Game Time - July 2013

July was pretty dead in terms of new releases. As always though I was resilient and found something to play in the absence of brand new video games for me to consume. The one new game I played was a 3DS downloadable title, which was surprisingly good. Attack of the Friday Monsters is surely one of the best downloadable offerings that the 3DS has at the moment.

As for the oldies I took the plunge into the critically acclaimed Saints Row the Third and didn't find it to be very enjoyable. Alternatively I played the not so special Warriors Orochi 3, but had a ton of fun.

I played some Mega Man Battle Network as well, but probably won't write about it until I finish all 6 games in the series again. I'm at the end of 4 already, so that time is close at hand.

So yeah, I played some video games. Let's get into it. It's game time!

Attack of the Friday Monsters: A Tokyo Tale

Recently I was made aware of the series Boku no Natsuyasumi, which is a Japanese series exclusive to the PlayStation. Each game in the series focuses on the summer vacation of a child. Needless to say it's very much based around Japan and Japanese culture, so none of the games in the series have been released here. Then there's the fact that there isn't exactly a lot of gameplay. You walk around and play a few mini-games. From what I've seen the series basically amounts to a visual novel where you get to walk around, which sounds awesome to me. Which is how I ended up playing Attack of the Friday Monsters. The series creator of Boku No Natsuyasumi became part of level 5's Guild 05 project where developers make smaller download games for the 3DS. Seeing the game I got excited, but thought it would never see a translation. Much to my surprise the last time I booted up the 3DS store it was on there, so I purchased it immediately.

Attack of the Friday Monsters is just like the games in the Bolu no Natsuyasumi series. It's more or less a visual novel. However instead of focusing on summer vacation it revolves around a boy named Sohta who has moved to a new town. This new town has a television station where they film monster movies every Friday night. The kids and adults all gather at the top of the nearest hill and watch the battles play out, or at least that's what Sohta has heard. Since this game is only a story I won't give anything away. I will say that I think it was very well written though. The entire time the game keeps you guessing as to whether or not the monsters the villagers are talking about are real. Yes, there is a TV station, but that just makes you think the monsters are fake by default. As you progress you'll start to doubt that and ultimately find out what's true at the very end of the game.

Who could forget that the monsters come out on Friday!?

While the story is very well executed that doesn't mean this game was without flaws. All you do is walk around the town and talk to its various residents, which I loved doing. You get a sense of who everyone is and it's actually quite refreshing to be able to just leisurely stroll around. You need to find certain things or talk to certain people to advance the game, but the town is small enough where that's never an issue. Despite that the game gives you a glowing indicator of where you need to go at all times on the map which takes away any challenge. You're always going to know exactly where to go.

Apparently walking around and being immersed in the town wasn't enough for a downloadable title so they threw in a monster card battling game. That's all fine and good, but I feel that it actually takes away from the game. The way you collect cards is by finding a certain number of glowing "glims" on the ground. Once you have enough of the same color they'll form a card. When you have five cards you can battle the kids in town. If you lose to them you'll become their servant. They can cast weird spoken spells on you, but really all they do is make you fall down and stand back up if you lose or decline their invitation to battle. If you win however, you can do the same to them with the added bonus of them giving you any information you want.

Card battles are pretty boring.

The way you play is painfully simple. The game is literally ro-sham-bo. Each card is either rock, paper, or scissors with an attack value assigned. Each player throws down 5 cards face down. The game will tell you if two of your cards win, lose, or draw and give you the option to switch the places ot two of your cards. When both players do that all the cards are flipped over. If there are any draws the monster with more attack power takes the win. The person with more wins is the winner.

The card battles end up padding out the game unnecessarily. It's especially dumb, because if you yourself use the same magic spell as your opponent then they'll go easy on you, which basically means they let you win. Other than the card battles I really liked the game. It's not the kind of thing that gets released in the US often, so I was more than happy to support it. I could use some more visual novels that are more game than novel.

Saints Row The Third

This past year it was impossible to go without hearing how awesome Saints Row the Third was. Everyone seemed to love its stupidity, but seemed to agree that there was something special about the game. However, my brother who absolutely loved Saints Row 2 did not and still does not share that same opinion. He says that the campaign is too short and none of the jokes are funny. If prompted I can get him to go off on quite a rant about just how bad he thinks it is. He tends to exaggerate quite a bit and I think his hatred of this game is a bit too strong, but I do agree with him when he says he doesn't think it's anything special.

