Star Wars: X-Wing - Rogue Squadron Special Cover Art By Mark Harrison

Star Wars: X-Wing - Rogue Squadron Special Cover Art by Mark Harrison

I suppose I should finish off that ramble about Gundam Code Fairy, shouldn’t I?

Gundam Code Fairy is a Videogame billed as the single-player campaign to Gundam Battlefield operation 2. I’ll start with talking about the gameplay, since I want to take my time with the story and characters:

The (story) Gameplay’s….. fine. It’s not really as deep as GB02’s and it genuinely annoys me you can’t select different mobile suits for a level after you’ve beaten it, but there aren’t any real problems with the moment-to-moment gameplay. The skill system’s irritating, because you’ll always have the wrong skills in when fighting bosses, necessitating restarting the level. You can command your allies to target specific enemies which is helpful, but it’s really only used to call out snipers or blunt hordes, as opposed to actual tactics.

The other gameplay modes are fairly hollow, Simulations are mostly nice - a few missions to kill so many grunts are functional. I’d like to call out tank-hunting as quite enjoyable, and Hardcore as an exercise in utter pointlessness. The Cost Matches are just awful. To save me droning on - the AI’s crap, you win by kills and kills alone, you can’t even exploit the enemy by calling in artillery or blowing up the base, as those features aren’t in the game. Finally, in order to get rewards, you have to win the match with a certain number of kills. Win the match without those kills? Waste of your time. Lose the match after soloing the entire enemy team twice, because your AI partners kept getting shot? Waste of time. It is an exterior in frustration, where you just have to keep trying and praying for a quirk of the AI to cause them to lose and you to win.

In a nutshell, it’s a (very, very) hollow reproduction of GB02’s gameplay, with the tactical options replaced by mind-numbing gameplay, a bigger-stick philosophy and putting kills over objectives.

The characters, then.

The plot of Code Fairy concerns the exploits of the Noisy Fairy Squadron, a specialised all-female commando unit under Kycillia Zabi. The three pilots being Alma Stirner (centre left, the squad leader, and the player character), Mia Brinkman (middle right, Tech nerd and support) and Helena Hegel (centre right, Sniper). They are commanded by Killy Garret (middle left, a Zeon Ace canonised from Gundam’s very early side materials, who fought in the Battle of Loum) with Barbara Hahari (left) and Irmela Grubler (right) as further support (honestly, these two are essentially nothing characters, here to give the rest someone to bounce off of). The whole story is framed as a “coming of age” for the main 3 pilots. I am going to spoil the majority of the plot, but in a nutshell, it’s not very good, since the entire cast are a bunch of stock characters.

The main trio first. Alma’s fine, I don’t have any real problems with her. She’s supposedly a newtype, but she can’t use Psycommu, and honestly it feels like the story could have worked just as well if she was an Oldtype. Her arc is that she’s young and inexperienced, and she gets beaten (non-lethally) in a fight with an enemy Gundam, leading to issues with her self-worth. Alma’s struggled with her confidence as a leader and how her encounter with the enemy Gundam affected her are good, it’s just I feel like actual lasting consequences would have lent it more impact. As it is, she fights a strong enemy, and ceases being commander for a few missions. She still goes out and fights though. No Amuro “you can’t make me pilot the Gundam” thing here. It comes across as incredibly hypocritical, since she’s worried about being killed by the Gundam or her friends dying under her command, but not about the (literal) hundreds of Federation Grunts she mows down along the way? Oh, they were the enemy, it’s alright then. Alma’s essentially the fresh rookie that grows into the leader of her squad.

Helena Helgel is the only one of the three I would consider to have an actual arc. It’s not brilliant, but it’s there. She starts out the war as a sniper, and slowly comes around to adopting a more generalist fighting style when she finds that sniping doesn’t work for everything. And then she gets the Efreet Jäger, the best sniping suit in the game. Also, her “growth” is punctuated by her throwing away her sniper rifle. Like, actually throwing it away. A still-working and incredibly rare Zaku Sniper rifle. After they’ve literally been

Grave Robbing

For the equipment. As I said, it’s not brilliant, but it’s an arc. I honestly struggle to remember what her personality was, but I don’t remember disliking her particularly.

Mia Brinkman…… I kinda hate. I’m not really sure why, because it’s obvious that she’s the one I’m supposed to like, being the healer. Part of it could be that getting the Dom Gnomides (which I despise) is what counts as her arc. Part of it could be the

Grave Robbing

Or it could be that I don’t really like a lot of Gundam’s “nerd” characters, because they’re always so one-note, existing to ramble on about technical specs or identify the new enemy mobile suit, and having little else in the way of personality.What I do I know is that early on in the game your squad comes under attack by some GM’s. Mia goes “make sure to move in zig-zags to avoid their beam weapons” and then proceeds to not do that and is shot in the chest pretty much immediately. I laughed out loud and rewound the scene to watch it again, simply because the timing was so perfect. But it’s played as such a serious scene that it makes it funnier.

Killy Garret’s honestly just weird, because the game acts like she’s going to make this big dramatic choice at one point and she just… doesn’t. She’s just “the commander that wants her troops to succeed”. But she never really does anything other than be Mission Control. She even goes out in defence of California base, disappears at the end of the war and then sends Alma a letter years later. I assume it’s supposed to be a hook for her own adventures, but we’re given no real personality to go off of.

Now that I’ve rambled about the protagonists, what about the antagonists?

