Every day is the "End of the Week"

Publisher: Namco Bandai

Systems: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3

Release Date: 6/28/2011

     Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 is the latest title in the Gundam spin off of the Dynasty Warriors series.  The premise of this iteration is similar to the Final Fantasy Dissidia games, pilots from  many of the different Gundam anime series universes and times lines are pulled into a unknown dimension by a mysterious signal and are set up to fight against each other while also being confronted by an unknown automated Mobile Suit. This third title in the series added and changed much more content than the last two and for the most part, the changes are vast improvements.

     The bulk of the game is in the Story Mode, where you choose one of the 52 Pilots and progress through different paths of the new original story. At the beginning, there are five pilots available, Amuro Ray, from Gundam, Setsuna F. Seiei, from Gundam OO, Banagher Links, from Gundam Unicorn, Garrod Ran, from After War Gundam X, and Kou Uraki from Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. Except for Amuro, each of these characters and their respective series and Mobile Suits (MS from here on) are new to the series and along with these additions the developers added some more MSs, most notably Gundam Deathscythe Hell and Gundam Heavy Arms Kai from Gundam Wing, one of the more popular Gundam series.

     Each character belongs to a "team" in story mode. This is what determines their path through story mode as they encounter and join with others from the same team.  Once you choose a Pilot, you go the main Story Mode menu which consist of:

  -The Mission menu: Where you select the battles you want to take part in.

  -The Terminal: Where you get notifications from the game and letter type events with other pilots.

  -The Mobile Suit Lab: Where you purchase new MSs, purchase special equipment, purchase stat boosts, and sell MSs that you have 2 or more of. (You purchase new MSs using plans obtained in battle. Special equipment are power ups)

  -The Shop: Where you buy licenses, skills, and training (buying a license for a MS allows anyone who wouldn't normally pilot it to do so, skills are power ups you buy for each individual pilot, and training is paying money to level up your pilot)

  -The Settings: Where you can select your partner, select your operator, and select your skills. (You can choose 3 out of 38 Skills)

  -And the Records: where you view your statistics, your obtained licenses, and your friendships.

     The way you upgrade and buy MSs has been changed drastically from Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2. Where before you would obtain parts from defeating important enemies, the process has now been more streamlined. Instead of obtaining parts you obtain plans. Once you have a plan, you can make the full MS. The plans also now have upgrade slots, which are taken up each time you choose to upgrade a stat and the amount the stat upgrades is dependent on the tech level of the Mobile Suit lab. The plans have the ranks 1-4, with higher ranks having more upgrade slots and better base stats. The whole MS now only has four special equipment slots, with one of them often taken up by a unique equipment for that MS which is unlocked by becoming good friends with the original Pilot.

     This means most of the time you can only add three equipment and then on top of this, they removed the ability to attach the same equipment twice.  I disliked this at first because it meant I couldn't stack my favorite equipment, but since there are less slots, I don't really have the space to stack anyways. On the plus side, the unique equipment on the different MSs gives me good motivation to become friends with as many pilots as possible and keeps me from making every MS a near clone of the others, which was a problem I had in the last game.

     You can have up to four plans for the same MS at the same time and when you get a fifth you get to choose which plan to sell. You also can have four different units of the same MS. This allows you to make multiple roles for the same MS, which is cool but I only ever have one unit since it's less costly and I go for melee attack anyways, but for example you could have a Melee Offensive MS and a Defensive MS as separate units)

     Choosing a Partner is another new addition to the Dynasty Warriors Gundam series. Your partner is your ally and can be called out in battle when you have a full segment of the Partner Gauge. Depending on the partner, the support given will be either offensive, such as wiping out a bunch of enemies in front of you, or defensive like recovering health.

     Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 also does away with the separation of Official Mode and Mission Mode and just offers you a wide variety of mission in the Mission Menu of Story Mode. The main focus in this game is the original story, having multiple paths and making it more involved than the original stories of the previous two games. Once you select a mission, you get to select your MS out of 74 different ones! The different types of missions consist of: 

  -Chapter Missions: These are the original story missions.

