Gundam 0079: The War For Earth - Just Bad Games

gundam 079 the war for earth is a video game released by presto studios and bandai digital entertainment for the pc playstation and apple pippin in 1996 and 1997. the game is part of the ever popular gundam franchise that started as an anime series back in whoa 1979 over four decades of giant robot adventures that's gotta be canonically dense luckily the two of us know a guy who can lay down some serious anime knowledge in a short amount of time tristan from glass reflection buddy you've got the floor yeah great gundam is a topic that i can literally talk about for hours how long do i go about a minute oh okay so gundam crash course yes originally the franchise started in 1979 with the original mobile suit gundam and there have been countless media releases for the series since then not to mention an even longer list of written work in the form of manga and novels as such in japan gundam's influence stretches far and wide having been one of the forefathers of the mecca animated genre and the originator of what is known as the real robot sub-genre see mecca narratives prior to gundam focused heavily on superhero-like narrative tropes where the robots were used by pilots to combat evil such as in mazinger or if you're more familiar with the property super sentai and its north american equivalent the power rangers we know the power rangers power rangers light speed rescue on the nintendo 64. [Applause] right well what gundam provided that was different from its robot four bearers was a darker more narrative driven tale with technology at the forefront the mecha suits used in gundam while somewhat fantastical compared to our technology in the real world didn't have magical powers but were instead just a logical progression of technology the stories included a lot of heavy hitting topics too like our characters being child soldiers suffering from ptsd the idealism of a truly pacifist nation in a world ravaged by constant violence and even just the innate horrors of wartime but hey did you want some zaku tofu merchandising aside the stories that gundam told while tragic and futuristic still felt real like humanity could progress in technology one day far enough to soar amongst the stars only to have the same conflicts we know today it's what's helped keep the franchise relevant all the way to the present needless to say gundam's uniqueness added to its appeal and it's very much a household name in japan much the same as star trek and star wars are here in north america heck gundam's popularity has spurred on whole secondary hobbies and even a full-sized moving gundam replica in yokohama whew thanks tristan gundam big deal in japan get it so what did north america think of gundam back in 96 when this game was released well your average joe likely didn't think much because it was hardly a blip on their radar by the mid-90s gundam had multiple shows and products available in japan they also had several video games for many platforms and while there were multiple gundam related things released not many were officially brought over to north america but presto studios was about to change oh that don't do that because the developers of this game have one very important distinction they're american that's right bandai entrusted their japan exclusive beloved and downright iconic series to folks that may or may not have been the most in the know when it came to the series impossible as it may seem it happened and boy did it happen not only would this game be the first in the series developed in north america it would also be the very first four north americans you see in 1996 the first official english translation of a gundam anime hadn't been released yet meaning that this game would have been the first officially released gundam anything that north americans could have experienced well actually there was a cartoon pilot called doozy bots in the early 90s which actually attempted to repurpose the anime sd gundam into a saturday morning cartoon no we didn't make this up but it being unaired and all means that nobody really saw this besides some unwilling tv executives so without much of an official gundam presence in north america that means that this video game would have to be many people's first entry points into the series that's a heck of a lot of weight to put on any game developer's shoulders because if we didn't properly establish it yet did you not see the life-size moving gundam here have a picture of a train station where locals funded a gundam statue official stamps anyone gundam big deal in japan so how do you pay respect to this classic franchise how do you possibly take what gundam is and turn it into an interactive game well you should do this mobile suit gundam is a video game released and developed by bandai for the playstation in 1995. it's a fully 3d mobile suit game where you pilot a giant mecca through locations with events made popular in the original animated series this was followed by a second game that was more of a remaster and upgrade called mobile suit gundam version 2.0 this heavily improved almost every aspect of the original game while they were not the first gundam games to offer a first-person perspective they did establish a greater idea and understanding of what fans and gamers wanted from piloting a mobile suit oh that's right there were two simulation style gundam games already on the market just begging to be translated for an english-speaking audience but were they retooled and released outside of japan no to this day both games remain japanese exclusive playstation releases okay well that's kind of strange but i guess presto studios must have really wowed bandai with an amazingly interactive game that surpassed the two earlier titles oh crap i'd say it's time to jump in an experimental mobile suit and pilot our way through gundam 079 the war for earth the game begins with a video introduction that lays out the setting 79 years have passed since crushing overpopulation drove humankind into space the rundown is that earth helped launch