I started watching Gundam the only way I know how: being fed an IV drip of the series’ best moments and music through YouTube and Websites (ominous) for ten years before ever seeing a single episode. That’s just how things were done, back in the day: see a picture of a giant robots eye, well, it was time to spend the next five weeks trawling every depth of the world you could find for it. In my skin, I already knew Gundam but it was as a vicious fight filled with hot blooded aphorisms and revenge. Funny, that I’d run into the same thing one more time.

GUNDAM EVOLUTION is a half deck of those moments played in any order for a crowd of strangers. Link up with five friends and six enemies and let them all have it, or, in the case of most people: five pilots anonymous, dedicated to the sole mission of Destroy The Target. It’s a wonderful way to get strangers together, these days. Put us in a room and tell us to pull the trigger already.
A DOM TROOPER is a type of mobile suit: a metal cyclops that hovers over the ground on atomic engines that would strip pedestrians caught in its path down to their nervous system like they’ve been sandblasted by the eye of a god that speaks in the canter of any numerous YouTube channels about home craft and DIY. Tungsten and Zinc giving lift to a creature that has one single appendage and a driving desire to use it.

The DOM TROOPER cradles a bazooka the length of a city bus. It fires a 360mm shell out of a barrel that would vaporize me if I stood next to it when the trigger was pulled. That shell would drive through concrete, steel, bend rebar and reinforcement and twist one of those towers in New York City that have bad ventilation and obnoxious rent: it would, theoretically, leave no trace my house ever existed if for some reason it glanced off of another Mobile Suit and landed where I live.
Theoretically: this could be caused by a player trying to do something stupid, like shoot the ground a good six hundred meters in front of where another pilot, a reckless ZAKU MELEE, is standing. If it misses – whoever is still stuck on the ground is gone. If the shot goes wide, the center of a building will collapse. If I personally miss: I tense my fingers on the mouse and fire again. We’re playing for keeps.

If that all sounds terrifying to you, that’s fine. You’re perfectly sane. What we call “The US Military” and its myriad components that drive everything from propaganda to gun sales to which military hardware gets to be depicted accurately in The Marvel Universe – is currently shipping up to test a 120mm tank round for deployment in the next few years. Its capacity to drive through a concrete and steel target is described in press releases with words like “exciting.”
GUNDAM EVOLUTION mostly happens in a pretend world of play: explosions and rounds cascade off of walls and turn into smoke vapors and particles before disappearing entirely.
A nothing of orchestra blares if played with the music turned on, still. Particle effects gently linger over silent battlefields otherwise – an woman announcing in the tone of an Alexa will tell us when a team wins that “tactical says we’re doing good”

Everything feels, when nothing happens, like a perfect illusion of Mobile Suit Gundam. A bunch of cosmopolitan, suburban, fuck I don’t know: people who usually get nothing get three minutes of combat to find an identity. Amuro Ray, Char Aznable, Kou Uraki – all people like me, right? Suffering under one system or another, for a few minutes of death can have a Who They Are. Most rounds, I’m Unicorn Gundam. I find “healing my entire team” and “ventilating a guy with a plasma rifle” to be options that I’m upset are usually kept mutually exclusive in videogames.
It’s not a plasma rifle, though, really. It’s a type of powerful mounted Gatling gun – it delivers a payload probably similar to that of the early Zaku out of a rapidly cooled barrel. At one point it turns what would be the descendant of the DOM TROOPER into a husk of metal, collapsing streets and subway systems when it hits the ground. The cloud of dust wouldn’t be dust – it’d be a concrete vapor that choked civilians without respirators and dropped birds from the sky.

THE ZAKU floats like a butterfly in GUNDAM EVOLUTION. It’s a powerful suit with a generous lifebar, the ability to turn intangible and a machine gun that spits out damage in raw, big numbers at close range. I have a feeling It is the favorite suit of the bastard who just killed me, and I always choose to fight fire with fire. There’s a structure to a casual match that lets a player engage in a stupid, suicide mission: can I fight you like you can fight me?

I’m dreaming of future Esports leagues now, as at the time of writing this the first balance patch is due. Likely, more mobile suits and their weapons will be added. Youtube playlists of Z Toki Wo Koete will be queued while a rank of their own, pilots play in perfect silence so they can hear out every shell that lands around them.
We’re playing different games, desperate players looking for success in the world and people who just want a chance to blow up a Sazabi, one of those mecha that always looked like it
had the texture of cheap rubber and plastic.The long-term success of Gundam Evolution isn’t dependent on you and me, it’s dependent on if people can get payed a couple of thousands of dollars to play it in a tournament. It’s time in history for a reflection of Ryu Vs. Sagat right? Built up with years of explosives, tears and wishing that nobody had to fight anybody at all.

Who’s got time for it, though? Catch me in your crosshairs – I die. I catch you in mine, something worse. I’ll see you. I’ll find you. It’s not about the team, It’s not about the hollow voiced announcer, or the timer ticking silently away in my hud. It’s about the most satisfying thing I can do in GUNDAM EVOLUTION:: see the explosion rupture out of your core and spread metal, tungsten and whatever the hell gundanium is all over a city block, or Military Base, and watch your suit go dark. There are few things that feel as good as shutting down another pilot in Gundam Evolution. For a second: I can imagine seeing all those hopes wash away under a fade of white and black on an animation cel.

It’s a closed war in cities of cardboard – places called Factory and Military Base. In abstract jungles, real weapons are fighting for survival at 9 seconds a respawn timer. At some point we’re all going to be funneling together: polishing strategies, picking out all of the right angles. A generation that moves from pilot to ace, for those that can last. Some pilots will dream of a future in E-Sports, applause. A round ends and turns to silence, I wonder who’s out there dreaming of a bigger gun.

Here’s to a postmodern war: who’s gonna let us say it’s not that fun when it looks this good?