This was my first playthrough of the game, and thus less thorough then later ones. I may go back and do this campaign again at a later date.
Part 1: One Year War
The Federation scenario begins with General Revil’s escape from Zeon custody back to the Federation after the failed peace negotiations. Cutscenes in this aren’t animated, but the game itself is fully voiced.
You’re in charge of both of the Earth and space fronts. Zeon is in red, Federation blue, and gray is neutral. The large circles on the map indicate bases, and the yellow stacks are the number of allied units on that space. When units are in motion, a separate green stack appears to indicate that as well.
Without getting too into the details in terms of gameplay, your units are made up of both machines (vehicles, ships, MA, MS) and people (soldiers, aces, commanders). You can build units at your bases, and research new ones as they become available. Things flow like a tech tree, so for example you need to make the GM before you can research GM Cannon. Units can be upgraded as well, once you unlock the plans for the new version.
Most soldiers are grunts who you don’t see individually, but you also have aces and commanders, where you’ll recognize some familiar faces. One neat example I found is some members of the Titans and AEUG appear in the Federation army at the start, albeit younger.
The Federation starts with no MS, only things like tanks, planes, and basic space craft. Zeon has the upper hand of course as they already have Zakus, so the best strategy early on is to use a quantity over quality approach to try to overwhelm them as best you can. Even so, you have to play carefully until you complete Operation V and construct your first Gundam.
Along the way, you get Guntank and Guncannon, then finally Gundams and GMs, along with upgrades to your craft as well, such as the Pegasus-class, among many others. You can also perform enemy reconnaissance and steal their plans and intel.
Moving into enemy territory with units or them invading yours activates a battle sequence. You can either auto battles or manually take control. Manual control allows you to move individual units around the map, and you get to watch little models of the units fight, but takes more time. As another bonus, if two characters that know each other in canon participate in a fight, they sometimes have special dialogue with each other.
There are many other nuances to the gameplay, including keeping track of your chaos/law meter (this will be important later), repairing units, soldier morale/exp, and a lot more…but if you’re interested in all the fine details, I recommend checking out a guide or let’s play. I’m mostly here to show you the story as I experienced it.
Now onto the story. This part will cover up until the end of the One Year War, though the Federation campaign itself goes beyond that, as we’ll see.
Throughout the game, you’ll be faced with choices that affect the outcome of events. For this playthrough, we decided to follow the original plot from the anime as much as possible, as that made knowing what options to choose much easier. The main story events begin with the attack on Side 7.
If you choose to follow the anime story, White Base functions as a plot device rather than a unit at this stage, and as such you can’t actually use it or any of its crew in battle yourself. You’ll receive periodic updates on it as major events happen, such as encountering Garma’s forces in Seattle and fighting against Ramba Ral. The alternative to this path is taking control of White Base from the start, which allows you to avoid certain story events (like Ryu’s death), but as we didn’t go that route, I don’t know much about it.
Even though you can’t use him directly as a unit yet in the option we chose, you collect data from Amuro that allows you to upgrade your Gundams and GMs, which is pretty cool.
As the turns progress, you gradually unlock operations that you need to activate in order to take Zeon bases, with the first being in China. Of the ones on Earth, Odessa is the biggest, featuring its own cutscene.
Something funny we accidentally discovered is if the White Base crew isn’t at Odessa when you begin your attack, M’Quve will actually launch his nuke. Or at least I assume that’s the condition? Either way it’s a special event that wipes out half of both sides’ forces in the battle instantly.
But despite that, you can still take the base successfully afterwards.
After you control Odessa, White Base will travel to Belfast. You have the option of disbanding them or keeping them together. Keeping them together will send them on course to Jaburo where Zeon will attack you there once they arrive. This is also where you can choose to formally establish White Base as the 13th Autonomous Mobile Squadron.
With all that done, and Earth now under Federation control, on to space.
You move your forces through space in much the same way as you did on Earth, although personally I found the space battles to be a little less tedious.
