“Why not?”
That was the response Bandai Namco’s Tatsuhiro Suzuki fired back when I asked a question that bordered on the perverse: Will Gundam Breaker 4 let you mix regular and SD Gundam parts when building your own mecha? To demonstrate, one of the developers selected the regular-sized head from our in-progress Gundam build and swapped it out for one of the chibi, or “super-deformed,” Gundam head pieces, as if someone had surgically attached Clifford the Big Red Dog’s head to a dachshund. To prove the point, he then tapped a button to make the head even bigger before we scaled it down to something more suitable for the rest of our build. Still, we were basically just going to put some googly eyes on a war machine.
“You can change the scale of every part, so technically you can make the SD look HD,” Suzuki joked.
Officially, the tagline for Gundam Breaker 4 appears to be “create your own ultimate Gundam.” But the unofficial mantra of the development team behind this new mecha action game, whom I recently interviewed in Tokyo, seems to be, as Suzuki put it, “Why not?” The basic premise of the series, which last saw action with 2018’s New Gundam Breaker, differs from most other Gundam games. Where those games typically focus on the experience of being a Gundam pilot, whether that’s a strategy game, a first-person shooter, or a 3D arena fighter, Gundam Breaker is all about the model kits.
Today, the plastic Gunpla hobby scene is international and far more popular (and lucrative) than any anime series or video game. Bandai Namco has sold over 500 million kits since the very first model for the RX-78-2 Gundam hit the market in 1980. When I was in Tokyo, I visited Bandai Namco’s Gundam factory and saw the metal mold for that original kit, which still works four decades later. The model itself is incredibly simple by today’s standards, with barely any articulation to speak of – I hope you like an off-white figure that stands stiffly upright.
Bandai Namco’s hobby division head Taro Inayoshi proudly showed off the old set to illustrate that today’s Gunpla are very different beasts, with intricate internal skeletons and ball joints that allow them to recreate every moment from the series they’re based on.
Inayoshi told me that the factory runs virtually 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that every day they produce some 70,000 “runners”—the individual injection-molded plastic trays containing dozens of parts waiting to be punched out. That works out to about 10,000 model kits a day, a number that will likely increase in the future if Bandai Namco brings another factory online. Inayoshi’s creative team is responsible for designing new Gunpla kits as well as other models, from Pokémon to Star Wars. They turn out about 350 new designs a year, a pace I’m not jealous of having to work at (although I am jealous of their team jackets, styled after the uniforms from the original Gundam anime).
I haven’t visited the factories of Bandai Namco’s modeling competitors, but I don’t think Inayoshi is blowing smoke when he says that the competition can only produce runners with 1-2 colors of plastic molded at a time. The secret sauce of Modern Gunpla, which has made its kits increasingly intricate and beautiful over the past decade, is that Bandai’s assembly line machines can mold up to four colors of plastic at a time. That might not sound like a big deal – why not just put different colored parts on different runners? – but it opens the door to greater color variety in kits, gives the designer flexibility in how they arrange the parts, and makes the logistics of producing those 70,000 runners per day a bit more feasible.
To make a point about this tangent in Gunpla production, Bandai Namco has ramped up this side of the hobby so successfully that even the most dedicated modelers couldn’t hope to build all the kits. Even attempting to do so sounds like a sure ticket to bankruptcy and premature arthritis. But Gundam Breaker 4 offers the alternative of kitbashing over 250 of those models into your own creations, whether that’s by kitting out the 1980s Zeta Gundam with the more rounded chest piece of Aerial, the star Gundam from the popular new series Witch From Mercury, or creating some sort of abomination using the squad body of a green SD Zaku with the shrunken head of the golden masterpiece Hyaku Shiki.
New to Gundam Breaker 4 is a diorama mode that lets you place custom and stock Gundams into a battle scene, complete with anime-appropriate poses and backgrounds and props to spice up the scene. This is in addition to a basic photo mode, and is the kind of feature that a small percentage of players will almost certainly use to create awesome things.
“If you wanted to do this in real life, making these dioramas, it would be super expensive,” Suzuki said. “But in a game, why not? We can do it in five minutes. That’s [another way] “We also try to reach out to Gunpla fans.”
At its core, Gundam Breaker 4 is an action game that feels a bit like a simplified version of the Gundam Extreme Vs. series, which has more of a technical fighting system at its core. It also doesn’t feel all that dissimilar to last year’s Armored Core 6 , which emphasized the propulsive power of your mech and was (pardon the cliché) much more visceral. AC6 wants you to feel the Gs as you overboost and the entire screen goes blurry around you. By comparison, Gundam Breaker 4 is an easygoing popcorn game that knows its silliness and embraces it: in fiction, you’re fighting model Gundams, not “real” hundred-ton steel gods.
It’s a looter shooter at its best: each fight has you mowing down hordes of weak enemies, and at the end of each mission you’ll scroll through a list of rewards, stacks of arm and leg and head and chest parts with rarity levels that adjust your machine’s stats. I found combat to be breezily button-mashing, with a set of customizable gear for special attacks and items like heals on cooldowns doing most of the work in fleshing out my combat strategy.
There is a campaign mode in Gundam Breaker 4, but I have a feeling the plot won’t be that big of a draw for me or others who enjoy the (good) Gundam series that tries hard to use cool robots to explore the value of war and humanity’s eternal struggle with bloodshed. The only theme here is “Gundam models are cool”, and everywhere I looked in Gundam Breaker 4 there was some little touch that reinforced that:
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In addition to mixing and resizing parts, you can fine-tune their position so they fit together better.
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The paint menu offers enough granularity that you can spend hours in it, but it also includes presets for doing iconic paint jobs. And of course, there’s weathering.
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You can personalize your online lobby by showing off one of your mobile suits, complete with a customizable pose.
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When you look at another player’s avatar online, you can see what parts he or she uses to build the character itself.
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You can now dual-wield weapons, so you don’t have to choose between a beam sword and an axe
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There’s a new test mode where you can quickly try out weapons and skills.
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It is not a PvP game, but a bounty hunter mode where you can fight against the Gunpla that other players have created.
I’m rarely drawn to loot games, but damn, they’ve got me: I love Gundam. And the fact that Gundam Breaker 4 supports up to three-player co-op makes it even more appealing to me. I had fun with the fights in the 30 minutes or so I got to play, but on their own I don’t see the moment-to-moment action holding my interest to the same extent as something like Armored Core : the enemies I encountered were largely fodder or damage sponges without much in the way of lively AI. But that’s kind of the point of these kinds of games: they’re there to be churned through, to offer up their plastic parts by the dozen for you to collage into some beautifully strange monster.
When I have to wade through thousands of pieces of loot to build my ultimate Gundam, I definitely want my friends to be there.