  -Relationship Missions: These are used to make a character's friendship Level go from 4 to 5.

  -Friendship Missions: These put you on the same team as a variety of different Pilots so that you can increase your friendship with them.

  -History Missions: These are where you can play missions that follow the story of the different Gundam series, a GREAT replacement to Official Mode.

  -Collection Missions: These set you up to fight certain types of MSs, in order to collect their plans.

  -Challenge Missions: These are the most difficult missions for those that want to push themselves.

  -Tutorial Missions: These are for those who are new to DWG or just need a refresher.  They help prepare you for most anything the rest of the game will throw your way.

  -Memorial Mission: These are missions that are unlocked by reaching certain milestones, like killing X amount of Aces, or X Mobile Armors, or clearing X Missions, etc. Certain Memorial Missions have special rewards for completing them such as being able to get higher Ranked Plans, new Skills in the Shop, and new Operators. Think of these as Achievements/Trophies that you can PLAY. (I love them because of that)

  -And finally, Special Missions: These are miscellaneous missions. The only ones I've unlocked so far, involve you getting much more money in the mission than usual, so they seem to be money grinding missions, which is a nice feature to put in to speed up any grinding you may do.

     The Friendship gauge in DWG3 has been made much better than in DWG2 by making it levels 1-5, and not having a pilot's friendship go down because their sore about you blowing them up.  Unlocking a character for befriending is done by joining up with them in the chapter missions and then viewing their following event in the terminal, starting them at Lv.1. Each level of friendship they gain from there on unlocks special bonuses dependent on that character. The usual is that Lv. 2  will allow you to select them as a partner, Lv. 3 will allow you to choose that character as a pilot for Story Mode, Lv. 4 will unlock a special power on that character's MS (usually if they are one of the main characters), and  Lv. 5 allows them to be selected as your operator, and in some cases unlocks new skills to buy. This friendship gauge is greatly improved over previous games and perfect for a guy like me who loves unlocking a ton of things.

     So you may now be thinking, "Man, he just doesn't stop talking! He must be almost done now right?!" Sorry buddy, but those were just the changes in the menus, THE MENUS FOR GOODNESS SAKE! I'm just now getting to the significant battle gameplay changes! (Which is what we all REALLY care about here anyways). So without further ado . . . I present the battle system!

     Well, upon starting up the game, you are immediately greeted with a cinematic and then thrown into a mission as Setsuna F. Seiei in the OO Raiser. The first thing I noticed was that the graphics have been revamped and done in a cel shaded style in order to look more like the Gundam anime. It's a significant improvement and really pretty to look at, especially when your character uses tons of particles.

     In the upper right of the screen are two bars, a blue one and a red one, each with a white line at the halfway point. This is the Battle Gauge and is responsible for some of the biggest gameplay changes in DWG3. In previous games when you die, it's game over and it sucks to be you, but that is not the case in now. As long as you still have ANY blue left in the battle gauge, you will respawn to where you died at the cost of significantly draining the battle gauge. Losing fields, having other Ace's die, and having cannon fodder die also lowers the Battle Gauge, but by a small amount since you will most likely be plowing through the enemies' ranks at a good pace.

     The red bar is the enemies' battle gauge and the same rules apply for them, when they die, they come back. The difference though is that there is a delay on their respawn so that you aren't always flooded by the same Ace, and they will respawn in their base most of the time instead of where they died. I love the pace they respawn at and the idea of respawning period. I haven't seen it done in a hack and slash game before, so it is a welcome breath of fresh air, but that doesn't mean you should underestimate your opponent, or you'll end up being sorry you did.

In addition, your health now regenerates over time. The downside, so does enemy ace's, so if you run away from an ace in mid battle, they may have time to recover most of their health. I love this feature because it removes the tedious search for health crates like the last games.

