The action takes place during Gundam's famous One Year War. For Gundam neophytes, there's plenty of cinemas and background info to help get you up to speed. Sadly, controlling your top-of-the-line mech is frustrating because of clumsy controls. While it's easy to pound stationary targets, mobile enemies are disturbingly hard to keep targeted. Also, hand-to-hand combat is both boring and cumbersome.

The graphics, while not spectacular (the explosion effects are cool), do a decent job of rendering large battlefields, and the mechs look similar to their toy counterparts. The full-motion video cutscenes are nice enough to keep die-hards playing, if only to see how the story moves along.

For Gundam fanatics, Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo is a decent time waster that lets you live the war you already love. For everyone else, though, this is a mediocre blaster that shows us that the definitive mech game has yet to arrive on the PS2. --Mark Brooks

Pros:

• Gundam finally comes to the PS2
• Decent graphics deliver the look of the cartoons and toys
• Plenty of background info and short cutscenes for initiating newbies to the Gundam universe

• Painfully frustrating, complex, and inaccurate controls
• Hand-to-hand mech combat is bland and slow