Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered Review

The PlayStation Vita felt like the last bastion for a particular kind of anime-licensed game. The Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Portable (PSP) and Vita had a plethora of portable games designed around short burst entertainment. The Gundam series was no exception, with the Vita getting around ten titles for the system. I remember importing Gundam Breaker 3 and Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme VS Force, and now that I’m much more into Gundam today, I get all the new releases. None of them ever truly match up to what I value in the franchise (the criticism of humanity’s desire for conflict, if I’m to keep it succinct), but I am not immune to Cool Robots. I missed out on Gundam SEED Battle Destiny, and now it sits before me, localized into English for the first time ever. 

SEED Battle Destiny retells the two main series, SEED and SEED DESTINY, in a mission-based structure. You create a pilot, decide if they’re a Natural or a Coordinator, and pick a side for the two wars covered across both series: ZAFT or the Earth Alliance. At specific key moments, you will be able to desert your current allegiance for some of the splinter factions during key moments. You can also play as a large roster of popular pilots from both series, each with their own stats and special abilities.

If you’ve never seen any Gundam, especially SEED, you’re likely going to have no idea what’s going on. The story is not a focus in the slightest, with all character dialogue playing in the background during missions. Actual cutscenes with characters don’t exist, with bare minimum recaps of the show’s story told in text dumps. Your pilot, despite how capable they are, is just a generic soldier in the conflict, along with a partner pilot you can also create. In a way, it makes sense why the story seems to be happening around you, but it’s still a missed opportunity. 

It’ll take a while for you to get any headliner mobile suit, mostly wetting your feet with generic mass-produced units. Depending on the value of the suit, you’ll have a varying number of times you can respawn into a mission on death. Weaker suits can come back into combat more often, whereas the most powerful ones will give you about 1 respawn chance. Every single suit has its own unique upgrade points that can be dumped into their stats, but I appreciate that you are still expected to not play carelessly. 

The missions themselves are pretty simple, with your objectives often boiling down to defending a point or wiping out all of the enemy forces. Occasionally, you’ll have special missions where you’re trying to accomplish a goal while juggling multiple points on a large-scale map. It is at these moments Battle Destiny manages to recreate the chaos of war effectively. Where these get exciting is when iconic pilots with their equally memorable mobile suits jump in, and sometimes you’ll have to keep them at bay while focusing on a particular objective. 

Mission variety can be a bit restrictive, and that mainly comes down to locations being simplistic. This is a Vita game at its heart, though, so there’s some leeway I am willing to give it in that regard. Areas have simple terrain, with non-destructible environments. This is largely fine, but it did take me out of it to see the Destroy Gundam’s beam attacks just clip through buildings during its rampage from Destiny. Missions are surprisingly at their best in Space, I feel, where you give up complicated stage design for really fun full 3D movement. 

Given all the different factions and eras you can play missions from after your first playthrough is completed, there’s a lot of replay value if you want to collect all the different mobile suits and level up your favorites. I finished the campaign with a 35% completion rate at 11 hours, with a lot of extra content left to dive into. If you find yourself a fan of the grindy gameplay loop, you’ll enjoy this structure of pick-up and play missions that can be knocked out in about 10-20 minutes each.

Difficulty comes down to a mix between skill and maintaining proper stats. You’re meant to grind missions for resources to improve your machines, obtaining both a suit-specific TP and universal GP that can both be put into stats. You can improve the body, each weapon, and shield separately. There’s no mix-and-match part or weapon customization for the various aspects of your Gundam or Zakus, so the way you improve performance comes down to getting your numbers higher. Oftentimes when I’d hit a wall in a story mission, replaying missions to get more TP and GP to dump into the best suit I had access to would be enough to get me over the hump. I tend not to be really into this way of Action RPG progression, but it overall works well enough since you need skill to fully utilize even the most powerful machine.

This might seem strange to hear, but there’s a bit of joy in how unfair the game can feel at points. It doesn’t make for the most fun in the moment, but it’s nice to go against overpowered characters from the show and feel pushed to your limits. Going up against Kira or Athrun is genuinely dangerous, because important enemy pilots have the same abilities you do. Activating a pilot-specific SP attack is a quick way to turn the tide in your favor. There are only two types of these in the game: to give yourself invincibility or slow down time. The former is much more usable, but it also makes it terrifying to see it used against you. 

In the same breath, there are missions that don’t feel entirely thought out and are a bit too easy. If I’m tasked with destroying an enemy ship during a large battle, chances are I can rush it and completely ignore every other boss pilot put on the map. Spamming your SP skills and your charged abilities can destroy things quickly if you build your mobile suits right. This happened more often in the Destiny campaign, with only a handful of times where I’d be punished for straying too far from my side’s main ship or base. 