     If you're like me, then your first thought was something like "well this is dumb. They made an easy game even easier!" However, as it turns out, they also changed the AI to make them tougher! I really didn't expect this since something found in all hack and slash games seems to be poor AI. Not due to laziness or fail programming, but because if each one of those hundreds of enemies was smart, you'd die way to easily. So by giving you regenerating health and respawns they were able to make the AI smarter by having them attack more often in groups. This still doesn't make the regular enemies too challenging, but if you're fighting two aces, they'll take advantages of openings, usually by striking when you're preoccupied with the other. Oh yeah, aces are HARD in this game.

    The game also adds emergency dash which lets you teleport while being hit, or to teleport after doing a normal attack. This uses a good amount of your boost gauge, but that recovers quickly anyways. I love these changes, because the health system in the last game made me feel like I was just wasting time more than being challenged. These changes do make the game a bit easier, but I feel they also make it more fun.

     Another thing I noticed was that the map looked different. Instead of just consisting of a bunch of bland fields for you to take over, most of the fields had an icon on the map, signifying the bonuses that capturing that field would give. This addition makes field acquisition a bit more strategic, but not by much, since you are a near unstoppable beast anyways. It mainly just ends up that you aim to get rid of the annoying fields first.

     The victory conditions in the past DWGs were mainly defeat X pilot who often wouldn't appear until the end of the level. Now the Enemy HQ has a commander who comes out of hiding when the enemy battle gauge goes to zero, or when their HQ is captured. Every victory condition I've seen has been to beat this Commander. This is a pretty minor change, but I like it since if you are doing a great job in a mission, the Commander would appear before you even captured all the fields, and thus you could skip on capturing the remaining fields and kill the commander instead.

Online play also has been improved. In the last game, I was really excited about the online play, but when I tried it I was a little underwhelmed. It was a VS mode where you would fight three other players along with some regular enemies. There wasn't really anyone on it and it got boring quickly. For DWG3, they decided to redo the online mode completely. It now consists of 15 cooperative missions made just for online mode. Each mission has their own lobbies and their own Leaderboards. That's right. 15 LEADER BOARDS! There is also a nifty function that shows you which missions have lobbies.

     In order to keep up an online community, online mode gives more money and experience than anything else in the game, and the missions are insanely quick too since there are usually four players.

Before the game in the waiting room,  you can go ahead and play the mission alone as practice, and you get to keep the money and experience you earn in the practice, although it is smaller than the amount you earn in the real thing.

     One of things I love most about hack and slash games is the co-op mode. Dynasty Warriors Gundam has always been a blast to play with my friends and this iteration's co-op remains the same as before and thus I still has some small peeves like the fact that the screen is split vertically instead of horizontally. There may be a way to change this, but it doesn't bug me enough to warrant searching further than the settings menu. Co-op was also was where I noticed that the camera hangs at an odd angle. It's not as noticeable in single player, but it hangs low and is a bit unwieldy. After playing for a little bit however, I got the hang of the camera and it no longer was a problem.

     I've talked on and on about the changes this game made, but I should also give a brief mention of what is the same. The combo system remains unchanged for the most part.  If you've played any Dynasty Warriors game or Samurai Warriors, the combo system is the same as those. The specials remain the same, with 3 segments of the special bar max (you start with one and gain more upon leveling your pilot). The thruster gauge remains the same (if you use it up you overheat and it slowly recharges). Oh and you are a one man army of death and destruction.

My Verdict: 

I LOVED this game. I am a decent fan of Gundam, more so with the newer series than the older ones, and I love hack and slash games. Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 is a suburb sequel, with way more improvements than I expected. However this game is still a Dynasty Warriors game so it is a LOT of the same over and over. This iteration does a good job of spicing thing up and since I love grinding, this game is right up my alley.

This -is- a niche game, but it does exactly what it set out to do.

Buy It: If you like/love Gundam, liked Dynasty Warriors Gundam or Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2. You'd spend a long (and hopefully good) time with this game and all it's different combinations.

Rent It: If you like hack and slash games and if you want to try one with giant robots instead of people, or if you were let down by the previous Dynasty Warriors Gundam games (or if I made the game sound cool to you!). You just might be pulled into the series.

Skip It: If you dislike Gundam, hack and slash games, or excessive grinding. You would probably not enjoy this game very much.

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