EFFORTPOST Obscure Vidya Kino: Post great but obscure games most people have never heard of

Post anything and everything !g*mers. If I haven't heard of it, I want to. As long as it's good.

And don't be afraid to longpost a little. I certainly will with my entry

As for me, I humbly submit Gihren's Greed, a Gundam themed grand strategy game set in the original series timeline. (Universal Century) It's honestly the perfect “fan game” and a love letter to the series as a whole. It's not another strategy game with Gundam assets slapped on. Rather, the entire game is built around Gundam lore first and foremost. Like the board game Axis and Allies, it is intentionally unbalanced and somewhat linear so as to better simulate the “history” of Gundam.

The game is military management with strategic and tactical elements. The player controls one of the major factions of the setting and works to defeat any and all enemies. Each OG Gundam anime is its own time period so you'll have to potentially face multiple wars — i.e. Char's Zeon only has to face the Federation in UC 93, but the hegemonic Federation starts in 79 and has to face the Zeon Monarchy, then the Delaz fleet, then the Titans/AEUG, then Axis Zeon, and then Char's Zeon remnants. It's kinda neat though since you can choose your own campaign length based on which faction you pick.

Like Axis and Allies, the game tries to replicate the “conditions” of each faction and can be downright unfair. For the One Year War, the game's first time period, the conflict is set up not unlike WWII with the Allies inspired Earth Federation having a superior industrial capacity and the Axis inspired Principality of Zeon having better technology and initial soldiers. In Gundam the Zeon were also the ones to invent mobile suits, the giant robots that the series revolves around, and it took the Federation half the war to finally build their own.

Sure enough, the Zeon player enjoys several turns of complete dominance where your robots can literally curbstomp the primitive 21st century tanks and jets that stand in your way. The tradeoff is that you need to capture enough territory to prevent the Federation's superior economy from drowning you when they do counterattack.

Conversely, the Federation player is stuck with those same tanks and jets for a time and must struggle to survive. It'll be several turns before you invent a tank with arms, and the titular Gundam is locked until a story event.

Win conditions also vary, often railroading you into canon strategies. The Federation can capture all of Zeon as soon as your successes allow you to, but Zeon can't win without taking the Federation's underground base at Jaburo. You can attack Jaburo conventionally by having Char find an underground entrance, or you can fund a flying cannon called Apsalus, or you can deorbit a space station directly on top of where Zeon believes Jaburo to be. If these three actions can't be taken for some reason, you're destined for a draw at best.

Other periods have their own quirks. In the following Zeta Gundam timeframe, the Federation is in the awkward position of having to choose between the Titans and AEUG and your unit roster depends on this decision. The Titans are well paid but evil PMCs so they get more mobile suits and pilots, but their pilot skills cap out early. The AEUG are the quirky resistance fighters with plot armor, so while they start with little to work with and have less mobile suits, the pilots they do get are plot armor protected and some of the best in the game. Flash forward to CCA and the Federation is theoretically at the height of its power, but you must take specific steps to stop Char's schemes or you'll suffer heavily. Meanwhile Char has few mobile suits and pilots to work with, but he can smash an asteroid into the Earth to make it laughably easy to seize. The Principality can also take the Federation's place if it won the first war but suffers from a lack of protagonists. If the Feds can't stop Char's asteroid then war hero Amuro can use his psychic powers to stop the impact just like in the ‘88 movie. Zeon alas doesn't have any anime flavored burning justice, so you're SOL if you didn't win conventionally.

True it its anime origins, Gihren's Greed has plot armor as a mechanic of sorts. Virtually every named character in Gundam as of a game's release will feature as a playable character with skills befitting their roles. Main characters like Amuro Ray and Char Aznable are unbeatable when all things are equal, and “ace” management is important. Named characters need to be countered with your own instead of unnamed grunts since they can kill entire fleets if left unchecked.

The game also replicates the events of the actual animes through event chains that the player may or may not go down. For example, the plot of Gundam ‘79 is told through events where the Federation player will usually choose between two options. If you follow canon, Amuro and friends and the original Gundam will be unplayable but will kill all the Zeon characters they're supposed to. Alternatively you can choose to annex the Gundam into the regular army and cancel the anime storyline. You get the characters and the resources directly, but the Zeon pilots they would have been occupied will also be added to the enemy's controllable roster.

Funnily enough, antagonist factions see these event chains from the other side. The Zeon player can make all the canon decisions of the Principality, but you will, of course, lose. Making smarter decisions instead allows you to change history by killing the Gundam and sparing the villains-of-the-day.

Knowledge of what happens in the anime is important since the wrong decisions can be very punishing, for instance the Federation will immediately lose the Gundam if you fail to resupply it when you're supposed to. Named characters are usually just injured when felled in battle, but story events will kill them permanently. Of course you can also ignore some of the event chains in favor of micromanagement if you feel you can use the characters better through direct control. Event chains are often high risk high reward.

