| The Batlord |
01-13-2015 11:12 AM |
Been playing the hell out of Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3. Never been the biggest Gundam fan, but I've loved the Dynasty Warriors franchise and its spinoffs for years, and mowing down hoardes of peons is actually far more satisfying in a ridiculous, giant robot (The use of thrusters also makes getting around battlefields far less tedious.) The anti-war pseudo philosophizing gets real old real quick, but Duo Maxwell at least keeps it to a minimum and has a bit of a humorous character. The fact that his Deathscythe is swift death to large groups of unfortunate Zakus is a serious bonus. All the upgrades and special abilities you can give the pilots and suits, and collecting better versions of suits to develop adds possibly more replay value than any DW game I've ever played, besides perhaps Samurai Warriors 2: Empires, due to it being a combo of DW and Civilization lite.
I actually kind of miss the first DW:G game though. It didn't have nearly as many mobile suits to choose from, and I don't remember if you could use different ones with different pilots (which you can with 3), but the story---such as it was---was more immersive, and the characters actually interacted with each other during missions rather than just having uninteresting powwows after every mission. My fav moment in the first has to have been playing a campaign as a female villain which resulted in a total OOC romance with the hero from her series. It was just so ridiculous and warmed my cheesy heart.
That's one of the few drawbacks of 3. Instead of individualized campaigns for each character, you have four campaigns (and a fifth that emerges after a while) that include multiple characters, but without there being any narrative benefit to playing as a specific pilot. Like, my main guy is Duo Maxwell, but he's more of a side character to his campaign, so even if I'm playing as him the focus is still on guys who I don't really want to use. Along with the use of smaller maps (both physically smaller and a smaller number of maps that are constantly reused) and missions that just feel totally generic, without any narrative justification, and have the feeling of "We're battling here because this is the next battle, so... 'LAUNCH!'" The first game actually gave me insight into different characters in the Gundam universe and a crash course in its history, which actually made me kind of want to watch Gundam. This series does too to some extent, but I still feel less invested in what's going on.
Still, with smaller maps and less emphasis on coming up with original situations, the battles feel more fast-paced, and even with the extreme narrative shortcomings (it's not like the first game's story was a masterpiece in the first place), it's still a much better development than the last Dynasty Warriors---or whichever the first one was for 360---where they severely reduced the number of playable characters and campaigns to focus on longer campaigns with more involved missions, but with almost no replay value after about a week. I'm getting that worrying thing that happens with some games where you look at the clock and see that it's 10 in the morning, and when you look up an hour later it's 3 in the afternoon. Then you just say, "**** it, the day's shot so I'm just going till I pass out."
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