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Just to beg the question to everyone here: "Which scenarios are the best and worst of the game?"
The main areas I wanted to focus on as a whole are character interaction, premise, progression and overall plot of each.
The Quiz missions and the DLC are obviously off the table since neither really has a story and serve mainly as just random missions.
To start off, I had two missions that kinda show the basics of what makes a good scenario and a bad one.
Spoiler: click to toggle School of Master Asia is the good one in this case. While certainly not boasting the best story, this scenario nails progression and character interactions. You must win every match to beat the scenario. If you lose once, it's all the way back. It makes you really prepare before taking on a stage, and adds a lot of tension to the matches, which aren't difficult by any stretch of the imagination, but it just takes one misstep to possibly lose everything, like a real Gundam Fight. But the more important aspect is that you actually have the option of a branching path that ends the scenario differently. Both lead to an ending with Master Asia as the final opponent, but the fights beforehand are very different. The split begins when the competitors complain that things are going too slow, so Master Asia gives you the option to either speed things up or keep the current pace. If you speed it up, you get two battle royale matches, followed by two duels against Domon and Master Asia. If you choose to keep it slow, you actually get to face Jerid, Graham and Treize before fighting Master Asia at the end. Before and after each match, you get an extended segment, where the three get many lines of dialogue with Master, Domon and Rain, each with their own thoughts on the competitors. When they're defeated, they are given words of wisdom by Master and sent on their way, grateful and willing to come back and earn his respect. The interactions are absolutely brilliant, and both Domon and Rain make every bit hilarious with their comments.
Meanwhile, Mission Accepted is awful. Just awful. Not the absolute worst mission in the game, but pretty bad. Most of the scenario plays out with minimal character interaction. Everyone is behaving the way you'd expect them to, but their dialogue is forgettable and interchangeable with nearly every other character in the game. The stages themselves are pretty boring, and stick with the "defeat one MA/Ship/Ace/etc" shtick until the end, where the scenario splits. This is the part where this scenario really earns its status. Kira, Lacus and the Archangel Band swoop in, tell the player that what you're doing is bad and you should feel bad, revealing what the ZERO System actually does and why it shouldn't be created. This is all fine and good, since it gives you the choice to either side with Lacus or with Doctor J. But it doesn't matter which you choose. Lacus is right. Lacus is ALWAYS RIGHT. This is where my issue with this scenario comes into play: it presents you with the illusion of choice, and then doesn't even commit to it. No matter which you choose Heero goes berserk, but if you picked supporting Doctor J it's almost as if the game is mocking you for choosing that. This easily could have been an interesting end, with Lacus' intervention actually causing the situation to become worse by presenting Heero with both a betrayal and an enemy, whereas choosing to stand by Heero prevents him from going berserk, defeating his supposed enemy and keeping his exposure to the system's effects to a minimum. But no, it chose to be lazy and ended up stating far more than was likely intended.
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The Best Scenarios:
The power of Newtypes:
Spoiler: click to toggle The scenario is a interesting combination of Gundam X, Zeta Gundam, and Gundam Seed Destiny. The story itself is pretty straight forward. Quattro/Char takes the role of Jamil from Gundam X, and works together with Garrod,Tifa, and Zinnerman to seek out Newtypes and protect them. As the scenario progresses however, it becomes clear that Gilbert Durrandel wants Newtypes out of the equation, because they get in the way of his Destiny Plan.
Generally what makes this story so good is that characters act like they would act. Char isn't just acting out the part of Jamil, because Char's history still carries a great deal of weight during the scenario, as you see with his interactions with Amuro, Zinnerman, Kycilia, and Gilbert. Garrod and Tifa also act exactly how they should, and this leads to a believable conclusion to the scenario, giving us a interesting yet much more positive reflection of Destiny's ending.
Earth Landing Operation:
Spoiler: click to toggle This Scenario at first seems to be just a retreading of Zeta Gundam. It starts off when the AEUG forces launch their assault on Jaburo and as per usual, things go wrong when it becomes clear that it was all a trap. Suddenly though, ZAFT appears as they try to escape (I can only assume that this was this Universes equivalent to Operation Spitbreak). From there, they face the Earth Alliance forces that try to stop their escape (or Celestial Being optionally, but they literally have no role in the story after this encounter). Upon escaping, it becomes clear that the Gryps conflict has taken a turn for the worse. Axis has alligned itself with ZAFT while Azrael has added his forces to the Titans.
It's interesting how the events of Seed and Zeta Gundam work so well together in this Scenario. You get some interesting interactions when Murrue and Mu La Flaga join up with AEUG forces. It also leads to a brief rivalry between Rau le Creuset and Kamille, which I wish was developed further. My only major criticism with this one is that it could have used some more interactions. Still the ending of this Scenario is surprisingly dark. The AEUG forces have no choice but to fire the Gryps colony laser, which is exactly what Rau wanted to happen. Thus it ends with the AEUG forces striving to work together with the Archangel crew to prevent any future conflicts that may ensue from their actions.
