It’s been a long while since I’ve had to rewind a promo video so I could back and try to figure out what the hell the player just did. I’m really hoping that the more acrobatic stuff going on in the Delta Gundam video is actually player-initiated rather than merely part of preset attack animations, because if it is the former, we could be looking at mecha gaming’s answer to Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. From has often created great mecha games, but they haven’t attempted to do much in the “stylish action” genre with the mecha offerings.

The ACE games on the PS2 are extremely functional, but I often felt that there was a certain flair that was lost by From Software when they made the game accessible and relatively easy to control–it made for a very fun game that modeled the many series of mecha in it fairly well (especially considering the diversity of the cast), but there was still an element of magic lost when you couldn’t really dodge at the last moment like a Newtype, or realized your melee attacks were just button mashes. Mecha anime, whether Real or Super, is all about aces pulling off crazy, impossible stunts, and the mecha action games we’ve gotten so far haven’t given us that same feeling. Yet.

I wasn’t looking forward to Mobile Suit Gundam UC before, but it seems the laser-focus of this game is giving From Software room to experiment.