a bunch of space colonies into well space the intro is brief but there is more information linked in the main menu detailing important historic events that lead to this battle now why show snippets in video form of these compelling events when you can just place i don't know a mile of plain text to read the colonies and earth eventually engaged in a full-scale war pitting two armies against each other the earth federation fighting for earth and the duchy of jean fighting for the colonies this um right we gotta pause here for a sec folks some of you no doubt heard my colleague here say the words the duchy of jean well we're not in 1996 anymore and nowadays everyone who knows what gundam is would call them by another name the principality of zeon likely this is just a translation error and is the equivalent of pronouncing this guy's name as master chef hey everyone it's me masterchef the iconic protagonist from everyone's favorite interactive software disc hello i guess we'll stay true to presto studios naming revision here so good guys earth federation bad guys duchy of john okay we all finally have an understanding of gundam right well no see gundam has kind of a complicated story with no clear identifier of good guy and bad guy these ideas are supposed to be more ambiguous well yes on the surface this is a series about teams of giant fighting robots at its heart gundam has a weaving story of politics and relationships with nuance on all sides are you telling me we're not off to a good start here ha was the hello donut created by the floor runners yeah i think that means we're off to a bad start okay well weird and strangely off-brand intro done let's get into the gameplay the game begins with a sequence zooming in on one of the space colonies showing a packed street with people desperately trying to go somewhere amidst the crowd a lone driver who thinks they're better than everyone else takes a detour and drives into a military base where he hits the foot of a giant mobile suit because apparently he just didn't see the giant aggressive robot an explosion occurs and his car is decommissioned freaked out the driver runs to a warehouse where a soldier on a monitor implores this rando to jump into the mobile suit in the hangars what the guy gets into the mobile suit and gets destroyed game over okay must have missed something there uh were we in control we weren't really told to do anything uh let's restart 79 years have passed since oh cool looks like we have to sit through the entire opening sequence again no skipping yeah if you fail it like we did you'll just need to repeat it over and over again until you get it right well then i guess we best try not to screw this up against back to start 79 years okay i'm thinking we need to push a button or something uh let's check out the instructions so according to this the game is controlled entirely by keyboard that must mean we need to push one of these keys at a specific moment makes sense let's go back to the gundam sequence yeah see the space bar lets me change weapons so we must be able to attack with one of these let's try attacking with this dagger looking weapon nope dead no problem let's try this punchy fist no dead okay maybe the gundam's head icon thing nope dead uh oh duh it's gotta be the gun icon right [Music] nope what that was all the attack options there is literally no other possible way we can attack let's restart again wait wait you see that there that icon thing it's lit up i i think it means we need to push something okay whatever fine the button is clearly an up arrow so let's push the direction key on the keyboard what the gundam is going on dear viewers this whole area right here this opening sequence it took us over a half an hour to figure out first off there's this section where you can pick a weapon to attack with and you know what it's a no-win situation despite the fact that you can toggle through different weapons here you can't actually use them why because the character we're playing as is not actually in the gundam yet but why do i have access to toggle through its weapons why would the game let me select them at all if i was unable to use them and wasn't actually in the gundam who knows what we do know is this while playing the game you'll see four icons at the bottom of the screen almost at all times now what do you think these icons represent let me let me i can figure it out using my advanced ai companion frittata according to frittata i guess the first one is an x or something the second one is a really speedy lightning bolt the third one is totally a coffin oh yeah and the fourth one is one of those cool old viking shields uh no blast frittata playmaster chef is disappointed in you music mix volume seven [Music] i love this song sure yeah these symbols look like a bunch of weird things but what do they actually mean for starters the x at the beginning is actually four arrows it represents your movement keys how the keys on the keyboard look nothing like this and don't move in those directions at all the second one is the attack icon the third one is the gundam shield and the viking shield symbol at the end that's actually the interact icon why doesn't the shield look like the actual gundam shield that the gundam uses why couldn't they just make the icons something simple like i don't know the words that these things actually represent that would have probably made the game better good thing they didn't do that huh but now we know what we need to push so let's go back one more time okay the button is lit up and i pushed the c key which means interact the icon lit up and i hit it and another major problem here folks hitting the right button doesn't always work you might be off by a couple milliseconds or the game might just not register it so what you need to do is keep on trying until it works finally i did it great time to get into the gundam which you need to do really quickly by tapping the forward key while standing in front of that chair because if not again so eventually you get into the gundam and you're greeted