Mobile Fighter G Gundam (SNES)

 Round about the turn of the century, when access to SNES emulation became more widely available, there were a few previously Japan-only games to which a lot of people (especially young teenagers) flocked, due to their being tie-ins with anime that were becoming popular in English-speaking countries at about the same time, thanks to the multi-year delay that that process had back then. Sailor Moon: Another Story, Dragonball Z: Hyper Dimension, and most relevant to this review, New Mobile Report Gundam Wing: Endless Duel were three such games.

 

Sailor Moon was an okay RPG, and Hyper Dimension had the distinction of being better than the only other Dragonball game me and my friends had played at that point, the awful Dragonball GT: Final Bout on Playstation, but Endless Duel was a legitimately excellent game. Like, probably the best fighting game on the SNES, and definitely the best-looking SNES fighter. G Gundam had not yet had any kind of release in the UK yet, and I think wasn't very well-known in the US either, so no-one really paid its game any mind. It's also a fighting game, though, and in retrospect, it should have been excellent: the show was, after all, essentially Street Fighter II but with giant robots.

 

It won't be much of a surprise to careful readers of the preceding paragraph, but G Gundam just doesn't match up to the following year's game in any way. The easiest way to put it is that it feels like Endless Duel was developed to be as good a game as possible, and it also happens to be a licensed game, while G Gundam fits right alongside a lot of the other bog standard SNES anime tie-ins. It even has the presentational quirks a lot of similar SNES games have, like loud, low quality voice clips taken from the show, background screens where the show's logo scrolls by diagonally, and so on.

 

I will say, though, that it is a perfectly okay fighting game. Every character plays differently, they all have special moves with proper input commands, and there's also a desperation move for each of them. There's even a few features you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 1994 fighting game: seperate story and arcade modes, and a team battle mode, for example. Plus: the stages have different colour palettes showing the progression of time from round to round! SNK had introduced that feature a few years prior in Fatal Fury, but it was still very rare at the time.

 

I actually do really like the way the game looks, too. It's a shame that it's doomed to be compared to the vastly superior Endless Duel, because just as it plays perfectly fine, G Gundam also looks fairly decent, too. The sprites aren't very big, but they are nice to look at, and detailed in a way that reminds of a particularly great-looking Game Gear game. Which does sound like damning with faint praise, I admit. The aforementioned backgrounds are also very well-drawn, all depicted places in which fights took place in the actual show, too.

 

I've spent most of this review comparing G Gundam to other games, which might not seem fair, but I'll be honest here: it is a very standard, okay, average fighting game. If it weren't for the license, it would have been even more forgotten than it actually is, and if it weren't for the massive shadow cast by the other Gundam SNES fighting game, there'd be very little to say about it. Play it if you're a fan of the show and/or you're curious about it, but don't expect to unearth a lost classic or anything.