SDガンダム GGENERATION GATHER BEAT, released 7/13/2000, developed by Vanguard, released by Bandai

This is a game in the long-running “SD Gundam G Generation” series. The series started on the Super Famicom in 1996 with six short games that went from “SD Gundam A generation” to “F generation”. Each game focused on a different Gundam series (original, Z, ZZ, Char’s Counterattack/F91, V, and G), and a peripheral called the “Sufami Turbo” let you insert two games at once so that you could transfer mechs from one game to another. These games could be considered strategy RPGs if your definition is very broad, but they failed to meet my personal criteria.

Next, on the Playstation, they went to the next letter G but decided that this would be the franchise name from here on out and that it would combine all the series into one game. The 1998 game was 42 stages, and covered the story from Gundam 0079 to Char’s Counterattack, including several side stories (08th MS Team, 0080, 0083, and Blue Destiny). In addition, there were characters and mechs drawn from a bunch of other Gundam series (including even Wing and G, although I have a feeling these were just cameos or mechs you could build).

This was followed in 1999 by SDDG Zero, which added additional series and storylines and had 50 stages, although these were now separated by series rather than being played continuously. This was where the series had reached when Gather Beat came out, although a month later the flagship entry for the series (at least from this era) came out — SDDG F. This had 101 stages drawn from 38 series (including manga, novel, and video game series) from both Universal Century and the alternate timelines. There were over 1000 mechs in the series. I played this game a while back but I found it too slow moving to really get into.

Without getting into a full description of the SDDG series, here are some features of the franchise (not necessarily every game):

• “Guest” units that are the characters from the shows (Amuro, etc) and then generic characters that pilot your mechs and ships (in some games you can get the Guest units on your team as well)
• The ability to capture enemy mechs
• Create new mechs by combining enemy mechs, or mechs with parts
• “ACE” units by levelling them up, which can transform them into new units
• Bonus money/xp/etc for activating events from the series (like attacking Char with Amuro in the first stage)
• Later entries introduce other stuff like “heat”, additional move if you kill things, and other such elements.

SDGGG, Zero, and F are considered by some people to be strategy RPGs. To me they are borderline, and the main reason I didn’t play them is that they are very long games and there is a great deal of repetition between the three. In general I do not plan to play the SDDG games of this type (which includes games like Spirits, Wars, and Genesis).

However there were other games in the franchise that fall more under my definition of SRPGs; they have a Super Robot Wars style crossover storyline and give you named characters with identities that you can develop throughout the game. The first game of this type is Gather Beat for the Wonderswan. Although released in the SDDG name, it is more indebted to Emotional Jam, an earlier SD Gundam strategy game for Wonderswan.

The storyline is centered primarily around the One Year War, beginning with Amuro’s first battle in the Gundam and ending with A Baoa Qu. But there are characters and storyline elements drawn from a number of other Gundam series (including Z, ZZ, Char’s Counterattack, G, W, X, Blue Destiny, 08th MS Team, 0083, and 0080). The game is 20 stages plus 6 optional stages that can be activated by fulfilling certain conditions in the stage. The optional stages mostly involve the side stories, and get you additional characters like Judau (from ZZ) or the Blue Destiny events.

One feature that Gather Beat has is “ID” skills. They are sort of like Super Robot Wars seishin, but they are named after famous quotes the characters say in the series. This one increases Amuro’s hit rate.

There is no equipment or items in the game; you can give mechs weapons by using the mech combine (develop) feature but that’s permanent.

Before each stage you assign mechs to the battleships you have. This screen is very annoying because there is no way to view any information about the mechs on this screen. You just have to remember what the different mechs look like and who you assigned to the mechs. It is very frustrating when you want to send a new unit you just got into the ship because I often found myself guessing who to sub them in for because I couldn’t figure out who was who.

Once you are on the map, you send out your units from the ships. Thankfully this game did not carry over the Emotional Jam system where ships fight each other on separate maps, sending out units. They kept the “three person squad” system from EJ but somewhat differently. You can send out units together in a squad (up to 3 units), or you can make squads on the map by moving units on top of other units (if you do this, you have to immediately attack or the turn ends for all the units in the squad).

There are two kinds of attacks. You can do a direct attack where the squads fight each other. One interesting system element is that all the distance attack (beam/rifle/etc) happen first for both sides, then the melee attacks. I did see occasional exceptions to this but I was never quite sure how they operated. I think also if the squads are unbalanced (like a single unit attacking 3 people) there are some additional modifications to the attacks or defense but I am not sure about this and I never looked it up.

The other form of attack is an “indirect attack”. Battleships have these, but some units do as well. When this kind of attack is used against a squad, they have two options. The first is to maintain formation and just take the hit (I don’t know if defend is applied). The second is to break formation, which halves the attack chance of the attacker but it causes the squad to break up into separate units on the map. Using this against enemy formations, especially boss class units, makes the stages considerably easier to beat because the enemy nearly always uses the formation break in response and only sometimes tries to reform the squad. If you can use your ships to break up the formations and then pick off the enemies individually, they are a lot easier to deal with.

If one of your units is destroyed on the map, you permanently lose the mech, but the pilot survives. This applies even to unique mechs that cannot be recreated through the Develop feature (such as Shining Gundam). It also applies to cases where units are NPCs during the stage but join up after the stage is over. You can send your units back into ships to heal, though. If a battleship is destroyed it just retreats from the map, although whatever battleship Bright is commanding is usually a game over if it’s destroyed. (I assume any units on a battleship that retreats are unavailable until the next stage but this never happened so I’m not sure.)

One system that I do like is that you get a lump sum of XP at the end of a battle which is then (I think?) divided up against your surviving units. So you don’t have to make sure certain units get kills to avoid falling behind.

You get new mechs in a few ways. Characters will join with a mech, and a few story events give you new mechs. You can capture enemy grunt mechs by surrounding them and then using the “capture” command, but I never found this very useful. You can also buy mechs, or develop them by combining mechs with items that you get either by buying them, or by some story events. This is the main way to get new units. Unfortunately there is no database that tracks your completion of getting all available mechs (this is available at least in F, I don’t know about the previous ones).

Overall I enjoyed the story. It was a good decision given the short length of the game to focus on the OYW and include the other series as seasoning — in some cases I think they overdid it (like the brief appearance of the Turn A moonrace) but overall it was well done. We get some story elements that are rare in these games (like Char appearing as Casval and a younger pre-Zeta Haman). The story ends with an original mech.

The gameplay is OK. I mentioned the interface issue previously with the battleships, but there are other annoying elements of the interface as well — I’ve said this many times, but can be unfair to criticize these handheld games too much until you get to the point where they could do as well as the consoles (which is the PSP or maybe the Game Boy Advance).

I sometimes felt like the individual mechs were not distinguished very clearly. Some of this is the interface not allowing you to get as much information as you might want before dispatching the units, but that’s not all.

The stages are fine, they have some varying goals and events, and you can have some of your characters talk with the enemies or allies to activate events that give you additional XP. I didn’t think it was especially difficult either (if you use indirect attacks).

Gather Beat 2 is for the Wonderswan color, and Advance is basically a remake of this game. I believe that this is the last monochrome game I will play (SRW Compact 2 parts 2 and 3 are still ahead but I already played them). I won’t be sorry to see the end of monochrome games…