to a boot sequence where they explain what the icons mean why would they explain them to you after they've started showing them to you if you didn't know what they meant you wouldn't be able to get to where you are right now it's madness it is but after that boot screen you can finally use your head mounted machine guns to take out the enemy mobile suit let me tell you after almost an hour of seeing the same sequence over and over again this is incredibly satisfying to see so we get control the gundam now it seems the game's turned into a point-and-click type thing where wait what [Music] a brief moment while my co-pilot sorts some things out gundam double o 79 the war for earth is an fmv game fmv is short for full motion video the concept of this was made incredibly popular by a game called dragon's lair which played like a far simpler version of this one joystick one button sometimes the screen would highlight a direction that you should aim for or give you brief hints of things you're supposed to do dragon slayer's execution of this style of game isn't perfect but it worked well enough but what's important what is real important to know is that the game came out in 1980 freaking three after a decade of advanced game development you would think you would hope that they figured out how to make fmv games work better but no the war for earth is a gigantic gundam step backwards oh you can say that again there's no reason why it should take us this long to get past the first three minutes of the game anyway back to the warehouse so after you start controlling the gundam you get to look around a full 360 degree still image looks kinda cool the problem with what i did last time was that i clicked on that open door right away silly me the developers expected us to know that we'd immediately get an axe to the face what you're supposed to do is click and drag around the outside of the door frame to look around if you do it right you'll find the iconic gundam shield hanging on the wall shield it up you can now go outside and use the craptastic controls to take on the enemy mobile suit this is your first true battle and it really doesn't inspire confidence in the rest unless you're literally told what to do it's usually just a guessing game with deadly consequences like here we've used our beam saber which is what i thought this weird dagger icon thing was anyway we used it to slice up that enemy mech real good according to our sensors thermal nuclear reaction imminent so what do we do maybe we should run away let's hit the back movement key quick he just stepped back slightly why would they even animate that yeah it doesn't matter what movement key you push nothing works what you'll need to do is pull out that shield and hide behind it because the shield alone is strong enough against a nuclear explosion apparently so this shield is so good in fact that it looks practically unscathed in the next scene that is one amazing shield yeah it doesn't make a whole lot of sense does it that issue we're having with not being able to know exactly what button we're supposed to push and what action we're supposed to take plagues the entire game and only gets worse as more enemies approach you'll come up to situations where you'll be given multiple light up icons having you fail again and again and despite the fact that a nuclear explosion can be survived by your shield you'll be in situations where your shield is compromised by regular gunfire it's completely inconsistent each time forcing you to go back to the start of the entire game if you forgot to save in time oh yes saving is a whole other ball of yarn as well the game is a video and always advancing forward you'll need to pause the game mid video sequence to save and when you reload it starts at the beginning of that video sequence even if you were several minutes into it so the gundam gets out of the explosion voids a couple more enemies and meets up with white base a giant spaceship with a sparse crew of soldiers fighting against jean here you'll meet some important characters plucked straight from the anime but kinda different these characters may have had great background introductions in the show but here they're about as flat as cardboard foreshadowing this character noah is clearly played as a mature adult here a weathered commanding officer but in the show he's a 19 year old thrust into a position of leadership the game avoids any of that and reduces the character to well iamonson noah bright the most senior officer left aboard during the attack a mussai struck our bridge with a tam missile bland yogurt noah goes on to explain that for some reason only you can pilot the gundam and invites you to join the earth federation by presenting you with some wings or something but be quick yup if you miss the brief second to accept the wings it triggers a fail state where you need to replay the entire four-minute white based video sequence again from the start just look at how long they give you to actually snag the wings that's pretty quick and they expect you to be able to figure that out flawlessly the first time so skipping along the story the game moves away from white bass and jumps over to the evil john here we meet up with char yup this here is another character from the anime who looks kinda better in that show yeah long story short he's hiding his identity and in the original anime this looks fine but in live action yeah they needed to give the actor a better costume because this looks like he ran to an arts and crafts store and grabbed some scraps of construction paper for a face mask uh and don't think we didn't see the spray-painted darth vader helmet we noticed but perhaps the worst part is that in the game they keep calling him shar shar like sharona s-h-a-r you see that that's strange because his name's actually char c-h-a-r like charizard and that's not all the name of the enemy mobile suits that the jean use is also wrong they're called zaku but the entirety of the game they call them zacks i guess we have to give them the benefit of the doubt without