A lot of people were upset when GTA IV was a great deal more realistic than its predecessors. I was not one of those people. I liked the fact that GTA wanted to be taken a bit more seriously, but kept true to its kind of goofy roots. GTA IV still has its fair share of weird and childish stuff in it, but it takes a little more digging to get to. Saints Row on the other hand starting with Saints Row 2 went in the complete opposite direction. They threw out almost any realism the series had in favor of pure ridiculousness. What I do like about Saints Row the Third is that you're basically invincible in order to make the game more fun.

Right from the start you're more or less invincible. As the game progresses and you do side missions you'll earn money and respect which you can use to gain more abilities. I'm not at the end of the game yet, but I'll bet that by the time I am it'll take a serious amount of enemies to even make a dent on my health. I can rocket out of a car's windshield and walk away basically unscathed already.

Yeah, this is basically what the game is all about.

The issue I have with Saints Row the Third is that I don't have fun while I'm playing it. I might be a fool for feeling this way, but I play GTA games to go through the story. I usually don't mess around and cause as much destruction as possible. Saints Row the Third let me know right off the bat that it wasn't really the game for me though. It starts ridiculous and continues to gets even weirder. They do an amazing job of setting the tone. In fact some of those moments are the ones I enjoyed the most. Shooting up a mansion full of enemies while Kanye West's Power is playing is actually pretty funny. The fact that there is a pimp who speaks exclusively in an auto-tuned voice is probably my favorite part of the game. These things alone can't make me truly enjoy the game though.

The story missions revolve around trying to take down an evil syndicate that for some reason has it out for the Saints. What I really don't like is that so far I've been playing for around six hours and almost every mission is just an introduction to one of the far too many side activities. I have no problem with side activities it's just that I don't find any of the ones in this game fun. So learning how to do them just to unlock another mission where I do the same thing isn't very rewarding. Perhaps when I'm no longer relegated to this side mission tutorial hell the missions will begin picking up.

I feel like I don't need to say that the combat isn't very great, but I will anyways. It's the same type of third-person shooting that these types of games have always had (GTA included). I feel like there should have been some kind of vast improvement to the system by now, but there really hasn't been. You auto-lock on to your targets until they're dead. Or if you want to kill everyone way faster auto-lock and then flick the stick up a tad to aim perfectly for a headshot. It's something that I really hope is better in GTA V, because I don't find the combat to be any better in GTA.

Zimos is the best character in the game.

Saints Row the Third just isn't really the game for me. As I said it made it clear right from the start. Regardless I still don't think it's the masterpiece that everyone made it out to be, but that's just my opinion. But hey, if it's the kind of thing you're into the fourth one is coming out in a few weeks and it seems to be basically the same game but even more insane.

Warriors Orochi 3

I was trying to get my mind off of a few things, but didn't want to concentrate on what I was doing too much. What better way to play a game, but not have to pay attention than to boot up a Musou game. I quickly realized that I had Warriors Orochi 3, but had never played it.Knowing nothing about it I booted it up, because I thought it was just another Dynasty Warriors clone. Little did I know it literally was a Dynasty Warriors that crossed over with the other musou games like Samurai Warriors. You know what, this game is not good, but I had a damn fun time playing it.

As I've said many times in the past I really like Musou games. They're kind of mindless, but for some reason I find them to be fun. I don't really like Dynasty Warriors itself though. The character designs of the ancient three kingdoms just aren't outlandish enough for me. I don't want to beat down thousands of enemy soldiers with normal swords. I want something that's a little more crazy. So what if you added in Samurai Warriors? Apparently that's exactly what you need to get me on board. Warriors Orochi doesn't just bring the Samurai Warrior franchise on board though it also brings in the likes of Ryu Hyabusa from Ninja Gaiden and even Ayane from Dead or Alive. There are a ton of characters made just for the Warriors Orochi series as well. There are well over 100 different fighters in the game and most of them have insane weapons.

Her sword is electric. I'd say that's insane enough.

Unlike other Musou games this one lets you use three characters at a time. You can switch between the three at any time by using the triggers. If any one of the three dies you lose. When not being used the characters will restore health and constantly generate energy for their special attacks. It doesn't seem like a huge change but it makes the gameplay a bit more fast paced and exciting. With this new gameplay mechanic the ways you can beat down your enemies become so much more varied in a single combat scenario. They try to get change your character up in battle, because each character needs to actually participate in order to get experience.