I might have my issues with Battle Destiny’s gameplay, but they nailed the feel of piloting a mobile suit. They feel like the heavy machines of death they are, but grow more responsive the further into the timeline you go. Attacks feel heavy, even if they don’t always give the best hit feedback, depending on what you’re hitting. Your melee combos aren’t very deep, but battles require you to use both ranged and melee weapons at all times. There’s also a fantastic mechanic with your guns where holding down the A Button allows you to lead your shots with the left stick. I’d love to see Bandai use this old game as a template to make another single-player Gundam game in the near future. They really have something here, and it’s good.

Visually, a decent amount of effort went into uplifting the original Vita version for this remastering, even if the Nintendo Switch version can’t keep up with it. Background textures look great, but I found that any time this version zoomed in on mobile suits, the texture quality would take a serious hit. There’s also a strange hanging on launch animations at the beginning of missions that seemed pretty unintentional. 

Despite the generational improvements that come with the jump from Vita to Switch, I was surprised to see how rough the performance could get. Battles regularly chug during demanding encounters with plenty of effects and attacks firing off. It makes the split-second reaction times needed to avoid an enemy’s ultimate attack almost impossible, resulting in cheap deaths. The slow-down SP skill is often accompanied by the game’s regular framerate drops, making the game almost unplayable when a pilot uses it. I’d be genuinely curious how this runs on Nintendo Switch 2, but the reality of the matter is that it’s just not in a good state for the console it’s releasing on right now.

I was surprised to find out that they managed to get some of the music from the original shows, but I was sad to see they didn’t get to license any of the amazing vocal tracks sprinkled all throughout SEED. We just have some of the normal battle music, but that’s never been where SEED’s OST has thrived. I’m sure that music would be expensive to license, but it’s really hard to get excited and immersed in high-stakes battles without even one iconic T.M.Revolution song. Not even Meteor or Vestige for when Kira shows up in the Freedom or Strike Freedom? 

This is a pretty faithful remaster of the original when it comes to the content making it over. You’ll also have certain spin-offs, like SEED Astray and Stargazer, accessible via optional missions to unlock more iconic Suits. The only thing that is missing is the multiplayer, which I feel should have at least been kept via local wireless on Switch. There’s a VS mode that seems perfect for it, but I imagine the idea was that server upkeep might have been risky for a niche game. This has been reduced to a mode where you only fight CPUs, which is quite disappointing. 

The localization isn’t much to write home about, being fine at best. It gets the job done, even if it’s a bit stilted. What’s really strange is names not entirely matching with official translations, like Stella being named Stellar. This is the one that stood out to me the most, but there’s a chance I missed some other ones. I also wish they bothered dubbing the game with the current English cast for fans who jumped in on the HD Remasters, but I can’t say I expected it either.

I’d say one of the biggest letdowns is the complete lack of agency in your decisions. I enjoy the idea of getting to play on the losing side of conflicts in Gundam, but because the story is non-existent, the only reason you would choose different sides would be to unlock the suits from different factions. I started the 70 C.E. campaign on the ZAFT side, who defected to Kira’s faction halfway through. Playing the intended path for this initial campaign was a great way to ensure how they adapted the original SEED, and to unlock the Freedom Gundam ASAP. 

Knowing how things played out in the 73 C.E. conflict and being pretty unhappy with the story of Gundam SEED Destiny, I decided to experiment with playing the ZAFT campaign throughout. The Destiny Gundam is one of my favorite mobile suits, and Shinn is by far my favorite character in SEED. Knowing that SEED’s story wasn’t really adapted too satisfyingly, I at least wanted to see how an alternate universe for Destiny could play out if you could help ZAFT win. The sad reality is that nothing ever changes. I blew up that coward Djibril’s ship again and again, for him to just keep showing back up. I would continue to win against Archangel, for it to keep coming back. And after succeeding in winning the final battle, my title card acted like Kira’s faction had won. 

Battle Destiny’s story never needed to be anything special, but I can’t help but feel disappointed at what could have been. I know what kind of game it wants to be, but I think making AU stories for these conflicts would lead to more varied missions as well. Given that it tells the story it does have with text narration, I can’t imagine it would be too difficult to write a different end slide for some of these different faction scenarios. It’s not a good feeling to dedicate hours of your time trying to see how things would play out if the balance of power shifted from the canon events, to be told it didn’t matter.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Battle Destiny Remastered is a fun time, but it doesn’t really get much better than that. I appreciate that these missions can get pretty challenging, and this is probably some of the best game feel I’ve seen from a Gundam game. However, a lackluster story and limited mission variety detract a lot from the package. It’s a fun grind at the very least, if you want to do all the missions from all the different sides. But doing so on Switch might try your patience, with frame drops all over. Even if I’m not SEED’s biggest fan, there’s a lot missing here to be the ultimate fan service game. Getting licensed music, or fully utilizing how fascinating a multi-faction structure could be for these stories would have gone a long way. 

Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by Bandai Namco Entertainment