In a pretty bizarre and off-brand move, the new Gundam crossover in Season 4 of Call of Duty has you cosplay as mobile suits.
Now, mecha cosplay is fun. Whenever I go to events like Otakon or Wonder Festival, you always have fans dressed up as mecha and it’s genuinely wondrous to see.
However, when you move into the world of gaming functionality, things change quite a bit when mecha get involved.
This is because mecha in anime and manga are abstract vehicles. They have their own internally coherent functionality. With Gundam having some of the most complex and storied functionality on how its numerous mobile suits operate. So much so, that much of the Gundam branding is tied to how mobile suits work.
So when games are made involving the Gundam brand, the ones that tend to succeed are generally speaking functionally aligned with how mobile suits work. Yes, you can have games like Gundam Extreme Versus Maxiboost ON that take a very arcade approach to gameplay, but the functional through-line of how those games work is based upon the mechanical tenets of how mobile suits broadly operate.
This is why games like Gundam Evolution failed, as the functional through-line was from a completely different approach, that of Overwatch. Conversely, it’s also why Rise of the Incarnates failed, as that lacked the context for game’s functionality, as the mecha were replaced with people.
So this collaboration breaks that functional through-line on what mobile suits are, but just putting human players in a robot suit.
What I find surprising about all of this, is that I didn’t expect Bandai Namco to ignore what makes this brand work yet again, so soon after the failure of Gundam Evolution.
Gundam Evolution tried to take Gundam and put it in an Overwatch functional framework, and it tanked. This Call of Duty collaboration is much farther along that trajectory of wrong. The only stabilising factor here is that Call of Duty is obviously very established on its own. So at the very least these cosplay mobile suit skins may just end up not being very popular.
The other more pressing issue here is that this crossover messes with the branding of Gundam in quite a major way.
Gundam in Japan and Asia has had its branding handled in a mostly coherent and faithful way for multiple decades. In short people know and understand what Gundam is. That makes marketing and promotion far more effective, when the branding is consistent with what people expect.
By contrast, Gundam is still a fledgling brand in an international sense. Yes, Gundam has doubled its size in the last decade, with a chunk of that being due to international growth, but the brand itself is not established or all that well-known outside of Japan.
This is why making sure that whatever international collaborations you have, or new games built for international markets, are aligned with what Gundam is and how it works.
Throwing a bunch of mobile suits up against a wall and seeing what sticks is not an effective long-term strategy for a very complex brand such as Gundam.
Obviously, I don’t want to see this Call of Duty collaboration fail, but it increasingly looks like that Bandai Namco doesn’t know what they are doing with Gundam.
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