YMMV / SD Gundam G Generation

• Awesome Music:
  • Most of the characters introduced from Spirits to World have excellent themes.
  • Mono-Eye/DS's characters had also some good arranged versions versions of their themes.
  • Many Crowning Gundam themes are here as well, but World's OST stands out for being the only SD Gundam game to not include ANY opening themes, breaking the pattern and instead giving us the best of the OST songs.
  • Code Phoenix's Theme, perhaps the most heroic Char Clone theme in Gundam history.
  • G Generation Genesis has "Cradle of Eternity" as its opening theme song and "Remains" as its ending theme song, both by Yuko Suzuhana, a lead vocalist of Wagakki Band. The in-game version of the former is a bit more enjoyable due to the last chorus of it having a bit more epicness from Suzuhana's vocals.
  • G Generation Cross Rays has "SUCCESS STORY" by EMPiRE as its opening theme song.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Cross Rays suffers from this, but only in data entries and dialogue related to After War Gundam X for unknown reasons, being markedly lower in quality and sometimes grammatically incorrect.
• Complete Monster: DS manages to make these two already vile Gundam villains even worse than in canon:
  • Gihren Zabi is the Supreme Commander of the Principality of Zeon during the One Year War. Seeking to reduce humanity to less than one billion to be ruled over by a Spacenoid Master Race, Gihren gasses multiple colonies and drops them onto Earth, killing off half of the human population. Learning of both the Black History and his eventual death at the hands of Kycilia Zabi after killing his own father from Moonrace scouts sent to the past, Gihren would fake his death and go into hiding. During that time, Gihren would create via human experimentation an army of Newtype-Coordinator hybrids known as the Legion piloting the Centurio Mobile Suits, said Mobile Suits being able to use the Moonlight Butterfly system that destroyed human civilization in the Black History. Revealing himself after the fall of ZAFT to the protagonists, Gihren would seek to use the Centurio Mobile Suits along with either GENESIS in the UC route or Libra in the AU route to destroy most of humanity so he can rule the remains.
  • Muruta Azrael is the leader of the anti-Coordinator group Blue Cosmos. Seeking to launch a campaign of total genocide on the Coordinators, Muruta Azrael would ally with both the Titans and OZ to accomplish that goal. In the AU route, Azrael would seek to nuke the PLANTs from existence, while imposing the rule of a Blue Cosmos controlled Earth Federation on countries such as the Sanc Kingdom. Surviving his canon death in the AU postgame with the help of Devil Gundam Cells, Azrael would kidnap Rain Mikamura and convert her into a life unit for the Devil Gundam. Infecting Neo Japan with DG cells, Azrael would use both the Devil Gundam and the Death Army as a instrument of revenge against both the Coordinators and the Three Ships alliance. In the Rival route, Azrael's plans to nuke the PLANTs would horrify the surviving Titans and OZ, whom subsequently team up with the AEUG and the Three Ships alliance to take him down.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Japanese fans are particularly fond of G Gen original Claire Heathrow, thanks to her penchant for Reference Overdosed attack calls.
  • Fan artists are quite fond of Maria Owens for among the reasons, her tendency to do G Gundam cosplay.
  • Some western fans are fond of Florence Kirishima for trying to speak like an Ojou but failing as her real personality comes through, going from being Ax-Crazy to being ultra polite and formal back and forth, sometimes in the same sentence. She's the type of person who'll scream "I'M GOING TO TEAR YOUR PIECE OF SCRAP MOBILE SUIT LIMB FROM LIMB!" and then follow that with "and have a cup of tea afterwards, de gozaimasu".
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Gundam Double X with G-Falcon is this starting in Wars. Not to mention it's easy to level it up fast: just attack the mooks using the Twin Satellite Cannon that can aim up to 3 of them, and the last one gets killed, allowing you to repeat the tactic again until you run out of MP or Chance Steps. The same can be said for any Mobile Armor which can do the same trick the Gundam Double X with G-Falcon can do (like the Divinidad), as well as the Psyco Haro.
