REVIEW: ‘Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered’

Remastered, for what? Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is a compromised effort, undermined on both sides by what’s missing in this updated release and the campaign design choices of the original. Fun can be found, but players will be limited by what nostalgia can excuse.

Based on the 2012 Japan-only Vita title, Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered gives players an upscaled, frame rate-unlocked jaunt through multiple campaigns in the Gundam Seed Universe. You’re given the choice of the Earth Federation or the Z.A.F.T. for your create-a-character, as well as the option of Natural or Coordinator. What do these terms mean? Who are the sides in this war? Why are they fighting? The game doesn’t seem too focused on that. Offering limited flavor text in menus, mission briefings, and the rare (Japanese only) voice over for a wall of text.

Calling the create-a-character players can build a ‘character’ may be overly generous. You can choose a name that has strange text censors. Why is ‘Kamille Bi-dont’ allowed but ‘Kamille Bidont’ forbidden? You can also choose a trait that has gameplay benefits, like making you less vulnerable to certain weapons or increasing the rate at which you gain experience in missions. However, your new character’s relevance to the story is nonexistent, and their response to events is reduced to repeating the same barks for the rest of your 15-20 hour experience.

The gameplay of picking your mech, reading a short mission brief paragraph, and having characters from the anime yell out-of-context quotes from the series until you destroy or defend your way to victory is mostly enjoyable. Some mobile suits can transform into jets or four-legged beasts. All offer multiple weapon types you can switch between in battle. Each has dashes to avoid enemy attacks, melee to tag enemies that get too close, targeting to assist with aiming at range, as well as special and charged attacks to punish foes.

Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is all about nostalgia.

Piloting in Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered doesn’t take long to get a handle on. And the game offers quick access to a player’s guide in the pause menu to touch up on any mechanics or controls. However, remapping and visual settings are only available outside of missions in the main menu. The game recommends players grab a controller instead of relying on the mouse and keyboard, which was advice I happily took.

My performance on my PC at 4k was excellent, and so was my performance on the Steam Deck. I saw maybe two significant frame rate drops during my time playthrough. Tuning your mobile suits was a joy. While there aren’t cosmetic customization options, you can dial in your suit’s health, defense against projectiles or beams, boost speed, individual weapon power, magazine size, projectile/beam velocity, and more.

You’ll gain tuning points through campaign progression, and each mobile suit can be customized differently. But it feels a bit odd, doing all this customizing, only to get a new suit a couple of minutes later or be restricted from using that suit a couple of hours later when you complete that campaign and move to the next one.

The free mission options pad out the game’s content offering. Allowing you to take some of the customized mechs out to play against opponents of your choice. But when you see the free mission menu, with the CPU text label over the three slots next to your own, you may start looking for a non-existent option to get into some multiplayer. As of writing, all you’ll find is the sense of emptiness of not being able to battle your finely tuned mechs against any of your friends.

While a remaster, Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is missing core elements from the original Vita launch.

As players progress, they can unlock new mobile suits, side missions, and eventually new campaigns. But progression is oddly gated to specific campaigns. Want to go back and choose a different faction to play for? Sorry, gotta finish the campaign first. Want to use that new mobile suit or pilot you unlocked in the first Gundam Seed campaign in its sequel, Gundam Seed Destiny? Nope, you’re restricted. These restrictions can be lifted, but you must finish all campaigns first to unlock that option. So the benefit mainly exists for replayability.

There are reasons to come back to play, but this will invite another compromise. The original Vita title had both competitive multiplayer and co-op. Both of which are absent in Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered. You’re given a co-pilot who has the same level of customization as your character and joins you for every mission. While there’s no exchange of narrative dialogue or character development between the two, there is utility in their addition.

A limited set of commands, such as melee, ranged, defense, and special attacks, can be issued to direct your personality-free buddy on the battlefield. And a blank slate partner character would be fine for a co-op-focused experience, like the original Vita release. However, the absence of cooperative play spotlights other encounter design issues. Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered’s overabundance of trash mobs to grind through during some of its multi-stage missions would be much more enjoyable with a friend.

