Giren's Greed is a series of deep military sims that will never, ever be published in English. There's a variety of reasons for this: Strike One is that deep military sims tend to be a niche market to begin with. Strike Two is that the amount of translation and voiceover necessary makes it a pretty expensive project for that small market. Strike Three is that it's based on the Mobile Suit Gundam anime series- in Japan, this is the equivalent of being based on something as big and as beloved as Star Trek. In the US, this means your game will sell to a tiny contingent of Anime and Robot nerds like me. Worse yet(Strike... Four?), the original Gundam continuity never caught on here to the degree that its spinoffs and alternate universes did, so you're talking niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche. It's a shame, because even though I get impatient with them I do like to play games that require some thought.
While some of the games in the series have a broader scope, they all cover at least the One Year War, the time period of the original Gundam anime and most of its spinoffs. Bear in mind, this is a time period that has been added to, revised and retconned to death by both fans and Gundam's parent company Sunrise for thirty years. So to get the most out of the series you need nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of the Universal Century's history, which you could call "rich" if you were feeling generous, "convoluted" if you were feeling slightly less generous, and "self-contradictory and confusing" if you were being realistic.
The game I played, Axis no Kyoui for PSP, starts a few months into the War, where you play either the resource-rich but technologically stunted Earth Federation or the advanced but limited-in-funding Principality of Zeon. In anime terms the Earth Federation are the good guys, at least by virtue of the main characters of the series being in their employ. Gundam is at least mature enough to not paint either side as completely saintly or bloodthirsty. I played the Federation because (three decade old spoiler alert!) they're the ones who actually win the war. To do this, though, you have to hold off Zeon until you develop the Mobile Suits you need to counter them, and hopefully push them back and expand your production capabilities. In both the anime and the game the Federation's greatest strength is its size and its ability to spam Zeon with Suits just slightly better than the bulk of Zeon's forces. Zeon wastes a lot of time on wild-eyed prototypes and expensive one-off behemoths, and while they can hurt you, nobody's that effective when they're waist-deep in GMs.
In terms of a blind Flailthrough, this game is utterly impossible. Everything is Kanji, and you have to manage your forces, your budget, and even your alignment, as certain actions are impossible if you're Chaotic- the Federation is nominally a democracy and the people won't pony up extra taxes and resources if you're a jerk. There's a dedicated wiki that tells you what stats mean and what events will unlock which units, and even with that information in hand I understood less than half of what I was doing at any given time. If you know Gundam you have an edge that makes the game playable- knowing how the war is "supposed" to come out gives you a good idea of what you should attack next and who is the most dangerous. (Do NOT let Char Aznable get anywhere near your expensive starships!) But due to the language barrier, you're never 100% sure whether you're making the right move or not. The PSP lets you keep something like 20 separate save files, and I used them all.
Ultimately I did win the war, and enjoyed a small period of relative peace. Which was then obliterated by the Gryps War that forms the basis of Zeta Gundam, the 1985 sequel to the original Gundam series. That's when I called it, because there's just too many variables to keep track of, too many new machines to develop, and it randomly redistributes your forces in peacetime so you have to shuffle everything around to put out fires. I may yet go back to it, though- despite the language barrier the game is engrossing, and without it I'd probably never come up for air.
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