Uniting the Earth Sphere:
Spoiler: click to toggle In this Scenario, Ribbons Almark is trying to unite Earth and Space under his leadership. To assist him, he has Treize Khushrenada and Paptimus Scirocco running OZ and The Titans respectively. However, things start to veer off course when Operation Meteor kicks in. When Ribbons believes he's found a way to solve the problem, Celestial Being suddenly jumps into the fray, and begins attacking everyone. This leads to Ribbons aggressively moving against the colonies, and his actions lead to Treize and Paptimus independently moving against him.
Probably what makes this scenario so good is the fact that you can side with Treize and bring down Ribbons. Alternatively you can stick with Ribbons and help him usher in his role as a would be god. Strangely enough, you can't side with Scirocco however, which I find kinda disappointing. Still, the story has some okay interactions and a lot of good battles. There are a lot of three team battles in this one.
Finding Blondie:
Spoiler: click to toggle To be honest, the plot of this scenario is pretty lame. Uso tries to tell the Ra Calium to search of Katejina but Katejina destroys the comm array on the ship so he can't get his message through. So Ra Calium decides to seek out people with blonde hair in hopes that one of them is the person Uso is looking for, along with collecting parts to repair their comm array.
What makes this scenario good though are all the ridiculous interactions we get. There's silly stuff like Bright having to land in Orb because of a salt shortage onboard the ship. Plus it's ironically Ridhe who tells Uso to stop obsessing about Katejina and to give her some space. Oh yeah sure Ridhe, you did such a fantastic job trying to get Mineva onto your side in Unicorn. Still there is enough silly stuff in this scenario to at least make you grin at some point.
A life of fighting:
Spoiler: click to toggle You know, I've never really been one for Turn A based stories in DWG, but I find this one does a decent job. It's pretty straight forward, Gym is up to no good and Loran goes to Earth to stop him. Loran, Sochie, and other characters like Kamille go about Earth in hopes of stopping Gym from spreading more conflict. What makes this work however is that these character encounter all sorts of different examples of battle.
They encounter Mister Bushido, who's only interested in dueling Gundams. They also face Yazan, who calls them out on trying to stop fighting by fighting themselves. Finally, they encounter Master Asia and Domon, who are fighting to train and because they enjoy fighting. Through these interactions, these characters learn that fighting can be caused in a variety of ways, and that fighting isn't always intended to be hurtful or negative. Sure it still ultimately ends like most Turn A stories do in DWG, with Gym being defeated and such, but the journey to get there wasn't that bad.
The Worst Scenarios:
Mission Accepted:
Spoiler: click to toggle Omega has already explained what is wrong with this one. Basically, there are terrible character interactions without any serious moral dilemma. Dr. J is in the wrong, Lacus and friends are in the right. Regardless of what path you take, it still ends up with Lacus and friends being right. There really isn't much to say about this one.
Is this a Bug?:
Spoiler: click to toggle Again, nothing notable regarding interactions. Seabook and Cecily end up stumbling upon the Bug machines and on top of this, Mobile Dolls. They work together with numerous characters to stop Azrael, Gihren, and Bask from conquering humanity with their mass produced army of Mobile Dolls.
This scenario mostly just translates into beat this grunt named "Mobile Doll", then beat that one, etc. To make matters worse, the final villains are just in Battleships. Bask isn't even prominent in the game so he never actually appears in a stage on a Battleship. There are no major battles to be had with prominent villains and its just a utter bore from the game play perspective.
1 suit, 10.000 enemies:
Spoiler: click to toggle Remember the Emma simulation missions from DWG 2? Well, these are a lot like those, but even worse. The concept is simple. Beat 10,000 enemies across the entire scenario. The problem is that the missions themselves are only good for farming plans on higher difficulties. There's nothing interesting or exciting about them. On top of this the story and character interactions are very boring. Gilbert has assembled a group of good pilots to run combat exercises. As the story goes on, Gilbert invites others to take part by deploying their own mobile suits in combat exercises. It is a very boring and uninspiring story and scenario.
Destroy Gundam's rampage:
Spoiler: click to toggle This one was close to being good, but manages to amazingly fall flat on its face. The story is straight forward again. Destroy Gundams are up to no good and so the Minerva crew go out to stop them. Along the way, Kira is assigned to work along side them in the operation. It becomes clear as time goes on that Rau le Creuset is behind the Mass production of Destroy Gundams, in some sort of push for war and mass destruction against mankind.
Probably what kills this story is the bad interactions on top of some terrible leaps of logic. Everyone is complimenting Kira, other than Shinn, but Shinn is basically forced to work with Kira and eventually agree to Kira's reasoning. It would have worked better if Kira was met with distrust and eventually through interactions, came to a mutual understanding with Shinn and the other characters. The other problem is just how hilariously incompetent Rau is in this story. He has Neo Roanoke working for him, who Rau knows is Mu, yet he has no contingency plan in place in case Mu regains his memories. On top of this, he totally sells out Azrael for no good reason. And this all amounts to Rau just buying time so he can fire Genesis. Oh come on, really? This story could have been a lot better. There are some good interactions in there, like how Shinn interacts with the Cyber Newtype pilots, but there just isn't enough of stuff like that.
I'll think of another bad scenario later. Right now I'm debating between Aerial Rescue Operation, Develop the legendary upgrade plan!, and Protect the Archangel. None of those three were particularly fantastic.
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