The variety of mech options is staggering, with over 100 mobile suits and mobile armor. In spite of my tone in this review, I love Gundam Seed, and I was excited to see mechs that I hadn’t seen before. Players can pilot mobile suits from Gundam Seed, Destiny, the manga series Astray, the OVA Stargazer, and more. If Gundam means Gunpla model kits to you, you’ll enjoy playing with and checking out some fully assembled mobile suits that are not in your model kit backlog pile, staring daggers at you.

At least we can steer Gundams in 4K on our PCs, that’s where the fun is.

The textures and terrain suffer greatly from this being a remaster and not a remake, experiencing what feels like only a moderate touch-up. Space battles are where this game shines, as anytime the theater of war moves from the stars to the ground, you’ll feel your soul being weighed down by Earth’s gravity. The mobile suits look great while in motion. But when the game attempts to show off with close-ups and flyby cut scenes, the sheen wears off, and you’ll see the time limitations.

My biggest issue with Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is its campaign design and execution. You complete story missions to unlock mechs. Then, more story missions, to unlock tuning points and pilots. Then you use those tuned-up mechs and new pilots in more story missions. All of which you’ve unlocked can be played later in free missions or in the campaign again for higher ratings. However, the game doesn’t seem to care about the story being told. It’s where you’re expected to spend most of your time, but it can’t be bothered to provide the context for many of the missions it drives players to complete.

An example of this failure of context happens in the final mission of the first campaign—spoilers for Gundam Seed. Rau Le Creuset, the core antagonist of Gundam Seed, drops his nihilistic speech from the anime during the mission. He waxes poetic about mankind deserving annihilation and desiring it by our actions. He argues that he’s the only one who can offer that judgment because he’s the product of mankind’s ambition.

But the game doesn’t tell you why he thinks this. It doesn’t say he’s a failed and quickly decaying clone of his rival, Mu La Flaga’s father. It doesn’t tell you that Rau’s creation was in exchange for the Al Da Flaga financing the creation of the ultimate genetically modified human, Kira Yamato, the protagonist of the first series. It doesn’t tell you that Rau is paying the price, through the failed clone process, for Kira’s greatness. It just assumes you get it, because you’ve watched the anime, or just enjoy the vibes of anime dudes yelling in their space robots.

One thing that Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is missing is context, a lot of context.

The majority of the narrative is told through voice acting and middle-of-battle speeches, without providing any context. Why is everyone yelling and killing each other? Watch the anime to find out. The design decision to focus the bulk of the game’s context on the story campaign, but only through incomplete references, visual call backs, speeches, and diatribes, breaks any narrative cohesion. And when the game allows you to diverge from the source material, making different choices from the canonical narrative path, the decay is more evident.

Mechs, ships, and pilots will be seemingly destroyed, only to return on a mission later. The game will selectively say ‘this ship got a way’ or ‘that mech was destroyed,’ only to revive them without any narrative explanation. Characters will go from being on the same side in one mission to trying to kill each other in the next, and the most you’ll get for clarification is a couple of sentence blurb in the mission text. And regardless of your choice, the ending text for each path is basically the same.

This could be excused or understood if Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered’s campaign wasn’t the bulk of the experience. However, the absence of the original’s multiplayer modes limits how players can engage with the Battle Destiny Remastered. I’m glad this game exists, that it is available outside of Japan, and on more platforms. I did enjoy playing it, and I will probably knock out the rest of the free missions and unlocks.

Still, it’s hard to thoroughly recommend something flawed in its original iteration in one way, and compromised in its remastered release in an entirely different way. Last year, Gundam Seed Freedom overtook Mobile Suit Gundam III’s 40+ year box office record. There’s an audience that loves the world of Gundam Seed specifically. But we’ve been waiting for something more than this.

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is available now on Nintendo Switch and Steam.