Gundam Battle Assault 2

I've said before that I don't think that games age. Or at least, I don't think they "age badly." Nor do I think that you necessarily had to be there at the time to fully understand the cultural context to most games; doesn't matter if it's 1985 or 2025, you can still enjoy Super Mario Brothers without having to understand what game development was like in the 80s. It's like watching a great film after everyone else, or listening to an album that influenced so many of your favorite bands: you'll understand things pretty quickly by absorbing the art, and maybe a few minutes of research at the most. Then you get a game like Gundam Battle Assault 2, which is such a perfect encapsulation of a very specific moment in time, that I feel like most of its appeal lies in having actually been around in that era, and in that particular sub-culture.

GBA2 is a 1-on-1 fighting game based on Mobile Suit Gundam, released in 2002 for the Playstation. The world was all-in on the sixth generation of consoles; not even Capcom were releasing games for it anymore, and here's this little fighting game quietly coming out on a system that rode off into the sunset a year before. This game was made for one specific reason: to capitalize on the western success of Mobile Fighter G Gundam, which had begun airing on Cartoon Network. So now it makes sense as to why it would be a Playstation release and not something put together for the PS2, as it would be quicker to reuse existing code and assets, with most of the development time spent working on adding G Gundam characters to the roster.

While GBA2 was made to promote G Gundam, the roster is a real who's who of all the Gundam series' you were watching on Toonami and Adult Swim. So you would get characters from the original Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam Wing, War in the Pocket (my favorite Gundam series for the zero of you asking), among others. I mostly bring this up because Anavel Gato is a playable character, which might be the only time Gundam 0083 has ever been remembered in any capacity other than someone bringing up how sweet its opening is.

I mention all of this because, on paper, this game sounds like a cynical cash-in hammered out by tired developers who just wanted to go home. However, this is actually a pretty solid little fighting game. I wouldn't call it a great fighting game, or even the best Gundam fighting game (that honor goes to Endless Duel on the Super Famicom), but it defies the circumstances that would otherwise condemn it to the pits of mediocrity. There are some things that bother me, like my brain not being able to grasp that the game with giant robots has somewhat sluggish movement, as if you're controlling a giant robot. GBA2 also lacks any blockstrings. You go in with a light jab that gets blocked, you cannot follow up with any other move; you simply get pushed back and reset to neutral. That's a weird thing for me, playing a fighting game with no blockstring. Otherwise it's a solid game with a nice roster that kind of makes up for a real lack of modes other than story, arcade, and versus. No training mode is a bummer.

Getting back to my opening paragraph. Gundam Battle Assault 2 is a good game. But what make it stick in my brain so much is how much of a time capsule it is for the late 90s-early 2000s anime boom. This was a game made for an audience during a time when Optimus Prime and a sick hip-hop beat let you know about new episodes of Card Captor Sakura. A time when anime was hitting the mainstream outside of Japan, without having to be rebranded and filed down until there was nothing Asian in it like so much animation in the decades prior. Anime was finally Anime. While there was still censorship for things like graphic violence and anything remotely homosexual, network restrictions eased up a little bit more, showing us a whole new world of animation that had a plot that was more than "buy more toys" (paranthetical aside to acknowledge that anime was also a vehicle to sell toys and model kits, but you would be a damn fool to compare Mobile Suit Gundam to the Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour bullshit we were dealing with before).

Gundam Battle Assault 2 is a game that asks: do you remember having your fucking mind blown every weekday afternoon by Gundam Wing and The Big O? Do you remember how your life would be enriched every Saturday night with a new episode of Cowboy Bebop? Remember all those anime theme songs you downloaded off of Kazaa and played on Winamp, wrapped in a barely comprehensible Ruroni Kenshin skin? Remember when you could still like Ruroni Kenshin? Remember posting on anime forums, reading anime fansites, and quietly taking part in anime roleplaying chat? Remember when you joined an anime club at the age of sixteen because the owner of an anime store just so happened to be standing next to you in line at a tech shop getting your computer fixed up, and he saw your desktop wallpaper was Vash The Stampede? Remember watching the latest fansubs of Haibane Renmei and Gundam Seed in that anime club? Remember when Char Aznable was a skilled Zaku pilot, and not an obnoxious Twitter Check Mark that constantly platforms alt-right hatemongers?

This is a game where you had to have experienced that early anime boom to fully appreciate it. You had to have been enough of a freak to buy a 2002 Playstation game, ignoring literally every other game released that year, and throw it into your PS2 after you and the boys just finished watching Domon and the Shining Gundam kick someone's ass. A niche game for a sub-culture that was very quickly becoming The Culture.