News: Gundam Assault Survive Release Leaked
Posted on : 04-01-2010 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Hardware: PlayStation Portable
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A new PSP game by the name of “Gundam Assault Survive” has been leaked on Amazon.co.jp. With a release date of March 18th, it seems that Amazon have probably jumped the gun on the impending PR campaign. In any case, the name alone suggests that this could be another entry to the Gundam Battle Assault series. Though Japanese fans have been hearing rumours that Artdink may be developing a new game in the same vein as their successful Gundam Battle series (something the two recent Macross PSP games are based off in terms of technology). We’ll know for sure in the next few weeks most probably, when the marketing push kicks off in earnest.
Update: The above product link is now dead, so someone at Amazon is probably getting scalped as we write this.
With 2D fighters seeing a significant resurgence, I hope that this really is another entry in the Gundam Battle Assault series, and more like the first two and less like the third (which was in 3D).
Wikipedia seems to confirm that in Japan, they didn’t call it “Gundam Battle Assault” but rather “Battle Master”, and it seems weird for Japan to adopt the US name.
There’s a thin (oh, so very thin) chance that this might be an attempt to get more Gundam fans by creating an entry into a genre, the 2D fighter, already known by Western fans of anime, but I wouldn’t even suggest the possibility if I didn’t think that Gundam Battle Assault 2 had been exactly that. I don’t know for sure what happened, but Japan’s release of that game was apparently split into two budget releases–and the American version had all of the Z Gundam characters dummied out, perhaps to focus more on the Wing and G Gundam characters, both series which were semi-popular in America at the time. (I’ve always kind of wondered whether, if history had turned out differently, if we would have seen a Z Gundam centric edition, had the original Gundam’s showing in America not been cut short by the September 11th attacks).
But the safe bet, I think would be on the idea that the name is a coincidence, unrelated to us poor Westerners.