Thoughts on Gundam Breaker 3
I saw Gundam Breaker 3 get likened to Nioh 2 and Strangers of Paradise in a random Reddit comment, which immediately piqued my interest. I wondered why I had never heard of the game before, until I realized that it actually never came to the states - technically. I was able to import a physical copy for the PS4, which is all in English. When it came in, I booted it up, figuring I'd only play for a half-hour and go to bed.
I played for four hours and vastly overshot my bedtime.
You may ask: why did you do that Mint? I respond to your question with my own: where has this game been all my life?
Gundam Breaker 3's comparisons to Nioh and SoP are sound, for the most part. It doesn't crib from the Souls genre like those games, do, but it's a Character Action game crossed with a Diablolike, and it's fucking perfect.[1] The loop is basic but unbelievably addictive, and it goes like this:
- You destroy Gundams
- You scrap the Gundams for parts
- You use the parts to customize your Gundam and make it more powerful
- You go back onto the field and do it again
Repeat until you get tired of it. I haven't gotten tired of it yet - not even a little bit. This is because GB3 does make the number go up, but it also plays like Bayonetta's younger, feisty cousin. You have air-juggles, you have jump-cancels, you have combos for days, and it makes the act of scrapping Gundams for parts feel incredibly satisfying, hours into my playthrough. There's barely a weapon I haven't enjoyed using, but in particular I love the claws type, which lets you perform wrestling moves on the robots. Dear reader, when I tell you I literally got out of my seat after accidentally pulling off my first pile driver, I mean that shit. I was screaming. It might be the most hype moment I've experienced in games in 2023.
Gearing up is a blast too. Not just because I love to see numbers go up, but because it really does feel like your Mech is getting stronger. I loved maxing out my thrusters so I could zip through stages, and added perks that made every kill I pulled off heal me, turning me into some sort of blood-sucking vampire Gundam. There are hundreds of helmets, arms, backpacks and so on to collect, and the best part is that if there's a certain piece you like glamour-wise, you can have it inherit perks, letting you keep the strength of the old part and the fashion of the new one.
That said, there are certain sets that are worth putting together because they give you bonuses based on the anime a particular Gundam comes from. For example, equipping the Shining Gundam's arms will give you access to Burning Finger as one of your four equipable special moves, which is sick as hell.
I am a fake Gundam fan - I fall pretty much fully into the "wow, cool robot" section of the fanbase.[2] But even I found a bunch of Gundams that I recognized and used parts from. Gundam Breaker 3 came out in 2016, so it seems to have units from everything Gundam-related up to that point. Yes, even SD!
The other big thing that makes Gundam Breaker so charming is its aesthetic. The game takes place in the real world, where Gundam Breaker exists as a game that people play. Your Gundam is a literal Gunpla, which is hammered in by the fact that your customization menu has a literal model kit studio in the background. Even the rarities of parts that drop are based on real-world Gunpla: MG, PG, etc. I very much enjoy this because I both suck at Gunpla building, and also don't have the space to really get into it as a hobby, which makes this a nice substitute.
The plot is simple but effective: you're recruited by a girl who's trying to advertise her neighborhood's local mall, so that it doesn't get shut down now that it's being outclassed by a much bigger, modern mall next to the town's train station. How will she accomplish this? By giving the local mall exposure by winning the Gundam Breaker World Tournament, of course! Because if Bandai Namco has anything to say about it, the whole world will be as focused on Gunpla as they are the World Cup.
Like I said, it's simple and pretty silly, but it works on me. I'm a sucker for Tournament Arcs and rooting for the little guy, so there's a lot to love! Not to mention, the game can be weirdly hilarious at times too - there's a very dry humor in some of the cast that I wasn't expecting, and the localization is almost entirely error-free as far as the script goes.
With all that said, even if this is game is perfect for me, it's still not a perfect game. For starters, customizing the visual aspects of your mech is a wonderfully detailed process, allowing you to change colors, material types, and even how degraded the Gunpla is. This is good. What's not so good is that changes don't stick after you swap parts, so you have to re-add them whenever you update your Gundam. As such I just chose to use some of the included presets until I got a new build that I really liked. But I really wish I could add my own presets that I could quickly slap on.
The other major issue is that even though the story's localization is well-done, this doesn't account for a lot of the perks your Gundam can pick up. Some are self-explanatory (X Health Gain When Parts Destroyed), but others are incomprehensible (wtf does an X-ANTENNA do?). There's no glossary that gives extra info, so you might need to do some digging online to understand what an ability does.
But beyond that, I've been smitten with Gundam Breaker 3. It's got the Goop, it's got the numbers that go up - sometimes that's all I need from a game I'm playing.