan etc) and not the Japanese release, it has full Japanese Voice acting but the text can be in languages such as Taiwanese or any other Asian Language for that region.

When I played the original game I felt the focus was absolutely on the online play as the difficulty in going in to levels alone would ramp way up or they would last so long due to being all on your own that you wouldn’t really want to play more than one match at a time. This time around I do still play alone but you always get at least one or two CPU controlled units with you to alleviate some of that difficulty spike.

It’s clear they still want you to play online (and I do when I can!) but at least there is that option to go solo with CPU backup, I will say I do generally get people joining me online but they are usually those that are so overpowered and over-levelled compared to me that any mission they do is a cakewalk and no real fun, they are also super impatient when I’m looking through the items we got during the mission and deciding if I want to equip them or not.

This game shines for me due to the amount of customisation on your unit, I had only played the original game but on the Vita and it was all in Japanese (so pretty impossible to understand what I was doing), had an awful frame rate at times and was generally not as fun due to the lack of things to do. I did not play the second title so cannot comment on how much they improved from the original but in terms of this title I think they blew the original out of the water. I’m playing it on PS4 so there is that natural step up graphically as this is the first of the series on the console but the amount of options I have to design my unit is fantastic.

You have the standard leg,arm and head parts as you would in the other titles but this game allows for much more finer detailed options such as the ability to add emblems and decals to your unit, being able to change the material you unit is made out of such as plastic, High gloss injection or metal composite and one of my favourite appearance details has the be the option to make your unit battle damaged, I love this it really make the unit stand out more than just a big plastic blob on the screen, you can even add weathering effects to the unit which give off a really worn or dirty look.

The gameplay is relatively simplistic as it is generally a multi-level based mission in which you and your team will face hordes of other Gunpla enemies, with a mid and main boss’ usually appearing throughout  the level, once you have defeated X amount of enemies you are then able to move on to the next stage of the mission until you face the strongest unit and end the mission. Now there are variations in this in which it can be you versus a giant mobile armour as a kind of one on one boss battle and there are also some more objective based gametypes in which you must defend a command post while defeating enemies.

The combat is generally a simplistic fare as you have your three main attacks, light, heavy and projectile based attacks and when you gain enough power you can execute a special move that does huge damage, now obviously there are a wide range of customisable weapons, so for example with your melee attacks you can use Beam sabres, whips, knives or even martial arts fists as if you were in G Gundam, now if you have the latter that will affect your entire fighting style as well as your special move which can be anything from a combo to a Kamehameha type move.

Now those are the standard equipable weapon types however as you progress you may gain certain parts that allow you to use even more weapons, for example if you equip the 00 Raiser Seven Sword backpack which has buster blades on each shoulder then hell yeah you can use those. Have a back plate with two throwable daggers on it? Hell yeah you can use them. It does not even stop there an addition in this game from the first was ‘Builder Parts’ now these are small items that are either cosmetic or weapon based, an example being if you added a grenade anywhere on the body you can use it, I personally use the ZZ head beam cannon and put it on my units chest to have a decent long range attack.

The good thing about these extra weapons are that they do not replace you existing melee and projectile weapons, these will always be your Square, Triangle and R2 weapons no matter what, these extra weapons are controlled by the D-Pad for selection and used by pressing the circle button. You actually have enough room to use 8 extra weapons so two for each direction, I think this is wonderful even if it does make you slower and you mech look massive.

Now while the combat can get a bit more intricate if you throw all this into the mix it does not really go beyond an almost horde mode sort of thing where you’re just smashing through waves of enemies so in that respect it is not a touch on the arcade fighter series Gundam Vs, however I feel in time it could become a lot more than it is now if the developers will allow it, it is certainly a huge step up from the first game.

I think I would recommend this if you’re a Gundam fan or even a mecha fan, there are so many options and the in game story is nothing you really need to pay attention to or need to have watched the series in order to understand, it’s just sort of in the background so this is a pretty decent place to start for anyone. Of course I’m a huge Gundam fan so there is a bias somewhat in that I’ll pretty much play anything Gundam related I can get my hands on,

I would have to say that I would class this game as my favourite of the bunch I have played, I think the reason for this is just from the satisfaction of making your own unit, I love this aspect of the game so much and feel it can only be improved in much more detail in further instalments, this game is most definitely worth your time if you’re a fan or the series!

If you ever pick up the game and want to play add me on Psn: ScatmanBegins

I just want to take a short moment to thank Royce for always sharing my Blogs, I mostly write for myself but thanks to him my blogs have reached a lot of people I would never expect them to reach, he does a lot of work for a lot of people but I really appreciate it and will miss him in California this year!