{"id":56647,"date":"2026-02-13T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/?p=56647"},"modified":"2026-02-13T13:58:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T04:58:14","slug":"a-western-perspective-on-mecha-games-gundam-one-year-war-maybe-the-best-gundam-game-ever-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/column\/a-western-perspective-on-mecha-games-gundam-one-year-war-maybe-the-best-gundam-game-ever-made\/","title":{"rendered":"A Western Perspective On Mecha Games. Gundam: One Year War: Maybe The Best Gundam Game Ever Made"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Greetings, my name is Ollie Barder<\/a>. I\u2019m from the UK and work in the game industry as both a game designer and a journalist in Tokyo. My area of expertise is mecha games, having played them for over 30 years.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is my second column for AUTOMATON, so I thought I would cover Gundam: One Year War on the PS2 and how I think it\u2019s one of the best Gundam games ever made.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the One Year War is hard to adapt into a game<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2005, before Bandai and Namco merged, Namco made a Gundam game for the PS2. Under the banner of Project Pegasus, the team behind the game managed to make something genuinely special.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, over the years, there have been numerous Gundam games, some great, some good, and some truly awful. The main issue is that, unlike other mecha anime, the rules that govern mobile suit combat in the original Universal Century timeline were somewhat flexible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was entirely intentional, as when I interviewed Yoshiyuki Tomino<\/a> about making Gundam, the creation of Minovsky Particles was purely so that mobile suits would have to fight each other in close quarters. This, he explained, was to make the combat look more dramatic. So the emphasis from the start was on drama, rather than any kind of functional coherence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, this has put various Gundam games in a difficult bind; how do you recreate something functionally that already isn\u2019t internally coherent? The answer, in the better Gundam games at least, is to create your own ruleset that mimics part of the anime but not all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been various implementations of this approach, from the excellent cockpit-viewed Blue Destiny<\/a> games on the Saturn and Rise from the Ashes<\/a> on the Dreamcast, to the more modern arena multiplayer games such as Gundam Extreme Versus<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, trying to tackle the One Year War period specifically has birthed a broad selection of games that only really worked in one environment, and normally, that was ground combat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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