During my time playing Super Robot Wars, one of my mecha anime-loving friends mentioned this series to me. I told her if she could hunt me down a way to play them, I’d love to give them a try, and she was kind enough to do that for me~. I didn’t really know what to expect from an RPG parody series of SD Gundam trading cards-inspired JRPG that itself is effectively a remake of some earlier Famicom games, but I got what I more or less should’ve expected? ^^;. This is another game that doesn’t count your playtime, but I reckon it took me about 25~30 hours to beat in total. I played the game in its original Japanese emulated with a fair bit of savestate use when things were most optimal to do so (and I will elaborate on just what those parts were in due time, believe me XP).

Knight Gundam Monogatari wasn’t just trading cards. It was also a manga that had four different stories through the time of its publication, and this game’s four chapters cover the events of the first of those four stories (as well as the events covered in the first two of the three Famicom KGM games). You play as the titular Knight Gundam who crash lands in the kingdom of Lakuroa, and are given a mission by the king to save the kidnapped Princess Frow Bow who has been kidnapped by the evil Satan Gundam. The whole thing is a giant, silly fan service-y exercise in turning events from the original U.C. Gundam series into a Dragon Quest-style JRPG, and it hits its mark pretty well. The actual story beats are played pretty straight, but the inherent sillyness of things like partying up with Minister Guntank, your first caster party member, is difficult to ignore. It succeeds very well (in its 1991 JRPG way) of realizing that story in an entertaining way, so it’s hard to give it much flak for being relatively narratively shallow.

Mechanically, it’s just Dragon Quest in a flavor of something similar to DQ4. You have a party of characters who come and go as the story progresses, they each have their own inventories (and the inventory management is an appropriately cumbersome nightmare, I assure you), some party members are more melee-focused while some are more magic focused, battles are done in a first-person view, you go through dungeons and you even talk to the king to save your game. This game is in no way trying to reinvent the wheel, and it really didn’t need to.

The only places that really becomes a problem is when it runs into problems presented by that old DQ formula. In some ways, this is present through the bad inventory system and how shops don’t tell you if the weapon you’re buying is actually better than the one you have, but it’s especially present in the game’s difficulty balancing. The game becomes absolutely brutal in chapters 3 and 4 despite being very pleasantly balanced in the first two chapters. The signposting also takes a nasty hit in those bits too, and it all feels much more down to deliberate choice rather than any kind of not knowing any better due to how young the genre still was. The game also has a ton of taking party members away and returning them significantly later exactly as strong as they were before, and that’s a big reason chapter 3 is so brutally awful. You’ve gotta rely on some pretty godly RNG luck to be able to level up your awful new main character in that one, and the game makes it about as hard to do that as it possibly could be (and that’s where I ended up save stating a lot). Encounters in general just get way nastier and meaner in the game’s back half, and it ended up having the game end on a really sour note compared to how much I’d been enjoying the first half.

Presentation-wise, it’s hardly the prettiest SFC game, and the music is also pretty forgettable, but being only 1991, it’s easy to forgive if not exactly overlook that. But even then, the most fun aspect is seeing all those familiar Gundam characters in their DQ-ified forms. Tons of care has been taken to recreate iconic DQ monster poses and armor designs in all sorts of styles, and it adds a ton to the charm. However, that does sorta put a restraint on the game’s appeal. Compared to something like Super Robot Wars, you’ve really gotta have a pre-existing knowledge of and fondness for U.C. Gundam and Dragon Quest to really appreciate the aesthetics of this game. If you don’t fall into those categories, particularly the former, you’re probably not going to get a ton of enjoyment out of this game unless you’re a massive retro JRPG fan.

Verdict: Not Recommended. This game’s aesthetics are cool and well designed, but it’s ultimately too held down by being too darn much of a DQ clone for its own good. The bad design and brutal difficulty in the game’s second half make it really hard to recommend but to the staunchest of U.C. Gundam and retro JRPG fans. If you’re one of those kinds of people, you may get a fair bit of fun out of this one, but if not, I’d say just look up the original CardDasu trading card Knight Gundam art and appreciate that on its own, as its more or less the exact art they took to use for everything in this game anyhow.