MS Saga: A New Dawn

No, that's not Eureka.

Ah, MS Saga: A New Dawn, originally released in Japan as Gundam: True Odyssey in 2005, then in America in 2006. I patiently waited to find this game in-stores to buy it since I first heard about and followed it's Japanese release, but I never saw it grace the likes of Wal-Mart or Game Crazy. It wasn't until sometime last year a great friend of mine got it for me, who also has a blog, Kaji's Blog, which you should checkout.

So after nearly a year of off again, and on again gameplay, and 92 in-game hours (twice that is probably the real time hours for dying and replaying) I have finally beaten MS Saga, with all the extremely hard optional bosses beaten as well, I might add. After not touching the game for about a month in fear of the final battle being a grueling ultra hard death and repeat-a-thon like the optional bosses, I turn it on last night to finally face the pain, but surprisingly is was really easy, never died or came near-death for any of my party. My final party of six Gundams, which you can only send out three at a time, consisted of Nu Gundam, God Gundam, Heavyarms Custom, Wing Zero Custom, Altron Custom, and Deathscythe Hell Custom.

Oh yeah, state of the badass art

With the defeat of the final boss and the watching of the ending I unlocked a new epilogue mission, which a very helpful in my battles walkthrough site only describes as "Insanity is running into a wall twenty times and expecting a different result", yeah it's freaking hard. Every random encounter is as hard as a sub-boss of boss fight, and on top of that the sub-boss and boss fights are all the powerful boss mobile suits again only even more insanely powerful the before. Yeah, so if I ever do beat this extra mission I be sure to post my victory here.

MS Saga: A New Dawn is an RPG featuring the Mobile Suits and Gundams of various Gundam series but not any the characters from those series. MS Saga has a complete original story with no connection to any of the Gundam universes, the basic story is boy and friend find mobile suits to avenge past tragedy, gathers new friends, allies, and mobile suits, along the way find a cause to fight for against a greater enemy. Gameplay consist of roaming the world getting in to fights to get experience points and money to upgrade, and customize your mobile suits, while hitting towns to get missions to move the story along.

I don't play very many turn based RPGs, but this game was extermely fun, and highly addictive. A real draw to the game for me was the Super Deformed mobile suits being taking as their full size seriousness, and the customization like given weapons to mobile suits who never use those particular weapons. You could also repaint your mobile suits and Gundam, which I did for the grunt mobile suits, but when it was a Gundam I keep their original scheme. I highly recommend this game for any RPG or Gundam lover.