I got back from my winter vacation in Japan a few weeks ago, but I was fairly sick and had to take this semester off of school to deal with it and now I'm on a lot of meds and getting better slowly maybe.
So since I was in a pained out state of mind and now I'm just in a tired/drugged state of mind, I haven't been able to really play anything that requires thinking. Therefore I've just been playing Gundam Musou 2 for the last 2 weeks.
Gundam Musou 2 is weird. It has more gameplay meat than GM1 and if you have the GOOD version with achievements (I do not) I think it'd give you several hundred of hours worth of fun. First of all there is the official mode that was in GM1, but now it adds a 2 mission CCA campaign in addition to expanding 0079, Z, ZZ. The expanded ones have some more scenes than they did in GM1, mostly because of the addition of Mobile Armors, but it's still kind of deja vu where you are playing the same game you played last time. These should take about 10 hours total.
Then you have mission mode. First of all there are a fuckload of pilots, but only eight new mechs (GM1 had 18, so 26 total). The new units are Strike Freedom, Infinity Justice, Destiny, F91, V2, Nu Gundam, Sazabi, and Musha Gundam MK-II. Ok, I lied, there are a ton more playable units (probably like 50? You can play as all the enemies/grunts) but they are super shitty with tiny movelists and no ability to chain combos so outside the fun for 1 mission factor they don't really count. WHY DID TURN-X END UP IN THAT CATEGORY JEEEEEZ.
Each main pilot/adversary (outside maybe the Turn-X dude and V chick) has 5 story missions, non-mains get like 2 (with no cutscenes) Unlike GM1 where you got like 5 mins of crossover voiced dialogue and then like 1 crossover cutscene in each one. Here you get jack shit. They basically went cheap, cut out almost all the dialogue/cutscenes. Instead you get a few text crossover scenes (some characters get a lot, some get almost none) and then one crossover cutscene pre-final boss fight. When you beat your story boss, there's no ending cutscene but sometimes you'll get an ending wrap up in text. Still there are voiced conversations throughout the maps between the various characters. But yeah, the game totally eliminated most of the cutscene fanservice from GM1.
BUT, that out of the way, the game then has a billion missions for people who like DW leveling and loot. After you beat your 5 story missions. You have a ton of friendship missions where you help out people to raise how much they like you. This matters because if they like you, you can do team musou. This also matters because if they like you, you can do license missions with them to be able to pilot their mech. There are also free missions which are like "you've killed 30,000 guys celebration mission" and when you beat them you get a reward like "You can now obtain rank 4 loot for ____ unit". Then there are extra missions which are SUPER HARD and only let you play them on hard difficulty and have special requirements like you can only use a certain unit. I haven't passed any so I dunno what the rewards are. Then there are downloadable missions, like one that lets you fights MAs one after another.
So yeah, if you are completionist, that's like 50 missions or something per pilot with probably 30+ pilots. Pilots start being able to do 4 square attacks and 3 charge attacks with a ground musou, an air musou, and a team musou (which are just the lvl.1,lvl.2,lvl.3 musous from DW1 split up). As they gain exp, at level 10 their 4 square combo extends to 6 square hits combo. At lvl 15 they get a charge 4 & charge 5 attack.
So after level 15, a pilot can jump into any mech that he has a license for and do 6 square attacks, 5 charge attacks, a boost dash squarex3->triangle attack, a charge attack where you hold square (mainly just used for MAs), a triangle shot, and 3 musous.
You want to get licenses and use other suits (or not if you don't really care) because each suit has 4 skills the pilot can learn by piloting it for a while. So the idea is to pilot a bunch and gain a big skill database and then equip 3.
The robots level through parts. This is good. When you kill an enemy general you randomly one of its parts as loot. There's like 5 (head, lets, arms, etc...) these effect power, speed, defense, musou meter, etc... at the end of the mission you compare them to the parts you already have for that unit and keep them if they are better loot. This way as you are playing one unit you are leveling up all the other units that you fight. So while you still are stuck to small combo strings when you start as another pilot, if their mech stats/parts are really high it makes things a lot better.
