MS Saga: A New Dawn

Another attempt to broaden Gundam's audience overseas, Bandai's MS Saga: A New Dawn shows a remarkable range of mecha-building options (running the gamut from suit crafting and cosmetics to interchangeable pilots, armors and passives), but is ultimately a competent, if totally generic turn-based JRPG, both narratively (the same war topics and story beats told a million times before) and structurally (town-to-trial loop, low-effort dungeons, linear skill systems, etc.). Except for its grid-oriented, space-dependent weapon equips and a prominent SP bar, one struggles to find any other feature worth mentioning.

I finally got around to finishing this game as an adult and had a nice time playing through this odd commercial failure of a Gundam game. I'm not a connoisseur of JRPGs but I thought it was mostly good, although there are some glaring flaws which I'll get into. If you like UC and 90s AU Gundam and don't mind the fact that everything is SD, definitely check it out. It emulates pretty well in PCSX2, good luck getting an actual copy (I'm not selling mine lol).

Somehow this got on my radar as a kid despite its apparent complete lack of sales, I guess customization really appealed to me. Returning now, it was a little limited but still gave some interesting depth in building your team and equipment. The tetris style inventory management was also cool. I was able to min-max without creating too much of an abomination and by the end I was doing 9999 damage with a single attack. The meta seems to be for range-focused characters to load as many weapons on them as possible (2 handheld, 2 arm-mounted, 1 shoulder-mounted, X number of integrated weapons) and getting a high RNG stat on their mobile suit, then just waiting until you can do the Gatling Fire boost attack. For melee characters you just max out MEL and wait until you can do whatever character-specific melee boost attack is available. I didn't really pay attention but it looks like the base weapon damage is just additive from character stats, mobile suit stats, and the weapon stats. There's some useful GameFAQs to be found which can help with build inspirations.

The story is rather incoherent and leaves some massive loose threads which seem like the writers literally just forgot to resolve, including the entire inciting incident. It takes places after an apocalypse, leaving behind mysterious technology for the survivors to wonder about. It's kinda like Turn A in that it's spiritually set in the future of all universes, so you get suits from UC, G, and Wing. Some installments only get weapons, like F91. I don't think Gundam X got anything. The characters are the standard archetypes: you got your shounen protag, your Rei Ayanami, your Char and Sayla, your tsundere(s), etc. They're likeable enough, though; just beware there's some atrocious character designs to be seen. It also references and homages plot points of the shows pretty often. Despite the flaws, I thought the story wasn't a terrible experience. There were a couple spots where I had to grind and there were some incredibly difficult optional bosses, but this time I could use save states and fast-forward. The playthrough on lparchive.org is very accurate to the experience.

I was inspired to replay this and actually beat it after playing ZoE2 on PC (mod in that JP dub, it instantly made that game better lol), which inspired me to rip my old copy of Encounters in Space, which then inspired me to rip a lot of my PS2 games, including this one. Playing through all these old Gundam games got me to start watching every Gundam series and to get into the models, so be careful. Otherwise you'll find yourself hate-watching every episode of Victory Gundam.