Parents' Guide to Mobile Suit Gundam: Battle Operation Code Fairy

There are some games that seem like a good idea at first glance, but quickly fall apart when you take a closer look. Mobile Suit Gundam: Battle Operations Code Fairy is a perfect example of this. On the surface, an episodic adventure featuring an original tale in the Mobile Suit Gundam universe should be great for fans. But look past the surface and what you find is a mess that's hard to justify. For starters, unlike most episodic adventure, there's no choice or consequence for the player to take part in. Instead, the formula essentially breaks down to an extended anime cutscene, a few static dialogues adding extra exposition, then upgrading your mech and heading out into a battle before coming back to base and doing it all over again.

Code Fairy is heavily tied to the free-to-play game, Mobile Suit Gundam: Battle Operation 2, and that's where things start to fall apart. The only real interaction from the player comes in the combat, which is essentially a stripped down single-player version of Battle Operation 2 with all the other player roles filled by a subpar artificial intelligence. It's basically little more than a glorified training module for Battle Operation 2's slow and poorly executed combat. Worse still, it's a training module that costs players twenty bucks a pop. It doesn't help matters that the action in Code Fairy looks and plays like an awkward and outdated action game, which is an extension and sample of Battle Operations 2's gameplay as well. What players actually get is Code Fairy's added story, which is a convoluted mess in and of itself. All of this adds up to Mobile Suit Gundam: Battle Operations Code Fairy being little more than a paid gateway to a free-to-play game that doesn't offer anything worth the price of admission.