Oh yeah, there's a story too I guess. The evil Hydra has killed almost everyone, except for the three main characters. They magically get sent back in time by this creepily pale girl in order to save all the other warriors and find a way to win against Hydra. You get to go through a bunch of huge battles where you fight all the characters because they either hate you, or are being possessed by demon magic. Once you defeat them they will usually join your cause. Sometimes you have to go back and beat the same exact map again, but it's been altered slightly. All that matters is that you have a ton of characters to choose from and most of them are pretty interesting.

Why wouldn't Ayane be in the game?

It's not a good game by any means. It's pretty tedious and barely has a story. Regardless I enjoy beating down thousands of soldiers with a single warrior. It's satisfying. Another version of this game is coming out later this year called Warriors Orochi Ultimate. They're adding even more characters to the mix, so I might have to pick it up if it comes to the US. By then though I may have had my fill since One Piece Pirate Warriors 2 is coming out on the 20th of August, which I'm unrealistically excited for.

Summer is Ending!

This summer was front-loaded with games and it seems that the back end is going to be pretty game heavy as well. Next week I'll be picking up the first true Wii-U release otherwise known as Pikmin 3. I hope for Nintendo's sake it's as good as they've been hyping it up to be. The Wii-U is already selling like a pile of poo though, so I'm sure the release of a unique first party game will do nothing but increase the consoles sales.

On the 6th Tales of Xillia will arrive at my door which is awesome, because I could use a solid JRPG. At the end of the month both Dive Kick and One Piece Pirate Warriors 2 will be on the PlayStation store, so look forward to hearing about the stupidly fun time I plan on having with both of those.

I'm getting hyped up just thinking about the coming month. If I start to think too far ahead though my brain might explode, because we've got GTA V and new consoles just around the corner! It's an exciting time!

Peace out.

     -Manny.

Game Time - September 2012

September is over! It was an action packed month for me in terms of video gaming and the new releases are only going to keep coming. Now is not the time to look to the future though, it's a time to reflect on the games I spent the most time with this past month.

I finally got my hands on Tokyo Jungle, One Piece: Pirate Warriors, and Borderlands 2. All of which I had been looking forward to for months. I still haven't beaten Tokyo Jungle, but it's interesting enough that I think I'll end up coming back to it. One Piece is like every other Dynasty Warriors game, so you probably know how that it. I enjoyed playing both of the games quite a bit.

Borderlands 2 on the other hand I may have enjoyed a little too much. I guess you could say I lost my fair share of sleep because of the all-night co-op sessions I was having. It met and exceeded my expectations for what a new Borderlands could amount to. Let's just say I really like it. Due to the fact that I like it a lot, I also have an extraordinary amount to say about it. That means I won't be talking about it much here, but I will be doing a Game Time ID dedicated entirely to my love of Borderlands 2.

Every time I write a new one of these I become more aware of how terrible I am at writing intros for them. So without further adieu let's get into the discussion so I can cause minimal intro pain to both you and myself. It's game time!

Tokyo Jungle

Yeah, the game's just as crazy as this image.

Crazy Japanese games are nothing new, but they've been few and far between lately. Lucky for everyone Sony decided that they wanted to bring back the crazy by releasing Tokyo Jungle. Have you ever wanted to see a Pomeranian savagely kill a hyena in a single blow? How about a deer wearing some hot Hip-hop clothes? If either of those things sound like something you'd be interested in Tokyo Jungle has you covered.

The world is in a post apocalyptic state and animals have become feral. Now they all run amok on the streets of Tokyo which has become not unlike a jungle. Oh yeah, there are also Dinosaurs. The gameplay is focused around this idea. You choose an animal to play as and try to survive as long as you can.

Everything about the game is very arcade-like. You can choose either survival mode, where you survive for as long as possible, or story mode where you have set objectives. The story mode missions can only be unlocked by playing survival, so it's the mode you'll be playing the most. You start off by picking what animal you'll play as. Initially you can only play as a cute little Pomeranian, but completing specific challenges will net you more animals. Once you have picked your animal of choice you'll be thrust into the wilds of Tokyo.

Sights like this are commonplace in Tokyo Jungle.