The Mobile Armor fights are decent. The camera auto-centers on them and you dodge their attacks and hit them with a charge attack (you can't boost while charging, so there is some skill in dodging while charging). Then they fall and you can do damage. You can also destroy certain parts of them to stop their ability to do certain attacks but it never really works for me so I just smash. They do break apart as the fight goes on which is cool. Also they have some cheap shit almost instant KO attacks if you're early on so quick-save when they show up is good. Like Psyco Gundam loves to spam a huge nuke blast around it and Devil Gundam is just...Devil Gundam, so totally annoying and cheap. With all the SEED Destiny guys in it, it's kinda dumb they didn't put a SEED Destiny MA like Psyco Gundam ripoff one, but oh well.
Destiny Gundam is surprisingly fuck awesome to use though. It's basically Gatts with a huge sword and good speed + GOD FINGER DASH which takes out a hundred guys as you drag them with you. The SEED guys Kira/Athrun have not so great mechs and probably the worst story missions in the game. At least with Shinn you get to kill Lacus whose riding a Musha Gundam MK-II
The graphics are GM1 but with normal mapping I guess? I dunno, but everything is shiny now. It actually looks pretty good and not too overdone. All the cutscenes that are there (official mode, 1 pre-boss in mission mode, 1 takeoff scene at start of mission mode) look nice at 60fps with all the shine. The models still aren't on the same level of detail as ACE3, but they look good enough.
The music is alright. Just midi-type versions of songs. Voice acting is good.
So basically, it's Gundam Musou 1 with a lot less cutscenes and goofy crossover stuff, but waaaaaaaaaaay more missions, about 8 more mechs, a few more attacks, and MAs. At first I was kinda disappointed because I really liked the crossover fanservice, but once I got past that I had a lot of fun with GM2. There's still crossover fun, it's just less. Also the missions are WAY WAY shorter in GM2, which helps for the burnout. Less focus on dominating all the areas and more focus on just going and killing the generals until the final boss appears.
I give it 1 & 1/2 thumb up.
Next, Japanese gaming market is terrible right now. When I was shopping I went to every damn store in Akihabara and Den Den town and a few stores outside Tokyo/Osaka and it's a mess.
It used to be that every store had every PS2 game ever made, same with PS1, pretty close with Saturn/DC (outside really rare stuff), same with GBA, and pre-disc based stuff was mainly at the retro stores. It used to be about just comparing prices and figuring out where to buy games.
Now it's more about WHERE CAN I EVEN FIND THIS GAME!? The stock levels are horrid and soooo many games have already disappeared off the realm of buying. Even non-fancy rare stuff, like for instance I wanted Kororinpa for Wii. I figured it was old and could be found used for cheap somewhere. I didn't find a single copy in the ENTIRE OF JAPAN. It's not like it's super rare. You can get it off ebay for $50 or so. But it's just not in the chain of supply. I had similar problems with a lot of lesser known PS2 stuff as stores have already dumped the majority of the PS2 titles, almost ALL the ps1 titles, DC titles, Saturn titles, etc...Hell I just wanted to see what new Sega Ages releases had been out in the last 2 years, but I would find stores having 3 or 4 TOTAL of the Sega Ages collection out of the 30+ that exist. Then I wanted Ketsui DS which is only like 2 months old, and I found a total of ONE copy in my entire trip and grabbed it for about $62 used. It's going on ebay for $82-150 right now so I guess it's officially rare already. Anyhow, the supply at the used stores are fucked right now. I was talking to duckroll and he thinks this whole casual market is a factor since casuals who actually are BUYING GAMES wouldn't think to sell them used, and then the main gamers just don't buy many games so stores aren't ordering much. Plus there's the whole DS is the main system, DS is a cart system, carts aren't produced as easily or as much as cds. I figured 6 months later, a game that sold over A MILLION COPIES like DQV DS would be in every bargain bin for $20-30. Nope. Still was $40-50 used everywhere, only $10 cheaper than a new copy. I hope somehow the used game market goes back to the readily available, good prices state that it was during the PS2 years.
I also found out that basically all the JPN Xbox1 games are now considered rare since no one in Japan was willing to buy a damn Xbox and now with the X360 they're like "oh wait, Xbox has good games??". I saw Spikeout for $100, Outrun 2 for $60-70, Metal Wolf Chaos for $60-70, Fatal Frame 2 for $268, etc....
Finally, since I'm sickly and in and out of phases of goodness I'm looking for a simple linear FPS where I can just shoot stuff. I don't want any of this team management, or strategy or whatever. I just want to shoot things. I'm thinking about playing FEAR, Prey, Perfect Dark Zero, or finally going back and giving DOOM3 another shot. What's the most enjoyable of them?