being able to pull from an official translation it's not like they would have written the name properly and just misspoke the name the entire time by accident right oh you mean like on whitebase's computer terminal that correctly spells zaku and therefore proves the developers knew that the names should actually be that but during the entire production they just happened to get it wrong it's maddening especially if you're a fan of gundam because you know these characters names and what these things are and how to pronounce them properly right so back to the story the gundam needs to be delivered to some place called jabro because it's a special kind of mobile suit that is very advanced and very rare the earth federation needs it we guessed to produce more of them but just to rub it in at no point during the entire game will the gundam ever demonstrate why it's so advanced hate to keep bringing up the show but the gundam from the series was made with advanced materials that made it very very very hard to destroy which is never mentioned in this freaking game at all so you as the pilot are left in the dark completely about why anyone would need this thing so badly you're just an untrained civilian who just happened to press the right buttons but boy do your teammates in the earth federation think you're amazing anyway i must say even i'm impressed they don't teach maneuvers like that in flight i can't believe how well you handled that mobile suit you have to let me know how you made it fly so smooth next shar our favorite dollar store cosplay arrives to confront you you get into a complicated and long fighting space filled with awkward pauses and no win scenarios but unlike the start of the game where the no one scenario could be corrected by selecting the right option when you fight shar you're supposed to lose it's one of them fail to win sequences that us gamer types sure do love in order to win you need to lose the correct way yeah see if you lose the fight accidentally too early you'll lose lose but if you keep the fight going far enough you'll lose properly i really really really hate this game to lose properly you need to trigger an event where shar blows up your gundam's leg and you helplessly fall to earth from space around this time a giant laser cannon fires at white base and they helplessly fall to earth from space as well you both end up in post-apocalyptic las vegas with the gundam's leg damage the team puts its torso on some tank treads now it's driven through the las vegas strip to find the big laser cannon and destroy it so white base can fly again without being shot down what comes next is a maze a maze that is traversed through multiple still frame 360 images each one represents a crossroads on the vegas strip and is surrounded by random and large 3d objects made to look like buildings giant texas hat giant light bulb giant bottle and glasses and there's a really cool restaurant off to the side here called scabies yeah everybody lots to eat at scabies the problem here is that you have no real guidance or direction sometimes you'll choose a path that has minds that blow you up or other times you'll run into turrets that shoot and destroy you it's pure trial and error with a single set path that you must memorize each and every time starting all the way from the beginning until you get it right be prepared to watch a lot of death animations it ain't fun by the way at this point we started to notice that everyone in the game kept calling the player gundam or pilot gundam pilot it was around here we realized that we're not playing as the character from the anime but instead just a nameless character remember this we'll get back to it later so the gundam makes it through the maze finds the cannon gets into more complicated and stupid fights to take far too long to beat with characters you've never seen before and have no idea who they are but eventually you are victorious and the big cannon is destroyed now comes a huge pivotal moment in the story that will make absolutely no sense at all to the player by the time you see this scene you're around 20 or so minutes into the game's story shar is going to backstab somebody leading to events that will cause them to crash their spaceship now this character you've only briefly seen during a cutscene this is inspired by the anime but the anime took its time to establish all of these characters and their relationships making this event far more impactful but in this game oh boy it doesn't matter you got no care in the world what cardboard face and captain john here are talking about or even fighting about all you need to know is that this guy here is about to crash his big spaceship and scream out the wrong name for the organization he's a part of for the freedom but what makes this section almost unplayable is that the gameplay here mostly focuses on moving the gundam around the top of the spaceship as it's crashing the camera keeps changing directions and perspectives also changing the orientation of your movement keys it happens randomly making it really really really hard to play properly and add to the fun sometimes the video loading sequences jump in too quickly cutting out important dialogue like this gem doesn't look like that ugly bird is gonna change course try taking out the try taking out the try taking out the the pit like a cockpit that's clearly what they're trying to say right they didn't actually mean i hope not that would either hurt or be kind of awkward this is where the horse has corralled itself anywho the gundam makes it back to white base and everything seems to be fine but suddenly we get this amazing chunk of acting what in the places was that did somebody just take a shot at me hey wait i just saw a red flash what whoa hey white face kai gundam i'm under attack duke duke no let's charge this experienced pilot taught to use one of the most advanced mechanical weapons in the military seemed completely unprepared for being shot at in a war zone suddenly their amazement at a civilian's piloting skills makes way more sense shar is