You'll either be a carnivore, or an herbivore. As an herbivore you'll only be able to eat plants randomly generated throughout the world. The attack of herbivores is often very low, but they can double jump and move very quickly. You can still kill other animals if you want, but you won't be able to eat them. Then as a carnivore you have to viciously attack every animal you see and then eat their corpse. Eating keeps your hunger gauge filled up, while giving you calories. Certain calorie milestones make the animal rank up, so they become stronger. If you let it empty your health will start to slowly drain until you die. If there's nothing around to eat there are sometimes pools of water to stave off the hunger for a little bit.

Much to my surprise the controls of Tokyo Jungle aren't terrible. In fact, I think they're excellent and that mainly stems from the fact that they're simple. Movement is done with the right stick, but if you flick the left stick in a direction the animal will make quick movements. It's all very twitch. Moving around an enemy rapidly is easy, so you can get in to attack them a few times and get out before they even notice what's going on. This makes combat quick and exciting. Alternatively you can sneak up to an opponent and score a clean kill. If you wait near an unsuspecting enemy for long enough fangs will appear on them letting you know that you're ready for a critical strike.

An average round of Tokyo Jungle takes around twenty minutes to a half hour, but can end up going for an hour or more. A minute of real time is equivalent to one year. As time goes on the animals around the world get tougher and tougher, so you really need to push to get that next high score. In order to make the game have an even deeper challenge animals can only survive for fourteen years before they die, making it crucial to reproduce. In order to reproduce it's necessary to mark all points in any one territory by peeing on them. Once every spot has been "marked" mates will show up on the map. There are three levels of mate which are prime, average, and dirty. Prime mates require you to have eaten enough calories to get to boss rank, and average requires you to be a veteran. Dirty mates don't require a rank, which is why they will give you fleas. The better the mate the more babies they will make. When you get a mate you have to take them back to the nest, where you will mount them as the game fades to black. When everything comes back up you will be in control of a baby animals with some others following you. The other animals amount to extra lives.

You'll need to procreate in order to survive the harsh jungles of Tokyo.

It all sounds complicated, but it isn't in practice. Tokyo Jungle is an arcade survival game. You start off weak, but as you change generations and advance you become stronger. You can become even stronger than that by unlocking new animals (There are a TON of animals). That's actually my main gripe about the game is that it's a total grind to unlock more animals. Every animal has a specific challenge to unlock one other specific animal. It can end up taking a while to complete what you need to do, so it can become a bit tedious. It takes a whole lot of play time to get to the crazy animals like dinosaurs, so it really depends on how much fun you're having.

Lucky for me I do have a fun time playing Tokyo Jungle. There's something about trying to survive longer each and every run that I find to be entertaining. It helps that each subsequent animal is stronger than the last so you feel like you're actually advancing. It's just a super weird fun game, which helps overshadow the fact that it looks like a launch era PS2 game that barely has any music.

Weird games like this have been few and far between and it's even more rare for a  game like this to actually be any fun. It was a retail game in Japan, but you can download it for $15 on PSN here. I highly recommend you check it out.

One Piece :Pirate Warriors

I don't know what it is about Dynasty Warriors, but somehow I keep buying more games in the series.

Well, not exactly. I refuse to play any more actual Dynasty Warriors games, but I have been known to play it's anime spin-offs. Specifically Dynasty Warriors Gundam. As I've written about in the past I hate them, but at the same time I have an indescribable love for them. There's something about the totally mindless action that I can really get behind. So when I heard that they were going to be releasing a Dynasty Warriors One Piece game I basically lost my shit. To top it off, it was actually going to get a U.S. release, and it did!

I don't think I've ever mentioned it on this blog, but One Piece is one of my favorite TV shows. In the middle of high school I saw clips from the CP9 arc and decided that I needed to watch the entire series in it's original Japanese. I ended up doing that and I've never looked back since. Needless to say I love the show, so the ability to play as it's characters as they completely annihilate everything in their path sounded very appealing.

This is basically my reaction to the U.S. release of Pirate Warriors.

I'm happy to say that reality actually met up with my expectations on this one. I wasn't expecting anything ridiculously fancy, because well, it's a Dynasty Warriors game. A Dynasty Warriors game with One Piece characters is exactly what I got. There's a whole lot of mashing square while occasionally throwing in triangle or circle. It's not saying much, but this seems like the most advanced Musou game to date. Since all of the characters have moves from the anime they have most of them in the game, which makes for great combo variety. I think it also helps that there are only thirteen characters instead of the usual hundred or so. This means that each character has a chance to be unique instead of an exact copy.