The game is mostly military but there is a morality system for every faction. There are neutral territories that can be occupied for at the cost of a morality loss for every turn of occupation. Many event options also flip you one way or the other — sparing your enemies and not experimenting on people = good, using nukes or turning people into cyborg super soldiers or smashing large objects into the Earth = bad.

The game allows for all factions to go both ways and there can be advantages to either like bad Zeon getting more Newtypes plus easy ways into the Federation's main base whereas good Zeon can keep the more honorable pilots and commanders from rebelling. Some factions like the Titans play fairly differently depending on your morality. The good Titans can recruit Federation pilots and keep the loyalty of Paptimus while the bad Titans can mass produce cyber newtypes and make use of Bask Om's sneaky strategies. There's generally no reward for being in the middle though. In this instance, the centrist Titans would lose Paptimus and his followers while also not benefiting from the unique talents of lovable tyrant Bask Om.

That said, you actually get good guy points for every turn you spend not doing anything evil. You're free to take specific bad guy actions if you know what you'll get. Then you can just wait until the world forgets about anything you've done lol

For all the intentional anime shenanigans, Gihren's Greed is still a war game. Making the right decisions and using your protagonists correctly is strategic in its own way since the consequences come in the form of economic penalties or sudden enemy spawns or opportunity costs. Of course, you also need to build regular armies and fleets and manage technological research. Even Amuro will pop like a firecracker if he's still in the first Gundam when your enemies start fielding high tech units like post war Gelgoogs and Marasais.

The game has both currency and resources, and you can grind to a halt because you've run out of one but not the other. Units also come out of specific production centers so you need to keep these out of enemy hands. Faction balancing should be kept in mind like Zeon needing a blitzkrieg to close the economic differences with the Federation. You need to keep on top of tech so the enemy doesn't outpace you. You also need a diverse roster of units since there are varied combat scenarios and no one unit will handle them all. This also means going down different tech trees since, for example, more advanced air or aquatic units can't be fielded until you've researched their predecessors. Lastly there's an intelligence division to fund unless you're okay with never knowing what your enemy is doing and what they have. There's also espionage that allows you to steal enemy designs — your chances improve based on funding but what you steal is rng. This can actually change the course of campaigns if you're lucky, since the Feddies might steal a Zaku when they're stuck with tanks and the Zeon might be able to mass produce the Gundam itself.

Gihren's Greed also has a map for both Earth and space. The Earth is risk style, divided into territories and the continents. Earth's orbit is also important though since it allows you to drop units directly onto continents you don't otherwise have a foothold on. Same goes for the oceans. Space too has geography in the form of asteroid bases, the moon, and clusters of space stations called sides. The placement of everything in space matters, Federation base Luna II is close to Earth for example and can send reinforcements to the planet quicker than Zeon can through Side 3. Space is also interesting because the locations change with time periods. In the One Year War many sides are destroyed and the largest base is A Baoa Qu. Come the Gryps War and many sides are repaired and important again. Meanwhile a massive asteroid called Axis has appeared in what was empty space and obviously effects the routes you can take from place to place.

In battle, geography forces that aforementioned unit diversity since regular ground units suffer in harsh conditions like mountain, snow, or desert and overworld features like mountain ranges and lakes force ground units to take detours. You'll want dedicated units to seize these territories and you'll want air transports so the slower mobile suits don't walk everywhere. The sky itself can be a battleground so you'll want fighters and add-ons for grounded mobile suits. In the OYW for instance you'll need to build flying sleds since no mobile suit can fly. Space is more fair but you'll need spaceships to act as motherships. These in turn need to be protected since mobile suits always beat spaceships in battle.

Most factions need to take Earth and space to win so part of the difficulty is managing both types of units. (Obviously things like submarines and jets don't function in space) This is another thing the factions aren't balanced on. Federation GMs are usually all purpose while Zeon mechs, though often superior in their chosen environment, are useless outside of it. Building too many ground units as Zeon can cost you the war if the Federation breaks out in space and takes Side 3 unopposed.

Lastly every battle must be approached tactically. Units are placed in ranks and some units are good frontliners while others need protecting. Proper placement is the difference between victory and defeat — snipers in front and Gundams in back can lose to even an inferior force while the correct placement can beat a numerically superior force. Even aces need to be placed correctly so they don't immediately draw fire and because some prefer ranged combat while others are better in melee.

And of course there are logistical units that can resupply or scout but can't fight. All in all Gihren's Greed is a balance of MIC management, tactics, and correctly navigating the main characters and event chains. You also need to understand the balance of each time period.

This game is the ultimate Gundam experience, and it's hard.

TL;DR

Gihren's Greed is obscure strategy kino and I daresay it's the most dedicated game ever made for a fandom. It is the ultimate Gundam compilation experience at the cost of being downright inaccessible to normies — as specialized and linear as Axis and Allies but for the benefit of a fictional setting.

Anyway, any spergy-gems you dramatards would like to share with the hole?