Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered is a fun enough title for what it is, but it struggles to feel like more than a solid port of a decent game.

Battle Destiny Remastered is a port of the original PS Vita title, launched back in 2012. The original title was only released in Japan, and this this marks its first foray into other markets. It comes complete with an English localization as well, which sweetens the pot. At a release price of US$39.99, it straddles the line between a full-priced new release and a budget title. I imagine that price is not so high that folks wouldn't risk purchasing it on a whim, but it's not so low that it's a forgettable amount.

The game is mission-focused regardless of mode. There are story campaigns where you select one of three factions and follow a largely linear path, as well as free play and challenge missions with more criteria and variables to play with. Regardless of selection, you focus on the same actions: select your pilot, select your mech, run the op, come back, and spend points tuning your machine and do it all again. As you progress through the campaigns, new mobile suits and pilots will be unlocked, while also allowing for more customization options as your pilots grow with experience. You also have the same level of customization for your copilot, who comes along on each mission, and you'll generally rotate through several different suits as you play.

The missions themselves open with story tidbits to give you context for the battle. These are often short in-game cutscenes, along with character dialogue setting the stakes and outlining the mission parameters. The missions include destroying all enemy mobile suits, taking out certain warships, destroying vital sites, defending assets, and more. Each suit you pilot has its stats, including speed, weapons loadouts, special moves, and more. Enemy variety ranges from plentiful grunt mechs to enemy aces and giant starships bristling with weapons. A key point is that all the aces have access to the same tools as you do, including special moves. Most missions take a few minutes at most, but some of the later levels run longer and include multiple phases of objectives.

Piloting the mobile suits is done from a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective. It's similar to many other third-person action games but with a slightly heavier weight to the movement. A standard suit will have two main weapons with total ammo caps, the iconic head-mounted machine guns that have magazine sizes but infinite ammo for reloads, a melee attack, and a boost. The boost can be used for lateral strafing, forward dashes, and high jumps over obstacles. Boosting uses a fuel meter that acts like a stamina bar, needing to recharge after extended use but never running out completely. However, later suits will often play around with these core assumptions, either toting non-standard main weapons, additional main weapons, unique secondaries, modified melee options, etc.

It sounds like a lot of elements in practice, but the game is refreshingly straightforward. It's incredibly easy to load up, blow up a few robots, drop the points in your robot, then do it all again a few minutes later. Most of the missions are bite-sized chunks that make for a good warmup or cooldown game for a session, or you could just as easily muscle through a ton of campaign missions in a single sitting. Upgrading mechs is fun, and there are so many new ones to try that you're constantly exploring new weapons or special moves to find ways to blow up even more enemies faster than before. The mixture of targets in the missions also helps the different weapons feel like they have their use-cases, like heavier artillery/beams struggling to target swifter enemies but tearing through warships and installations with ease.

I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much mission variety there was in terms of mechanics and presentation. Taking on the larger warships was a lot of fun since they have a big hull life bar that can be hard to crack, but you can target individual weapons and support systems to whittle down their effectiveness. There is a healthy variety of battlefields too, including your typical temperate grassy areas and deserts alongside low-orbit engagements, urban warfare, and blue water naval battles. When you are racing across the surface of the ocean, desperately trying to take out enemy aces as they pursue your flagship, it feels like you're in the middle of an episode of the anime.

There are some odd jagged edges to the game that keep catching on every playthrough. The actual game feel is a bit hard to pin down, but it is either buttery smooth mecha anime combat power fantasy or awkward jank that makes it feel like you're playing with toys on the carpet all by yourself and trying to make a dozen robot figures fight at the same time. The worst part is that these feelings often run into each other over and over again in the middle of combat. The most noticeable hangup is the weapon swapping. You can't just fire and then freely hit the weapon swap button and expect it to happen. Instead, you need to delay your input before trying to swap weapons, or it won't read it. I know that sounds minor, but the delay feels slightly longer than natural, and I often found myself messing up the timing. It messes with the flow of combat to go from smoothly swishing around and fighting enemies, then having to come to what feels like a dead stop before trying to use another backup weapon or swap to another main weapon.

And the storytelling doesn't do much if you aren't fully initiated into the plot already. The pre-mission briefings give you some context, but if you aren't already a SEED fan, then you likely won't have much of a clue what's happening. It could be argued that it's a SEED game, so the audience should know the source material, and that's a fair point. Not all Gundam fans are fully versed in every single series, and SEED is far from being the freshest Gundam out. In fact – it pains me to type this – SEED dropped in 2002, which was 23 years ago, and therefore the same age as the original Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) was when SEED premiered. Which is all to say – you can assume there are plenty of Gundam fans who have never seen SEED are simply picking this up for more mecha action and getting completely lost in the barrage of missions and battle cries of sudden ace pilot entries mid-sortie.

The actual storytelling on display in the cutscenes isn't much to write home about either. Most of the sequences are radio transmissions over mobile suits in static poses. The mobile suits often look like Gunpla by how plastic-y and artificially still they seem. Perhaps this is a charming selling point to some, but I mostly found it to be a flat presentation that reminded me this was once a portable game that had to make concessions for less space and weaker hardware.

There is also some fear that the gameplay is not terribly deep or varied for the long haul. There are ways to extend the playtime – challenges, special missions, collecting/unlocking all the suits, tinkering with loadouts, etc. But the core gameplay loop is relatively shallow, and the same thing you're doing in the first few missions is what you will be doing for the entire playtime. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing, and plenty of series are built around a comfortable, repetitive cycle of activity, and I enjoy plenty of them. But I'd be lying if I said the game was truly keeping you on your toes with new mechanics or difficult challenges to solve throughout its entire runtime.

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed: Battle Destiny Remastered is a perfectly solid title for a fair price. You will probably find a far more robust experience than you might expect, but the limitations of its prior platform, combat, and storytelling keep it from achieving greatness.