Lilith Aiden is the Gundam Pilot and at first is a screaming Berzerker maniac, because her family was killed in the colony drop. That’s….. actually a really good angle for Gundam to take. And how does she develop? Well, after nearly killing Alma, Barry Abbot (Lillith’s Mentor) points to the Black Dog Squadron, the villains of the piece and is all “don’t lose yourself to war, like those guys. Those guys are Wack.” So she doesn’t. Huh. Seems like a bit of wasted potential there.

And how about that Black Dog Squadron? It’s essentially an entire squadron of the Earth Federation forces dedicated to warcrimes. Like, actively. An entire division of giggling psychopaths with top-level mobile suits. ……..I’m really not sure how that would be in any way effective? Their leader, Renato Germi (who I would describe as Yazan Gable without the complexity) literally wastes valuable resources because he’s too kill-happy to think in the long term. It doesn’t make sense to me that anyone would sanction this squad unless they had an ulterior motive, and that seems to have been the idea at one point (Pale Rider Units, GM Spartan’s, Renato’s custom unit) but it just never comes up. There’s no actual depth to them as a force, so Gundam’s typical grey morality is completely upended. It makes the central conflict of the game feel incredibly dull.

Also, explicitly no named characters die. Like, call me crazy, but if I was going to make something about the horrors of war, something that involves a lot of death and killing, I would probably feature some of that death and killing. Maybe have a named character die at some point. Because throughout the story, Killy Garrett is depicted (privately) making a big deal about how horrible war is, and she doesn’t want the girls to be affected by it - but it never happens. And as the game goes on, it increasingly seems like she’s not worried about the death and tragedy inherent in war, but of being on the losing side. Which….. isn’t what Gundam’s about? Like, it’s difficult for the game to disguise the fact that it’s being written with the knowledge of Zeon’s defeat and of Operation Rubicon (the events of 0080). So much of what Killy says just foreshadows events to come in U.C. that it gets grating. Because instead of establishing her as someone who has a good read of the situation, it makes her sound like a character who read ahead in the script ahead of time and know how it all ends.

Come to think of it, Gundam’s whole “war is bad” aspect is kind of completely absent from Code Fairy. Yeah, Lillith has a good amount of rage towards Zeon, but that’s never actually resolved, she just…. Stops having it? Yeah, the Black Dog Squadron are horrible warmongers, but it’s so blatant that you feel that they’d just be going around making coats out of puppies in peacetime. Also the original series nailed this, so it irritates me that I have to point it out: Humanise the grunts. If I see a character, in gameplay, custscene whatever, as “Zeon Soldier F”. Then I know that he’s not gonna make it out of the scene. I don’t view him as a human, I view him as a plot device and it makes it meaningless when he dies. It’s just irritating, because it feels like the game expects us to understand these character, but it doesn’t actually bother to humanise any of them, so they’re all just cardboard cut-outs.

In fact, hopping back up to my earlier point about no named characters dying, while there are multiple bosses in this game, I’d like to talk about the second to last one, Renato Germi and the Black Dog Squadron, because it underlines the problem I have with the Black Dog Squadron as an entity. Noisy Fairy Squadron has a confrontation with the Black Dogs in the mountains, where they fight off waves of troops before being attacked by Renato Germi and the two Rider Units. It’s a pretty good boss fight, since it’s a three-on-three, with each unit having different weapons. Eventually a cutscene occurs of Renato getting Noisy Fairy on the ropes. So he has them, here, dead-to-rights, then turns to the rider pilot and says “hey, grab them and I’ll shoot you in the back, just to be sure we get them”. When they reply with the reasonable response of “no, just shoot them you idiot” he attacks them anyway, this enrages the pilot of the Black Rider, who proceeds to tackle him off a cliff. Cue explosion. Noisy Fairy wins, and retreat to California base for the final level. The final level is essentially Alma by herself holding off waves of enemies, with occasional fire support from your squad mates. It ends with a final confrontation with Lillith, and then ceasefire. And after that ceasefire, who should walk up but Renato Germi, who then attempts to kill Alma. So what exactly was the point of that entire boss fight earlier? I’m not going to sit here and say that every boss fight should end in a death, but there’s no point to Renato staying alive afterward.

Ian Greydon’s great thought. He’s another MSV pilot, known for piloting the Zaku Cannon, who shows up here. Yeah, he’s really just a mentor figure and he doesn’t do all that much. But I’ll admit I got a kick out of seeing him leading a team of Zaku Cannons. They only really use him sparingly, so he doesn’t outstay his welcome.

Honestly, the reason I like Gundam as a franchise is that all the elements blend together so well. You have giant robots, you have sci-fi, you have interesting villains and you have anti-war themes (there’s other stuff besides, but you get the picture). It all works because it all blends together. If you take one part of that out, then, yeah it still works, but it’s not nearly as appealing to me as the full thing, if that makes sense. Gundam Code Fairy is missing significant elements, and it doesn’t really bring anything to the table to replace them.

So, Gundam Battle Operation Code Fairy then. The story and gameplay’s fine, but the characters are just so very boring and the non-story content really isn’t worth it. I guess buy it if you really, really want to unlock the new MS (except the GM Spartans, Dom Gnomides and Rider Units) in GB02, but I can’t really recommend beyond that.

Tiny monk-in-training Garma from Daily Char.

Star Wars: X-Wing - Rogue Squadron #26 (Family Ties #1 of 2) Cover Art by John Nadeau

Jean-Claude Mézières