Pirate Warriors also switches it up with the single player, but it isn't necessarily for the better. At times the maps will turn into a third person action/adventure game. Every level like this you'll be required to use Luffy, since he's the main character. You'll go around and obliterate all of your enemies like normal, but sometimes you'll have to swing around with Luffy's rubber arms or solve puzzles. At first it makes for a nice change of pace, but after the second or third time it starts to get in the way of what I expect from a game of this type. It becomes especially tedious, because Luffy says the same thing every time he does an action. It's fine every so often, but it happens constantly in these sequences, which is enough to drive me mad. It's easy to see where Namco Bandai was going with this, but it definitely didn't come out as intended.

At it's core Pirate Warriors is just another Musou game.

In case you couldn't already tell One Piece: Pirate Warriors isn't for everyone. For starters it's pretty much necessary that you like One Piece. This game targets a very specific audience and Namco Bandai realized this. Here in the U.S. it was only released as a downloadable with just the Japanese voices. So when I say you have to like One Piece, you have to REALLY like it. Even with that extreme love it's still kind of hard to justify even at the discounted price of $40. The single player campaign is only around eight hours long and there isn't much to do after that.

All I know is that I had a fun time playing this game.

Borderlands 2 addiction?

I still have to beat Tokyo Jungle, but I think it's going to be a while before I get around to it. Borderlands 2 has basically been consuming my life. Normally when I beat a game I throw it to the side and move on to the next thing, but I can't do that with Borderlands 2. There's something about it that keeps drawing me in for more. There are a lot of people who don't seem to like it very much, but I can't really understand why. It improves on the original in almost every way possible.

Next month is another big month for releases. I'll be getting Pokemon White 2, Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracles, and Asaassin's Creed 3. I've already pre-ordered all of them thanks to the magic of Amazon Prime. Maybe I'll be over Borderlands before Pokemon comes out, but at this rate I highly doubt it.

Well, that's all for this edition of Game Time. See you all next month.

     -Manny

Love-Hate: Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3

After an arduous 97 hours and 36 minutes I finally obtained every trophy in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3. Now that I have achieved basically everything there is to achieve in the game I'll most likely never play it again. This has allowed me to reflect on my time with the game and it turns out I have pretty mixed feelings about it. 

ughhhhhhhhh

I've played a fair amount of Dynasty Warriors in my life, but I never got super into it. I can remember playing Dynasty Warriors 3 on the PS2 with my brother. As far as I was concerned it was a pretty fun game loosely based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Who doesn't like to decimate hundreds and hundreds of enemies with a single Asian general without taking a hit? My brother and I had a lot of fun with the game, so when Dynasty Warriors Gundam came out we picked it up. At that time we didn't have a whole lot of multi-player games for the PS3, so we picked it up and played it for a bit.

We had an average time playing the game together, same as we did with Dynasty Warriors 3. The only difference was that I was controlling a single giant robot, while decimating hundreds of other giant robots. When Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2 came out was when things got bad. It was summer and one of my friends convinced me to rent it from a now defunct video store, which I did. 5 days later it was time to return the game and I had somehow managed to put in 60 hours of gameplay. It was a dark time. At first I loved playing it, but by the end of the 5 days I hated almost everything about it. For a brief moment I thought about renewing the rental, but decided that my life would fall into disarray if I did. 

Luckily I managed to steer clear of the series until shortly before Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 came out this past June. The same friend who made me rent the 2nd game in the first place was getting excited for the 3rd game. Somehow, despite my hatred, we ended up playing the 2nd game even more. The craziest part was that I ended up buying it a week before the 3rd game came out... The third game came out and I ended up getting that too. As you know, I played it a whole bunch. Somehow my sheer hate for the time I spent with the 2nd game morphed into an even deeper hatred of the series, while adding in a little bit of love...

It looks cool at first, but then you play it.

Why I hate it

Dynasty Warriors games are all basically the same. To be overly reductive you push the square button repeatedly in order to achieve victory. If you want to get a little wild you can do some combos by throwing in triangle at certain intervals. It's mind numbing and extremely simple. All of the maps are basically the same thing. You have to kill enough robots in a zone to take it over. After a certain point you can take over the enemy HQ and win. Alternatively, there are specific maps where you will have to defeat certain enemies. There is never anything different to do. You go through the same maps over and over, while mashing the same button repeatedly. 

