gsonline

Gundam Season Online — that's what this fighting game on Game Boy was called, a title that grabbed a license from a popular anime and did whatever it could with it. When I first saw it, I figured it'd be some button-mashing beat-em-up with robots. I wasn't far off, except reality turned out to be more complex and a little sad.

It's a simple and sluggish fighter where you control some Gundam unit beating it out with others. On Game Boy, your robotic giant shuffles across a thin screen, attacking and blocking. No action really, more like wrestling matches with a few buttons. The menu is a perfect example of what a game looks like when nobody's especially fond of it — minimalist, no shine, everything just functional enough to work.

Playing it depends on how much performance you can squeeze out of Game Boy. And that's the catch — the performance isn't high. Animations are stiff, the pace of fights feels like watching someone in heavy armor who had back pain yesterday. The controls aren't worse exactly, just… laggy. You press a button and the character moves a second on its own schedule. It's not frustrating in the sense that the game doesn't work, but that it runs on a different tempo than your fingers.

In 2000, it was a solid attempt — anime license on a handheld, its own fighting mechanics, a shot at structured content. But honestly, it was never Game Boy's strong suit. That machine with its fourteen-inch display did nice puzzles and simple adventures. Fighting games didn't fit it, like it just didn't have the reflexes for the job.

Today there's no reason to play it. There are emulators, there's the internet, and if you want to scratch that Gundam fighter nostalgia itch, grab something from Super Famicom where those robots at least had some grace. GS Online is more of a historical footnote — proof that someone tried, but Game Boy simply wasn't the place to try.