Two days ago, my friend messaged me and asked if I wanted to start having sleepless nights by playing SD Gundam Capsule Fighter Online. At first I thought it was a hacked message judging by the, in my opinion, weird URL – http://sdgo.ogplanet.com/, but I soon dismissed that and so I clicked the link. Once the page was loaded, I then realized this was the exact same online Gundam game that I wanted to play years ago but it was only available within Japan at the time.
He was right, we will be losing a ton of sleep because I’ve only been playing for a day or so and I am already addicted to this game. SD Gundam Capsule Fighter Online is basically an free-to-play MMO third person shooter game where you get to pilot SD, or super deformed, version of mobile suits. If you have played any other shooter games on PC, be it first or third person, you will be able to jump right in and start blasting enemie mobile suits AND mobile suit carriers.
One of the elements that makes SD Gundam Capsule Fighter Online so addictive is the fact that you can use your points that you obtain from quests and battles to buy capsule fighters from the capsule machines. For those who doesn’t know what I am talking about here is one example. There are more than a few dozen capsule machines for you to choose from, each machine contains 6 different mobile suits that you can potentially get from playing (using your points). The mobile suits are ranked A, B and C with C being the lowest class of all. Obviously you want to aim for Class As. But just like the real toy capsule machine, its all based on chance (minus the fact that real toy capsule machine owners might take out the good ones and sell them separately for higher prices leaving all the worthless ones in the machine). It took me more than 10 tries to obtain the class B Blue Flame.
The game starts you off with tutorials covering the basics, then you will receive a random capsule which is your very first capsule fighter. It will probably be either a class C Zaku or GM. I got the GM and my friend got a yellow GM. Yes they are pretty bad but they are really just your starter MS (mobile suits). You can quickly obtain your next capsule fighter by completing quests. You will also earn the points mentioned above so you can try out your luck on one of those capsule machines. You and your MS will gain experience as you play. As your MS’s gain more experience and “rank” up, they will obtain abilities like the “special” move as well as passive / active abilties like increased attack or speeds up consecutive rate of firing when HP is below 40%.
There are different servers as well that suit different players (trainees, beginners and more advanced players) to do your co-op missions (up to 4 players) for completing quests or just in general. There are also single player missions, tutorial missions as well as PVP servers where human players clash with each other in free for all or team PVP. I don’t suggest you go into the PVP servers as most of the players, at least I’ve seen so far, all have high end capsule fighters (mostly class A) and chances are you will get killed in one shot easily.
In terms of graphics, its not Battlefield 3 quality obviously. But it doesn’t have to be since its a cartoon to begin with. The graphics is smooth and fluid enough and I did not suffer any framerate drops on my desktop but I did try it on my labtop and I did notice a lot of lag but probably because my labtop does not have a video card, but mind you its still playable on the labtop.
There are still a lot of features that I have not yet fully explored, such as the blue print system where I suspect you can build MS instead of trying out your luck, customizing the MS with stickers and paint of your choice and so on. There seems to be many different customizations for each MS.
Unfortunately I cannot record this game while I play but there are a bunch of gameplays on youtube and here is one:
If you are a Gundam fan, this is a must try! What’s there to lose? Its free!
Again here is the link: http://sdgo.ogplanet.com
