Review: Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 (360/PS3)

Dynasty Warriors is a popular series of games that recreate famous battles from the book "Romance of the Three Kingdoms". It is a hack and slash game with some minor RPG elements, such as leveling up your character's abilities, who you are able to choose based on which of the three different clans you want to play as. Your chosen character then has the honor of leading your soldiers into battle, which are massive 'conquer territories' skirmishes where you fight anywhere from 300 to 1,000 troops per mission. The series has been relatively successful, so Tecmo Koei decided to make it even more so by combining their winning formula with giant robots from a famous anime series, thereby bringing you Dynasty Warriors: Gundam.

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 is, obviously, the third installment in the series, so plenty of changes have been made since the original one first came out. The graphics have been improved and the overall game play mechanics have had a bit of an overhaul. The maps are a bit more developed, and I enjoyed the soundtrack much more than the previous two entries. However, the battle system has remained the same throughout all of the Dynasty Warriors games, so don't expect much of a change in Gundam 3.

The Dynasty Warriors: Gundam spin-offs work a bit differently than the normal Dynasty Warriors games. In Dynasty Warriors you normally have one of a variety of objectives, such as kill the leader, or head to this point on the map and secure it, etc. The Gundam versions' mission objective is to take over bases and bring the enemy morale down, which makes the leader show up. You then kill him and end the mission. Basically, every mission is the exact same regardless of what they ask you to do. There are certain bases that you can capture that help raise moral or do other little things to help change the tide of battle a bit, but over-all, you are going to end up playing the missions the same way each time.

The story is pretty bad, in fact I was actually skipping through the storyline during my 30+ hours of game play just to get to the fighting. The story is, in a nutshell, about how all of the famous Gundam characters from all of the different Gundam series follow a strange signal and end up on a planet where things are "distorted". You are never told what's making the world distorted, but all of the characters seem very distraught about it, so it must be bad. The characters break off into three different groups, causing three different storylines (seems like a Dynasty Warriors trademark) that eventually coalesce into two different stories.....apparently one storyline gets lost somewhere along the way. The three storylines are all really bland and all of them talk about the exact same thing. Whittling it down to two stories doesn't help either, as they also seem to be exactly the same. Now, I'll be fair and admit I didn't finish Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3, so the storylines could have magically developed into some sort of masterpiece in the last few hours of the game, but I highly doubt it. At least, they weren't going anywhere when I stopped. 

The best part about this game, like all Dynasty Warriors games, is the insane amount of missions to go on. Even if they do end up playing pretty similarly in this iteration, there are tons of them for you to do. Depending on which missions you choose, you gain new parts to put on your Gundam, or unlock higher-tiered Gundams to use in battle. These missions also unlock new pilots, operators, and various other things as well.

All in all, despite its huge flaws, there was a reason I played this game for 30+ hours. I am a big fan of Dynasty Warriors games simply because I love being an overpowered person that kills hundreds of enemies in a single stroke, and being able to do that while sitting in my favorite giant robots made it a 1,000,000 times better. If you also enjoy the Dynasty Warriors games, and especially if you love Gundams, you should pick it up just for that. You'll just have to skip the story.... but with giant, awesome, robot Gundams, who needs that anyways?

Submitted by: Jason Hald