Now for the skinny: Mobile Suit Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam is a third person action game based on Yoshiyuki Tomino’s iconic mecha franchise. The game puts you in control of a mobile suit, drops you and a partner in a large expansive stage, and pits you against enemy mobile suits.
The choice of mobile suits and armors is limited to the ones you’ll find on the original series, Zeta Gundam, Gundam ZZ, and the movie Char’s Counterattack. You won’t find any suits from the Gundam Wing or Seed franchises in here, and you won’t find any from the Unicorn series either even though that’s set in the same timeline.
Graphics and Audio
For the most part, graphics and audio are serviceable, if not above average. It doesn’t use cel-shading, and the details on the environment are a bit hit and miss (the city stages in particular lacks detail in some of the ground textures) but the most important parts – the mobile suits - are very detailed and move fluidly through the environment. The beam sabers are very impressive and the beam blasts may seem anemic, but they're nice to look at and a joy to watch in action.
Controls
As for the controls, the direction pad and left analogue controls movement, while the face buttons are mapped out to Change Target, Long Range Attack, Melee Attack, and Jump/Boost. The shoulder buttons allow you to shoot vulcans or another form of attack (different mobile suits come with different loadouts.) Blocking is automatic for suits that have the ability to block or come with a shield – as long as the attack comes from the direction in which your shield/blocking arm is facing, it will be blocked. Don’t depend on it too much, though – one or two hits is usually enough to break your shield.
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Gameplay
Gameplay is where Mobile Suit Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam really shines. The engine manages to translate how a Gundam moves like – it’s not very agile because it’s a gigantic hunk of metal carrying a ton of weapons, but it has boosters that help in maneuvering. Basically, the game will remind you that you’re controlling a mobile suit instead of a living thing, but the boosting mechanics allow for smooth, responsive controls so you won’t find any lag or floatiness in the combat.
When you start a game, you get to choose two Mobile suits to use. The first one will be used for land battles while the second one will be used for outer space, which could either be fights in the surface of a moonbase, or a dogfight in the vacuum of space. The former is basically the same as a land battle while the latter makes it a little bit harder because the suits move around/float in all directions, making it easy to lose track of your opponents and be disoriented. It’s the part of the game where you might want to spend some time getting the hang of things.
Conclusion
There’s only a couple of mobile suits to unlock (one of them is overpowered, IMO) but there’s a ton of playable suits already available and the differences between them are not mere cosmetic. Different suits vary in speed, size, loadout, durability, and even damage capacity. You’ll spend a lot of time trying different mobile suits out and finding the ones that fit your playstyle. There are also a ton of unlockable extra content, such as image galleries, background musics, narrators, etc. – but they’re not as fun to play around with and you’ll most likely spend majority of your time just playing the game.
On the issue of language, non-Japanese speakers can easily solve the problem by going for the English release on the PS2, but even those who are stuck with the Japanese Gamecube version won’t have any trouble because the menus come with English translation. You’ll be able to find your way around.
