Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam

Pretty neat Gundam game. Builds upon Federation vs Zeon with stuff like transformations, more suits, and more modes.

The Universal Century mode is interesting; it's a campaign mode that has a lot of branching paths for each character, and some of the branch requirements are more than just completing the level. For instance, if you kill a certain enemy character or if your ally dies then it will close that branch, although you can just redo the level. It was a nice surprise seeing the campaign extend backwards into the One Year War, and then have that affect the Zeta story. Unfortunately most of the levels are the same for every character and the friendly AI is a big annoyance. It has no parameters for avoiding friendly fire, so whenever you're in the middle of something cool they'll probably interrupt it by trying to attack the enemy you're right next to. On top of that, you can't give AI commands in UC mode and just tell them to fuck off. There's also the Arcade, VS, and the new Survival mode where you just keep doing levels with a small amount of recovery between them until your arcade power meter hits zero.

There's a lot of new suits on top of all the old ones. Some of the suits don't have walking animations though, they just hover with their verniers, which is disappointing for suits like the Gundam MkII. Some mobile suits can transform, either by dashing forward while ascending, or by pressing L2 and R2 simultaneously (a little tricky for some reason). It seems like you can't change back when you transform as Baund Doc and Gaza C though. The weathered style carried over from the first game is also cool. You can even unlock a couple ZZ suits through Arcade mode.

Feels like the melee attacks are more ostentatious on the new suits, and there's some cool context-specific attacks like using the rifle as a melee weapon for Zeta Gundam if you do the R2 attack with your gun in hand. Unfortunately the ranged targeting is still pretty infuriating, but it's an arcade port so what are you gonna do. For some reason if you hold circle as Guncannon, Palace Athene, and maybe some others, you kneel and get some kind of over-the shoulder view.

Definitely wish I had this as a kid, overall it's just an objective improvement over Federation vs Zeon, and there are so few Gundam games that actually released in the US so that's an automatic +0.5.