SD Gundam Battle Alliance

While the Story told here is nothing special and very much in line with other Japanese games like BNE's very own timeline-fixing adventure Xenoverse 2, I suspect the sheer amount of fanservice will be enough to keep most fans of the franchise engaged. Short VN sections - that are notably absent when playing in coop - connect the missions with each other while lengthy and near permanent chatter between characters during gameplay further advances the plot. Visually, the game offers a clean look, with little post processing and high resolution assets in gameplay while leveraging it's anime roots during VN sections and in it's extensive use of 2D character popups. While explosions, weapon and skill effects are pretty to look at, they can at times obscure the playfield and cause an overwhelming amount of visual clutter that can make it difficult to see enemies and their attacks. The soundtrack is little surprising but constantly of high quality with a varied selection of tracks from all iterations of the Gundam anime mixed with some original music. Weapons and explosions are punchy, only the voicework stands out negatively at times. The constant barrage of chatter during missions is exclusively available in Japanese language with subtitles and can not be turned off or muted fully. Especially during more difficult missions this makes following the in-mission story nigh impossible. The gameplay is very reminiscent of other Gundam titles such as SDGO or Gundam Breaker and consists of a healthy mix of cooldown driven skills, light and hard attack combos, powerful specials and last but not least dodges and parries. The mission and grind based structure of the game creates plenty of opportunities for replayability and the vast amount of Mobile Suits from all timelines of the show offer a wide variety of style mixups, even after a few dozen hours of playtime. Of note is the abysmal Keyboard & Mouse support which seemingly does nothing more than emulate a controller, which makes camera control feel painfully unresponsive. Performance on PC is good if not fantastic and the game offers a plethora of settings one would expect from a modern PC port. Only the missing FOV slider stands out negatively in an otherwise solid release. In Summary, SD Gundam Battle Alliance is an enjoyable if sometimes grindy game and with plenty of fanservice to enjoy and several DLC Packs including missions and new Mobile Suits on the way, it certainly will be for the foreseeable future.