Mobile Suit Gundam Extreme VS-Force is a mere glimpse into a world the west hasn’t been privy to since the PlayStation 2 era. As fun as this game can be, it feels more like a sample of what the Gundam VS series truly is. Generally, handheld ports of enormous console and/or arcade experiences are often flaming garbage dumps. However, what Extreme VS-Force excels at is compressing the source material without dropping its essence through a digital cheese grater.

For the unfamiliar, Gundam VS is a third-person, super-arcadey brawler with all kinds of bizarre rules and hardcore mechanics that make it as oppressively insular as possible. Last year’s J-Stars Victory VS is a similar game with a lot of similar concepts, including point values for characters and extensive co-op options. While it’s not a perfect comparison, it's functional unless you want to name drop something like Virtual-On, and they're so different, that would just being silly. 

Getting used to how Extreme VS-Force controls is the biggest hurdle. The core of a Gundam VS game is learning your way around limitations and becoming a master of swift, calculated movements. Moving is clunky and confusing, and most new players will feel immediately outmaneuvered by the AI. The default speed of a mobile suit is neither fast nor graceful, and using thrusters is obtusely nuanced. You can hold the button to zoom in a direction until you overheat, or you can double-tap a direction to quickly slide a short distance. Figuring out the feel as well as the best use of each in any situation is essential.

Furthermore, similar logic applies to attacking. Gundams also attack slowly despite the visual flare, and will happily sit on a long animation, especially if an attack misses. Getting to know how a mobile suit reacts to each button press and the core contexts to how pressing buttons in tandem with motion is also essential, otherwise, you’ll miss all your shots and leave yourself open with every melee attempt.

Figuring it all out is rewarding, and makes the player feel like a super cool mobile suit pilot, rather than say a cool Dynasty Warriors character in a robot skin (no shade here, I also love me some Dynasty Warriors: Gundam). The controls are difficult, but zipping around the field and clashing with an enemy unit feels like a singular life or death situation, a tension making your fingers dance across the buttons with purpose. Gundam VS games are thrilling, above all else.

Extreme VS-Force, being a handheld game, doesn’t capture the full arcade glory (or PS3 port glory, but that’s Japan-only for now). It has some basic multiplayer options--but is built largely with a single-player experience in mind. Through an unsurprisingly wishy-washy story meant to justify the timeline-destroying crossover stuff, players are thrust into large trees of missions, often with shifting objectives not unlike the aforementioned Dynasty Warriors. You’ll capture enemy territory, fight huge bosses and even direct satisfyingly competent AI companions around the battlefield.

What’s really strange/interesting is a micromanaging component meant to make the player use as much of the diverse roster as possible. With each use, a Gundam’s max HP will break down, and the player must either pay a fee to restore it or swap over to other characters for a while. Much to my dismay, I was not able to carry Amuro Ray through the entire campaign, as I needed that cash to buy new missions and characters. But, I was more motivated to venture out of my newtype comfort zone.

That said, having this typically arcade/multiplayer-oriented system slapped into a mission-based story gimmick worked out pretty well for short bursts of play, as well as replay value. Normally, I probably would have played through the arcade mode a few times, and maybe tried out some Ad-Hoc play a few times. But here, I constantly came back to try out more missions and relive some of my favorite Gundam moments as represented in the Extreme VS-Force style. Bonus objectives even encouraged me to go back and replay some missions, in order to reach even more unlockable goodies.

In the end, Extreme VS-Force probably isn’t the smoothest introduction to Gundam VS. It’s light on information, and if I hadn’t already been familiar, I may have been quite frustrated early on. But this is the dense sort of action game one can really sink their teeth into, even if the true meat and potatoes of the series, human competition, isn’t really the focus. It’s a more than solid port, with a surprising wealth of single-player content. Really, the biggest disappointment is that after playing Extreme VS-Force, I can’t easily swap over to its older siblings to go even further down the rabbit hole.

Hint: Use the d-pad. Double-tapping with the Vita’s analog stick is not ideal!

by Lucas White