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Revamped RX-78-7 Gundam to Be in Gundam Senki PS3 Game (Updated)
posted on by Egan Loo
The April 10 issue of Enterbrain's Weekly Famitsu magazine will announce on Friday that a new Mobile Suit Gundam Battlefield Record U.C. 0081 (Kidō Senshi Gundam Senki U.C. 0081) game for the Sony PlayStation 3 console will feature the revamped RX-78-7 Gundam #7 design that first debuted in Kadokawa Shoten's Gundam Ace manga magazine last month. Neither magazine mentions that the design will appear in other media formats.
The Bandai Namco Group's Bec is developing the game with in-game animation produced by Sunrise, Gundam's original anime studio. The action game will support network play for up to eight players. The release date and price for the game are not yet finalized. Besides the RX-78-2 Gundam #7, the game will feature the Aqua GM, the GM Command, the GM Ground Type, the Zaku I, the Zaku I Sniper Type, and the Zaku II mecha.
The story will star Hugues Couraud, a 32-year-old officer in command of the Earth Federation's Phantom Sweep Team. The special operations unit is ordered to hunt down the remnants of the losing Zeon forces after the end of the One Year War of the first Gundam series. When he was young, he once had his entire unit wiped out. The other main character from the Phantom Sweep Team is a 24-year-old woman named Sherry Allison. She was a test pilot for prototype units, but she has been assigned to the special operations team to fill its ranks. On the opposing Zeon side is Eric Blanke, a 20-year-old male officer born to a prominent family in the Principality of Zeon. He is leading the counteroffensive unit named Invincible Knights to avenge the Zeons' loss to the Earth Federation.
The Gundam robot war anime franchise is celebrating its 30th anniversary next month. The RX-78-7 is one of the last mecha in the RX-78 line, and a mecha that has appeared in Gundam reference material in the past but not as a main mecha in a project. (The model number of the main mecha of the first Gundam series is RX-78-2.) Bandai President and CEO Kazunori Ueno told reporters in a Tokyo news conference for the 30th anniversary last week that "there are no plans to broadcast [another Gundam] television series in 2009."
Source: 2ch
Update: Additional background information added.
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