For the first 10-20 hours of gameplay, this is fine. Ironically this is how long the story goes on for, so any normal person would stop at that point. I like to unlock everything in games, or at least try to, so I couldn't stop. This is where the problem arises. It's almost like there is too much content and most of it's bad. In order to do everything you have to play through a stupid amount of missions. In order to unlock all of those you have to play as horrible characters and make friends with every character in the game (There are a ton of them). Making friends takes so long, because there's a certain amount of luck to it. In the end I had to play through the same missions designed to boost friendships over and over until I wanted to smash the disc.

Banagher Links launching in the Unicorn Gundam! (If only I had a dollar for every time I heard that...)

 

Speaking of wanting to smash the disc, the voice acting in this game is horrendous. Maybe I would have felt better if I changed everything to Japanese, but I didn't. To go along with the repetition of everything else the characters like to repeat their lines constantly. There are at least 4 pilots on every mission and they're all saying things quite often. I'd say a normal mission takes 5-10 minutes, which isn't long at all. Somehow a pilot will end up saying the same line at least four times in that short span. This got to be so annoying that I began to play with the sound off.

Playing with the sound off helped make everything less enraging, but somehow the game managed to piss me off even more. I mentioned that the game was easy, but later on it takes a ridiculous difficulty spike. Challenge missions force you to play on the hardest difficulty. Judging by the rest of the game you wouldn't expect them to be anything crazy, but you'd be horribly wrong. It was common for me to die in two or three hits if I wasn't careful. There were so many times when I was near the end of a mission, but got blindsided and had to start all over. I don't get how a game can go from being so easy to so frustratingly hard in seconds. It's either off or on and there is absolutely no in between.

These games could easily get away with their repetitive nature, because they're fun at first. However, for some reason they're hell bent on making everything overstay its welcome. The repetition becomes maddening and I don't understand how this series sells enough copies to warrant sequels. I can't be the only one who finds everything in this game/series crazy repetitive.

Why I love it

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam may be a spin-off series, but I think there are certain ways that it's superior to the games it's copying. Plain old Dynasty Warriors is beyond unrealistic. As I've mentioned previously you're an Asian general who cuts through hordes and hordes of enemies. That just doesn't happen. I'm not saying that giant robots made of gundanium are realistic, but I am saying that they're much more believable from a gameplay standpoint. If you've ever seen a Gundam anime, then you know that all the gundams are practically invincible. They use their crazy robot beam swords to cut through everything like butter. Gundams annihilate hundreds of other giant robots without a scratch and this series reflects that.

In the anime gundam pilots say a whole lot, but this game takes it to a whole new level. I previously mentioned how I hated the voice acting, but I also loved it. The repetition of their lines is maddening, but it can also be funny. Their lines are so annoying that it's kind of funny. When playing co-op with someone it's commonplace to mock everything that everyone in the game says. Sometimes we'd even bet how many times they were going to say a certain line. Athrun's line "Enough foolishness" has found a great deal of life outside the game for me as well. Seabook's "Color me impressed" is pretty great too.

Six kills before this screenshot was taken someone said something annoying.

A  majority of the time I played with the sound off. I often listened to podcasts while playing, which worked out fairly well. I didn't need to focus very much on the game, so I got in a whole lot of podcast time. I guess this was one way the simple gameplay paid off.

To be honest I have absolutely no idea why I love this game, but I know that I do. At first I thought it was just a guilty pleasure, but now I don't know. It's like I get some perverse pleasure from subjecting myself to this series of gundam games. At first I thought that I was alone in my love for this series, but my recent quest to achieve all the trophies has shown me otherwise. The online mode in this game is lame and it doesn't have a long life span, because you're just doing even lamer missions of the main game's missions. Despite that, there were plenty of people for me to play online with. I had to play 100 missions and somehow I was able to do that almost a year after the game's release with a ton of people. I can only assume that these people are true gundam fans, unlike me. While I may not be the biggest fan of the anime I still love this game for some unidentifiable reason. 

While I could never bring myself to recommend this game to anyone, I will certainly be picking up the 4th game when it inevitably comes out. Somehow these games continue to make enough money to warrant a sequel and I'll continue my love-hate relationship with them as long as they continue to exist.

     -Manny