Around this time, the sequence of events related to the Blue Destiny side story begin too. There’s a few ways this story can go, but if you decide to allow Yuu Kajima to pilot the Blue Destiny Unit 1 (and later 3), he will face off against Nimbus Schterzen (pilot of Efreet Custom and Blue Destiny Unit 2) and both units will be destroyed. You gain the ability to build all 3 Blue Destiny units at the end.
You also get the choice to have Christina Mackenzie either join you or stay on Side 6 and become a test pilot for Gundam NT-1 (Gundam Alex). Saying yes will make Chris join you as a playable character, but the Gundam Alex will be stolen by Zeon. If not, the events of War in the Pocket presumably play out, and you won’t get her until later.
On to Solomon. At the start of the battle, the Federation fires the Solar System (their large mirror super weapon), which reduces the number of enemy forces. If you allow White Base to participate, they will attack simultaneously and defeat the Big Zam, but if Sleggar is with them, just like in the anime, he will die here. I believe if White Base isn’t following the anime plot, you have to fight Dozle and the Big Zam yourself instead of White Base taking care of things on their own.
After the defeat of Solomon, you’ll get a notice that the White Base is now in pursuit of Zeon forces that escaped and fled to Texas colony, which is where Amuro will defeat M’Quve and his Gyan.
Soon after, a dialogue event will appear telling you the magnet coating will be applied to Amuro’s Gundam. This is important so White Base can survive the upcoming battle with the Elmeth, which again takes place off screen. Once they defeat it, they continue on to fight with you at A Baoa Qu.
Speaking of A Baoa Qu, it will now be unlocked as an operation.
There’s an interesting deviation from canon that occurs during this fight. On the first turn of the battle, a dialogue event will begin informing you that Degwin Zabi wants to engage in peace talks. You can choose yes or no.
If you know the events from the anime, this is where both Revil and Degwin are killed by Gihren firing Zeon’s Solar Ray, and your first instinct might be to choose no – after all, we’re playing as Revil so we can’t let him die. However, in this timeline, the Federation already knows about the Solar Ray, and thus if you choose yes, the following event happens.
Gihren still fires the Solar Ray as usual, however both sides are able to maneuver out of the way in time, and you only lose a small percentage of your forces. Both Revil and Degwin survive, thus the battle continues.
Forgot to grab a screenshot of this, but a couple turns into the fight later Bright will call you to tell you the Gundam has defeated Zeon’s mobile armor Zeong, but was destroyed in the encounter. White Base itself is destroyed too, but the crew of course survived. You would assume their story is over…
…but after taking A Baoa Qu, the crew of White Base joins you as A rank pilots and commanders! That’s because in this timeline, Zeon doesn’t surrender yet.
In fact, Gihren is still alive, and in retaliation, he drops another colony on Earth, specifically at Jaburo. It destroys half of your units remaining there. Kind of a remarkably small casualty count, but then again we did survive a nuke earlier…
As you can probably already tell, everything after this point is non-canon, as you have to launch two more operations to finally defeat Zeon. The first of these is Granada, where you take the Zeon base on the moon. After finishing this battle, we got another event.
Jamitov Hymen, future leader of the Titans, proposes that we take our research of Newtypes to the next level with the Human Enhancement Plan. Apparently whether you say yes or no, the Titans will still have Cyber Newtypes in the next part of the scenario. However, choosing yes will allow you to recruit Zero Murasame, the first Cyber Newtype created by the Murasame Newtype Laboratory.
After this we got yet another side story event, this time from 08th MS Team. We receive notice that there are reports that Zeon is developing a Mobile Armor that will attack our base at Jaburo. You can choose to send in the 08th MS Team to fight it, but at this point in the story, we were about to invade Side 3 anyway so we didn’t worry about it.
On to Side 3, the final battle!
You face off against all of Zeon’s remaining forces. It’s a long fight due to the number of units, but we didn’t have too much trouble overwhelming them.
After the battle, the Federation conquers Side 3, ending the One Year War at last.
Next up, the events of Operation Stardust and the Gryps Conflict.