This week, Bandai Namco released Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare, its first Gundam mobile game ever to be made available in North America.
Along with more than 200,000 other people around the world, I pre-registered for the game so I’d be given notice (and free in-game Gundam RX-78-2 and Wing Gundam models) when the game was finally available about a month after it was first announced on July 2.
I initially reported that the game would be available for download at Bandai Namco’s predicted date of August 21, which means it was ready a month earlier than expected. It’s also apparent that there was a lot of global interest in the game since both free in-game model incentive minimums (100,000 and 200,000 pre-registrants) were met.
See also: ‘Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare’ Is North America’s First Ever Gundam Mobile Game
But is it fun? Do you need to spend real money to enjoy it? I took some time to test it and find out.
Story: Anime-Inspired School Saga
Storywise, Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare has only the barest thread of plot as a group of students try to keep their school Gunpla club from shuttering by racking up tournament wins. It’s similar to, though far blander than, several Gundam-battle-themed anime that have come out in the past decade. Gundam Build Fighters (2013) and Gundam Build Fighters TRY (2014) both center on school-age kids building Gundam models to battle with in a virtual game world.
There’s no character customization to speak of: you always play as a purple-eyed young man and your occasional dialogue choices, which range from earnest to flirtatious, do very little to affect the way other characters interact with you. Characters are mere caricatures: your bubbly and attractive co-ed Sana, the serious-minded Touma, and the local Gundam shop owner.
Thankfully, the story mode is straight to the point so you can get to the more interesting parts of the game—customizing and battling with your Gundam model.
Gameplay: Building and Battles
Once you slog through the story-driven tutorial, it’s time for the real fun to start. The most interesting part of the game takes place on your virtual workbench, where you mix and match Gundam parts you’ve gathered through experience and capsule prizes into the ultimate model.
Gundam fans will recognize the heads, shoulders, torsos, legs, and weapons from iconic mobile suits from the franchise’s 40-year history. Depending on the stats you’re trying to assign, you can put a Nu Gundam head on a Wing Gundam torso and finish it off with the legs of the original RX-78-2. You can also use tools to upgrade and “awaken” the full potential of each part, or just level them up in battles to do the same thing. This minigame also has a “Strongest” button so if you don’t want to spend too much time on the process, it will just generate the best build it can from what you have in your inventory. The result may be a quirky hodgepodge of a Gundam!
See also: ‘Mobile Suit Gundam’ Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary Today
Likewise, the gameplay is as simple or strategic as you want it to be. The tutorial takes you through several ways to inflict damage, from careful target focus to ultimate final blows, but it’s also possible to just tap quickly on the phone screen until the enemy is defeated. You also have plenty of allies: Sana, Touma, and a team of CPUs you can build yourself.
At level 7, I’m finding that story missions are still fairly easy, but the time-limited daily missions that you can access every 24 hours are beginning to require some skill. As a free-to-play phone game, Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare has every incentive to keep players checking in daily, so I imagine that the difficulty will ramp up slowly to keep players from getting frustrated.
Microtransactions for Gacha: Not Necessary So Far
So far, Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare has been exceedingly generous with prizes and points. Aside from the two preregistration bonuses that gave me some of the strongest Gundam parts in the game, I’ve also been showered with Haro Chips, used in the in-game capsule machine.
In other words, Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare is at its heart a mobile gacha game. Gacha, which allows players to put in-game currency into a machine to receive random prizes, is a popular money-making strategy for free-to-play games. One of the most popular mobile gacha games, Fate/Grand Order, had 20% of its player base spend $2,000 or more in 2018.
Since the capsule machine focuses on completely random gacha draws that could give you rare, powerful parts or mere duplicates to what you already have, I can see the lure of using real money to buy more Haro Chips in the shop. However, the game has been so charitable so far that I don’t see why I would. It’s certainly not the case that I need to use gacha draws in order to have a chance of winning, as battles continue to be fairly easy. However, judging by other mobile gacha games, I can imagine that it’ll eventually become more difficult to resist spending real money to get new parts—and that’s likely what Bandai Namco is hoping for.
My overly warm phone and draining battery will attest that despite a weak story, Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare is a fairly addictive clicker game. It’s a little too niche to become the next Pokemon Go, but it has the same draw: a beloved Japanese media franchise with lots of ever-changing daily activities to pursue and explore.
