That was the answer Bandai Namco's Tatsuhiro Suzuki fired back when I asked a question bordering on the perverse: Doeslet you mix regular and SD Gundam parts while cobbling together a mecha of your very own? To demonstrate, one of the developers selected the normally-sized head of our in-progress Gundam build and swapped it for one of the chibi, or"super-deformed," Gundam head pieces, like someone surgically attaching Clifford the Big Red Dog's noggin to a dachshund.
These days the plastic Gunpla hobby scene is international and far more popular than any of its related anime series or videogames. Bandai Namco has sold more than 500 million kits since it debuted the very first model for the RX-78-2 Gundam in 1980. While in Tokyo I visited Bandai Namco's Gundam factory and got to see the metal mold for that original kit, which is still in working order four decades later.
New to Gundam Breaker 4 is a diorama mode where you can pose custom and stock Gundams into a battle scene, complete with anime-appropriate poses and backgrounds and props to embellish 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 create amazing things with."If you wanted to do this in real life, making these dioramas, it's going to be super expensive," said Suzuki.
On top of mixing and resizing parts you can minutely adjust their positioning to better fit together. When you look at another player's avatar online, you can see what parts they're using to recreate the build yourself.There's a new test mode for quickly trying out weapons and skills. I'm rarely drawn to loot games, but hell, they got me: I love Gundam. And the fact that Gundam Breaker 4 supports up to three-player co-op makes it even more appealing for me.