Virtual Boy Ranked - Game #12
Wow! Lame robot! 3D Tetris finally has competition, and its name is SD Gundam: Dimension War. So, OK, first I need to establish something: I am not familliar with Gundam, all I know is that it's like Japanese Transformers, but with anti-war messages instead of the weird anti-Middle Eastern messages that made Shaggy quit? This is kinda the sort of thing you should expect going into an "every single..." project, but anyway. Let's talk the game.
SD Gundam: Dimension War is a tactical turn-based strategy game, you move across a board, ambush opponents, and then fight them in shmup battles. This is a great idea to work off of! but in execution, both the board and shooting are just plain bad.
I'll start with the shooting, because this is a bit easier to describe. There's a good idea to this shooting: you use the second D-pad to swap weapons, this is a cool idea! The weapons are mostly fine - gattling shot, big shot, biggest horizontally-shapped shot, and for some reason you have a sword, which is completely useless, I guess it was just in the show so they needed to keep it here. I dunno. You start at a fixed perspective, player in the front and opponent in the back, once enough damage has been done, you then move and now have to fight on multiple planes swapping - this is very obnoxious, CPUs are happy to just run away and get basically no penalty. The spaceships are the worst part of this though, there is no way a robot will be able to defeat a spaceship, at all, the spaceship always wins because it has so much HP and can shoot so many lasers.
Now the board is something else - you can move up to 4 steps, when you land on someone you can go to the shooting minigame, the spaceships can only move vertically or horizontally at once, there are meteors that cannot be passed through. There's no real telegraphing as to where you can go, and there's nothing to do on the board except just go to foes - there's no reason for the meteors because there's no projectiles to hide away from, at most they might prevent your opponent from getting to you too soon because of their maximum steps, the only effect the shooting game has is killing robots, nothing you do there applies to the board (I mean, you can't really do anything there except shoot and slash, but still) - the robots don't even appear to have unique abilities outside of the shooting, if they even have that, some fly, but that just makes them inaccessible for all robots except other flying robots, thus just giving the game less depth. Shooting as Gundam, the main protag, felt the same as shooting as any other robot. Speaking of robot distinction, that is another major problem here - if you have not ever watched Gundam, the game does nothing to tell you which robots are good and which are bad, at the start of a game you'll need to just randomly click around the board until you get a robot you can use.
The music sounds like... do you remember those YouTube videos from the late 00s that were like "Super Smash Bros. Melee Theme, 8-Bit Style?" and it sounds nothing like any 8-bit platform and more like a chorus of cartoon robots? Like, every instrument is just a soft beep instead of having drums or such? Yeah, that's this game's soundtrack.
I wouldn't say it's as bad as 3D Tetris, but it is absolutely only worthy of one star.
Wow! Lame robot! 3D Tetris finally has competition, and its name is SD Gundam: Dimension War. So, OK, first I need to establish something: I am not familliar with Gundam, all I know is that it's like Japanese Transformers, but with anti-war messages instead of the weird anti-Middle Eastern messages that made Shaggy quit? This is kinda the sort of thing you should expect going into an "every single..." project, but anyway. Let's talk the game.
SD Gundam: Dimension War is a tactical turn-based strategy game, you move across a board, ambush opponents, and then fight them in shmup battles. This is a great idea to work off of! but in execution, both the board and shooting are just plain bad.
I'll start with the shooting, because this is a bit easier to describe. There's a good idea to this shooting: you use the second D-pad to swap weapons, this is a cool idea! The weapons are mostly fine - gattling shot, big shot, biggest horizontally-shapped shot, and for some reason you have a sword, which is completely useless, I guess it was just in the show so they needed to keep it here. I dunno. You start at a fixed perspective, player in the front and opponent in the back, once enough damage has been done, you then move and now have to fight on multiple planes swapping - this is very obnoxious, CPUs are happy to just run away and get basically no penalty. The spaceships are the worst part of this though, there is no way a robot will be able to defeat a spaceship, at all, the spaceship always wins because it has so much HP and can shoot so many lasers.
Now the board is something else - you can move up to 4 steps, when you land on someone you can go to the shooting minigame, the spaceships can only move vertically or horizontally at once, there are meteors that cannot be passed through. There's no real telegraphing as to where you can go, and there's nothing to do on the board except just go to foes - there's no reason for the meteors because there's no projectiles to hide away from, at most they might prevent your opponent from getting to you too soon because of their maximum steps, the only effect the shooting game has is killing robots, nothing you do there applies to the board (I mean, you can't really do anything there except shoot and slash, but still) - the robots don't even appear to have unique abilities outside of the shooting, if they even have that, some fly, but that just makes them inaccessible for all robots except other flying robots, thus just giving the game less depth. Shooting as Gundam, the main protag, felt the same as shooting as any other robot. Speaking of robot distinction, that is another major problem here - if you have not ever watched Gundam, the game does nothing to tell you which robots are good and which are bad, at the start of a game you'll need to just randomly click around the board until you get a robot you can use.
The music sounds like... do you remember those YouTube videos from the late 00s that were like "Super Smash Bros. Melee Theme, 8-Bit Style?" and it sounds nothing like any 8-bit platform and more like a chorus of cartoon robots? Like, every instrument is just a soft beep instead of having drums or such? Yeah, that's this game's soundtrack.
I wouldn't say it's as bad as 3D Tetris, but it is absolutely only worthy of one star.