things are dire right now. i ordered my first Gunpla kit but it very rudely did not immediately show up at my front door, and so i've had to settle for a video game version in the meantime. i wish it was just about Gundam instead of Gunpla. i understand a big arm of the franchise has just become metastories about people who like Gundam playing with toys. but it's so lame dude they marketed things so hard they can now simply market the fact that they market them. i mean i say all this after i just bought both real Gunpla and a video game one so clearly it worked out for them

my favorite series is, the one (1) i have seen the entirety of. i wanted to wait until i'd seen a lot before playing something like this so i'd be like "oh thing i recognize from show!!" but i guess it could work the other way too. "oh thing i recognize from game. it wasn't very good in it"

when i watch the show and stuff like this happens i think well this sure was made in the 80s. but this came out in 2024. she's even all pink man it's fascinating, and her fake gamer profile says "don't underestimate me just because i'm a girl!" plus everyone calls me "he" when i'm literally just a robot so i guess this is the default

i very almost want to skip every cutscene. this is a video game about people playing a video game but no one who's ever written a story about people playing a video game has ever played a video game, even if the story is for a video game. i went into one story mission and the screen briefly glitched ominously, which the characters remarked upon, and figured of course what else could the plot of such a game possibly be about. there's a Bug in the System..

does my guy look cool. yeah. yeah my guy looks cool. so this is fake PSO basically. i'm glad the lobby is a fake multiplayer lobby instead of a real one so i have no reason to hang out in here, because the 8-second music loop that plays makes me feel like i'm going insane. and also because i don't want anyone to see me like this, because my guy looks too cool. i extremely hope i unlock a transmog system at some point so i'm not forced to equip every ill-fitting part i find just because its stats are good

oh yeah there is a game part of this game. it's incredibly easy and buttonmashy, at least for the first couple hours i've played. i put next to no thought into what weapons or skills i use, because each mission gives me an explosion of new gear that i outlevel so quickly i truly am not given a reason to care about what anything actually means or does just yet. makes me wonder why there needed to even be a vessel for delivering all these Gunpla parts. just give me everything up-front and let me mess around with it to my heart's content

i want to point out that boss fights begin with the boss gunpla exploding out of its retail box

royal mail told me my gunpla would arrive today but it didn't. thought i would mention this in case i unintentionally come off as slightly bitter today. anyway i played more of this stupid intangible poser game that sucks. a lot more in fact, and i have a disproportionately small amount to say about it as a result of every story mission being exactly the same. bad cutscene, three waves of guys with boss at the end, bad cutscene, all taking place in one of very few small arenas. a lot of features are locked behind progressing this non-campaign so really i'm just powering through it so i can finally have some fun

just to give an idea of how lenient this game is. i'd been playing each mission on normal difficulty which was mindnumbingly easy. there was a higher-level hardcore difficulty and an even higherer-level extreme mode i unlocked later on, but there's a level cap on the gear i can get depending on how far into the story i am. i figured it's just an "are my numbers big enough" game so normal difficulty would be way too easy and hardcore would be way too hard. tried a level 47 Extreme mission with level ~25 gear just to see and never mind it was really easy to get S rank. i still just press buttons

really missing Stranger of Paradise suddenly. story took about 10 hours to have anything going on aside from each character having a small "learning to believe in myself and the true power of friendship" arc. if there's one thing it does well, it's shortening my Gundam anime backlog by a wide margin since i can only imagine the Build series are a whole lot of this. distinctly had a moment yesterday when i realized ohhh i think this might be a game for small children

there's a bad virus. some bad virus guys somehow took over the big computerbrain at the center of the game and instead of it being threatening like something that doesn't amount to video game shenanigans, the bad guy has tasked us with simply being really good at the video game he is manipulating or he will destroy it. personally i would close my game down for maintenance if this kind of thing happened to it. one of his elite four bosses is a famous gundam livestreamer. personally i would not throw away my entire career to destroy the thing it hinges on. anyway here's me just absolutely bullying her

hoo boy so. i finished the story. i was expecting the ending to be bad in the way things had been up till now. i was not expecting it to be incredibly tone-deaf

the villain? turned out to be a former developer of the game who got replaced by AI. his goal? to inject some actual goddamn creativity into the game he made. first off they use this point to explain why the first 15 hours of the game are so boring and monotonous. he asks me once and for all if i'll join sides with him, but do i get a dialogue option. do i get the opportunity to say yes sir mr chaos you are 100% correct and clearly the good guy in this situation. no i do not get this

i pretty much all but decided to drop the game right here, but i figured i'll just get this final boss out of the way and see if it gets any better. it doesn't, the guy gets arrested. i really should've followed through on skipping every cutscene. huge whiplash watching this happen and then being presented with a credits sequence, like here's a list of people we hate that we had to pay. it's literally about Bandai Namco itself is it not?? they make the gunpla, they make the gundam games. presumably that is also the case in this universe. good lord

well that was over, so i was free to finally go all out on guybuilding. except i was feeling particularly ludditeful for some undiscernable reason? so i wasn't really feeling it. customization options are good, i've just never been into character creation and i went into this hoping it would change that, but as always choice paralysis rears its ugly-in-infinite-ways head. plus i don't feel like this game is the most deserving avenue of expenditure of creative energy right now. maybe i'll use it once this bad taste has left my mouth and i want to visualize customizations to my actual gunpla. which still hasn't arrived