  • Some pilot skills count as this, such as "Cool-Headed" (reduces enemy suit defense when attacking without supports) and 0079 Amuro's exclusive White Devil skill (Boosts both attack and agility of any Gundam-type Mobile Suit...basically, all the good MS.)
  • Multi hitting physical attack in Spirits and Wars. Normally the damage scaling of an attack is proportional to the attacker attack and target defense stat. If your attack stat is twice as high as your opponent defense, you'll do double the expected damage and so on. This result in diminishing returns in the late game as the opponent defense rise and each attack point you get net you less damage. However, physical attacks instead have a flat 100 point of damage, on top of the number of hits added instead which result in a absurd amount of damage if you keep leveling your attack stat, to the point that some people considered using Acguy because it had such an attack.
• Game Mod: The community sparsely ventured into modifying the games, limited to texture packs for the post-Wars games or minor code edits to the handheld ones... Until Cross Rays came to the PC, its success boosting the interest in including custom content such as recoloring the MSs or adding new pilots through replacement.
• Heartwarming Moment:
  • Cross Rays:
    • Placing Mikazuki, Atra or Season 2 Kudelia in the Akatsuki Gundam. The former two will remark on how they adore the name, while the latter will mention how reassuring it feels to pilot the suit, all cases referencing Mikazuki's child that Atra and Kudelia raise in the epilogue of IBO Season 2.
    • Performing the Burning/God Finger (Or its Sekiha Tenkyoken Variant) attack with certain characters has them declaring their love for their canonical partners, especially during the "Heat End" segment: Shinn declares his love for Luna in the same way Domon did to Rain, while Luna responds to his declaration in a way typical of a tsundere. Any version of Garrod Ran loudly declares his love for Tifa.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Most of the crossover CG movies in Neo, including the Cyclops Team attacking Torrington, Usso battling both the Frost Brothers at the same time, and the Wing Team fighting Master Asia (complete with him countering the Twin Buster Rifle with a Darkness Finger).
  • In Mono-Eye Gundams, Kincaid Nau and Zabine Chareux shut down the Turn X (which had previously been curb stomping the heroes) with a single well-coordinated Combination Attack.
  • Combining this with Oh, Crap!, Turn X and God Gundam finally using their fingers on each other, something that has yet to occur in Super Robot Wars. Predictably, Turn X wins.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The HELL stages in Overworld prominently feature Neuros copying pilots from the series featured in-game. While this is nothing new given the original plotline leading up to said stages, the Neuros present on the moon in particular deliberately invoke the Uncanny Valley by being completely silent except for a single quote upon startup and not being represented by their templates in the stat screens, implying that due to their aging minds and insatiable bloodlust, they can no longer be called human. Making matters worse is the fact that this corruption is causing psychopathic monsters to manifest with the personalities of everyone from the heroes and Affably Evil villains of the Universal Century, to genuinely nice people like Loran and Setsuna, to innocent children like Haru Irei. There's a reason every piece of background music related to the Generation System are Songs in the Key of Panic.
  • The Generation System itself places its inhabitants in a frightening scenario as well. Imagine knowing that you and everyone you know are predestined to fight horrible wars with countless deaths and casualties, and all of your attempts to stop it are automatically and invisibly twisted into events that were already on the machine's agenda to begin with.
  • The concept of Over Impact, or more accurately the Generation System's "Betrayal" code. As the game's characters reveal, it is a killswitch installed within the system that brainwashes everyone in the area of activation to murder each other indiscriminately if the surrounding conditions degrade beyond acceptable tolerance. In true Gundam fashion, the activation protocol is stolen and misused repeatedly, causing every stage to end with your guest cast of good-hearted heroes driven into a psychotic rage, the Enemy Civil War of the EX stages to end with your side of the villains captured and brainwashed into mindless servants, and The Cavalry in the Disc-One Final Boss stage to slowly suffer the same fate as Balbadoro is being chased in the stratosphere. And while all this is happening, the game world's Cyberspace bleeds through with an orange miasma to the tune of Over Impact's own apocalyptic-sounding leitmotif, to hammer in the fact that this is all happening because reality itself is collapsing.