back after double-crossing his own team he now wants to take you out the random guy he met 15 minutes ago because he's super impressed with how you handle a mech why is everyone so damn impressed with our piloting skills this is probably supposed to be the most epic battle of the game the one where you take all of the elements you've learned up until this point and utilize them brutally and efficiently to take on char but nah that's not gonna happen you get plenty of awkward pauses random moments where you need to retry again and again essentially we're dealing with probably one of the worst boss battles we've ever experienced in any video game you'll feel just as helpless and lost as you did all the way at the start of the game because you've really gained no experience that could possibly help and char well he just keeps taunting you like his mask isn't made from old cereal boxes his taunts are confusing because he acts like you're a challenge but also he doubts your abilities okay let's fire at him [Music] one cannot describe just how slow this fight is you have to wait for shar to boast about things over and over but when it ends you'll want to scream ah see you don't take out shar no you just cut off his arm and he flies away in retreat this pilot this great renowned warrior of jean is reduced to running away like a baby because he doesn't know how to fight these armies are useless none of these fighters know how to use their mobile suits in any way efficiently especially against a newbie pilot it's a joke but the biggest joke is about to happen back to the story shah has run away the earth federation soldiers and generals congratulate the player and inform them they need to go to jaburo and the video sequence cuts to shar in a spaceship boasting some more i look forward to our next encounter [Music] [Applause] and then suddenly the game ends the game ends on a cliffhanger [Laughter] just around a half hour of gameplay that is if you manage to play it without any fails it ends the story is not completed the narrative is unfinished but this game is over there isn't even a proper video ending this is what we get congratulations you have delivered gundam and white base from the clutches of john for now oh screw you you feel so wronged with an ending like this and it's even worse when you stop for two seconds to really think about it they went to all the trouble of designing entirely new live-action film sequences for this game and didn't even bother to finish the story what if they just repurposed the animation from the anime for those scenes that would have made sense the game doesn't utilize any of the anime scenes from the show there were hours upon hours of animation that already followed this exact plot using it would have translated to a video game way easier see all those moments where we need to make a choice in the game well they would have been so much better with an animated cartoon pausing it would look normal but with live action actors they had to keep things moving constantly making the game feel like a cluster of bad gameplay designs and with all the money they would have saved by not making live action and cg animated sequences they could have focused on translating the story properly and working on better gameplay we mentioned how the main character is just a nameless pilot right well in the anime the main character is amuro who isn't just some random guy that jumped into a gundam his dad had designed the thing making him the only person in the universe who could figure out how to control the gundam so quickly after his father died yeah all we know is that the guy in the game could drive a car badly from what we saw and suddenly he was capable of piloting an advanced mechanical warfighting robot the anime's narrative is complex deep and something worth exploring inspiring countless other shows that have continued to be produced to this day gundam double o 79 the war for earth fails at almost every possible aspect of being a gundam game and barely makes it as a game period you might be wondering if this is worth your time as a gundam fan and we would say no you might be wondering if this is worth your time if you're an fmv game fan and again we would say no according to the developers themselves as stated on their very own website they claim that they put in the best effort they could while respecting the franchise respect huh hey remember that sequence at the start when the main character ran into that building and found the gundam yeah well here's the respect these developers put into the game the security cam footage features some random words that they wrote and we didn't make up interesting let's clean this up a bit so we can read it look at this dorky guy running into the door he looks like jody foster on crack if you had to measure his iq point oh plus or minus blah blah blah hope nobody is reading this crap here are some numbers 213882068437y i don't think i'd call that respect i think i'd say it's just bad

Channel: Rerez

Views: 613,081

Keywords: Rerez, Video, Games, Gaming, Gamers, Video Games, Video Game, Gundam, Anime, Just Bad Games, JBG, Gundam 0079, Sunrise, Bandai, PS1, PlayStation, PC, 0079

Id: nNrmsx3S6w4

Length: 32min 8sec (1928 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/imaginary_num6er]

The Fat Char is legendarily bad

[u/Frankengeek]

Is crazy to think Bandai thought this was a good way to introduce Gundam to the west, but not entirely unsurprising.

First is not unheard that Japanese executives think that the very media they produce will not be popular in the west as it is. Example: The first Godzilla movie was re-edited with scenes with western actors at demand of Toho itself.

Second, before the merge with Namco, Bandai produced A LOT of crappy license videogames. So of course the quality of this dumpster fire was okay by their standards

[u/burkmcbork2]

Sieg John!

[u/ROANOV741]

"You craven traitor!"

[u/Xavier200708]

This series came back

[u/Theonlybutchnebraska]

2 hit Gundam

[u/[deleted]]

This awful game was heavily Memed in Japan also!