There once was a fan from Nantucket... whose name was Kevin and who sent us a couple awesome
items for Strange Anime License Friday.
The downside, it seemed, was that I had to procure a Game Gear and a Wonderswan, which
are a **** pain in the *** to record from.
Hah, limericks.
It makes perfect sense that the Wonderswan - a Bandai product itself - would have a stack
of Gundam games for it long as your arm, and SD Gundam: Emotional Jam doesn't disappoint.
Unfortunately, as is befitting a Gundam mash-up game on such a tiny system, they do their
best to shoehorn as much content in there as possible.
And, in a first for pretty much ANY Gundam game I've come across, there's almost no information
out there on the interwebs about this one.
No manuals, no tutorial in the game, no nothin'.
For better or worse, I was going into this thing blind.
Okay, so blind might be a bit of a stretch.
But unless you've got the eyesight of a freakin' eagle, the wall-o'-kanji you immediately run
up against might prove to be an effective deterrent to actually playing this thing.
Here's the schtick: Think Advance Wars, but with a movement grid that's skewed every other
column, allowing for more precise control.
It's about as close as you can come to oldschool wargaming's hexagonal grids, without actually
using hexagons.
Anyway.
There are actually two tiers to the battles: the overworld map, where you maneuver units
and can capture bases, and a second level, where the actual combat plays out.
This second tier... seems almost identical to the first, complete with turn-based movement.
The difference is that you can deploy your various Mobile Suits, which can be controlled
individually or as a squad of up to five.
Each suit in said squad (man, that's a lot of S's) still tracks its damage and stats
individually, though, meaning your attack on such a unit might only hit three out of
the five, each with their own HP pool.
So it's straight-up strategy, which is awesome, because that makes it significantly better
for, say, two-player head-to-head skirmishes.
Why should Advance Wars players have all the fun?
After selecting a map (from a list a yard long, though each one looks distressingly
similar in-game), each player picks a team culled from the history of the Gundam series
to take into battle.
But while it's a refreshing alternative to Advance Wars, the actual gameplay feels a
bit too slow for a head-to-head competition.
Each individual skirmish in Advance Wars takes a couple seconds; such battles in Emotional
Jam take several minutes to saw through an entire squad's combined 5000 HP at maybe 60
to 120 damage a pop.
And with such excruciatingly small combats, there's not really all that much you can do
to exercise tactics, shy of "concentrate fire here."
Still, if you're a fan of the series, it's engaging and pocket-sized, even if your optometrist
will hate you in the morning.