  • In Stage 18 of DS, if you have Kincaid/Tobia and Zabine accidentally destroy the Turn A instead of just weakening it enough to automatically capture it, its Moonlight Butterfly goes berserk, the screen flashes, and...the Crossbones simply vanish from the map entirely, followed immediately by a Game Over. Given what exactly the "physics" of the Moonlight Butterfly are supposed to be, though, and hence the implication that all of their technology (including their Mobile Suits and even their piloting suits) simply disintegrated around Kincaid/Tobia, Zabine, and especially Berah's very bodies in a single instant in the middle of deep space...yeah, ouch.
• Padding: Cross Rays does this to the unit roster by making all the Striker Pack options for the 105 Dagger, Dagger-L, and Windam, as well as the Wizard Pack options for the ZAKU Warrior, totally separate units, rather than simply allowing the base MS to switch between the different packs as it was in previous games featuring these MS.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: This can be invoked in games that allow you to assign any of the in-game music to a character for their attacks, but special mention goes to a version of Quattre that's based on his Zero-System influenced self. This version, at least in Cross Rays, still uses the same theme as his other versions as default; it's jarring to hear optimistic and heroic music playing while this version of Quattre rambles on about how he has to kill people and laughs like a maniac.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Putting characters from other series in God Gundam and having them use Erupting God Finger is usually a funny moment. With Sven Cal Bayang, however…
  "Back then, I used to watch anime like this on the sly… It's all far in the past for me now."
  • Completing A Wakening of the Trailblazer's final stage on Extra in Cross Rays unlocks the ELS Qan[T] and post-Time Skip Setsuna. While the combo is a fun Game-Breaker, it's sadly undermined by Setsuna's lines in this state, quietly lamenting that he spent 50 years in deep space and mastering the Quantum Burst just to come back to a planet that learned nothing at all from it and the ELS.
• Unexpected Character:
  • The Dark History Turn A Gundam was this for Spirits and Wars. Prior to these games, the unit had always been depicted in the protagonistic fashion of its Anime incarnation, usually piloted by Loran. Spirits was the first time the version that was only featured in flashbacks and through the novel adaptation had been adapted, and it established the unit's status as a hidden final boss and ultimate reward for the games going forward.
  • Gundam 00 Season 2's units for Wars, as by the time of that game's release the series had just wrapped up its first run on TV. Like with the Turn A above, it started a trend for Gundam 00 units carrying similar status going forward, starting with Adult Setsuna and his 00 Qan[T] in World and continuing, most recently, with the ELS Qan[T].
    • Speaking of, the ELS Qan[T] in Cross Rays is this for those who haven't had any experience with its appearances in the Asia-Exclusive Arcade and Mobile Gundam-related/featured games since Gundam 00's 10th Anniversary campaign. Before that time, the unit had only been featured in the card-based Try Age Arcade game, but carrying over its regular counterpart's GN Sword V and Sword Bits, and only recently have its weaponry and fighting capabilities been expanded on.
  • Belri Zenam and the G-Self Perfect Pack appear in G Generation Genesis as bonuses; this one isn't too far out there since Genesis focuses entirely on the Universal Century^note Albeit only from 0079 through 0105 and G-Reco's Reguild Century comes immediately after the UC. More surprising is the inclusion of the Gundam Barbatos Lupus (though Mikazuki Augus is nowhere in sight).
  • Cross Rays features a total of five hidden units, none of them from the main four continuities in the game. Four of them are Gunpla from the Build series', including the Star Build Strike Gundam, the Gundam Fenice Rinascita, the Gundam 00 Sky and the Galbaldy Rebake, though there is some precedence with those four considering both Meijin Kawaguchi III and the Hot Scramble Gundam were featured as DLC in Genesis prior, not to mention each of them have some connection to the main four continuities due to being based off of mechs from them. But the fifth? None other than Knight Superior Dragon!!! Not only does he have nothing to do with the main four continuities, but the last time any actual SD Gundam characters were featured in a G Generation game was the BB Senshi Sangokuden characters in World, which was close to a decade prior to Cross Rays!