Gundam Breaker 3 is a hell of a game. Released prior to New Gundam Breaker, the game is all around tremendously good. The only real negatives worth listing are the visual novel/story aspects, and hell, that’s a matter of taste. The story has its moments here or there, but this isn’t a Gundam anime or movie, this a game. We’re here for gameplay and mechs.
Gundam Breaker 3 has both in spades. It’s essentially Gundam Build Fighters in game form, with the relevant aspects of that show in gameplay form: players get to assemble mobile suits to their liking, and then play around with them in a spectacle fighter action game style.
As per the title, you can guess that what I’m interested in right now, is making a new shield. The RX-80RR is a mobile suit from Universal Century, and it’s a canon mobile suit. My interpretation in the game steals some features from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with an Anti-Ship Sword, however, in-game, it uses the Pale Rider’s shield.
The Red Rider uses a regular claw-type (RGM*S-Sh-WF/S-00109) shield. The only problem is, I’ve been using my Pale Rider shield for a long time, and it’s pretty good! But Gundam Breaker isn’t a game about making you choose a better item. You can make the item you like better! Except, before I can do that, I really need that claw shield.
There are two in-game. The Ez8’s which features up-armor, and the regular Gundam Ground Type claw shield. It’s worth noting that these are two variants of the same mobile suit; there’s actually four variants overall of the Gundam Ground Type, and were I to launch any other complaint than about the story, it would be that as a Gundam fan, there’s still plenty more that got missed. I want more Gundam Breaker, damn it! And instead, I got… Eugh.
Now, it’s time for that upgrade. Gundam Breaker allows you to select the various additional traits each part has, for example, increased damage per second, or ‘response time,’ a mecha based obfuscation of what essentially is animation speed. Since I’m upgrading a shield, the traits interesting to me are defensive ones, and generally, you can’t get speed increasing effects on shields except through special abilities that are tied to certain parts.
The colored rarities, white for common, green for uncommon, so on and so forth up to orange, essentially acts as a limit for how many abilities/traits a single part can have. When you upgrade a part, you can, one at a time, upgrade the rarity until a part is at max.
Psycho-Frame is one of those special abilities, as every opportunity to increase animation speed is generally one a gamer should take, I couldn’t help myself. But I’m afraid I’m still not quite done, either, as the shield for the Red Rider should be both a certain color (the GM Ground Type’s colors) and because I elected to use the Pale Rider’s shield on a smaller size originally, I need to fix the scaling of the part.
And these are both things Gundam Breaker lets the player do in terms of customization, it’s downright awesome and a breath of fresh air when it comes to most games now offering reskins instead of letting the player have some control. So a little bit of tinkering later, and…
There’s a proper shield! I still like my original shield, but this one’s got its perks too.
