BA3 M1 Astray: The Bread and the Butter!

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg141/Skiegh/Gundam3M1AstrayBnB.gif

M1 Astray BnB which you will be using almost every time you catch your opponent cleanly. This is my gundam of choice in BA3 or at least, the one I'm most comfortable with but I honestly didn't play BA3 for too long. Sadly, this game mostly Gundam Seed characters and they're... blah. (Never watched it)

This combo showcases really only one thing but I'm going to talk about a few things because you're apparently interested enough to read this and hear my thoughts. First would of course be this game's weird but not entirely unreasonable way of linking together chains of target combos into a much longer combo. Which would of course be that when a Gundam in this game is given the chance to "recover" (it's really just an animation, you have no say) when flung through the air, they will catch themselves on the ground on their knees and quickly climb to their feet. However, during that initial climb, they're still vulnerable to attacks and unable to defend themselves. As such, you can utilize quick dashes or boosts to follow-up. The timing is somewhat tight but it's actually a really satisfying way to extend combos -- I enjoyed myself and it makes it look pretty fast and impressive.

You can also see the combo restriction mechanic working properly in this GIF! See if you can spot it (it's obviously at the end...)

Now for random BA3 mechanics discussion which has little relation to this GIF! An odd thing I found in this game is unlike in most fighters where each attack is assigned a number of frames that it will put the opponent under when hit (Hit stun), this game doesn't seem to do that. Rather, BA3 has universal forms of hitstun that it assigns to it's different attacks. These can easily be read by the animations the gundam gives off which is actually quite nice even if somewhat uninspired since it does give each attack in the game less variety. During the mega special, you can see two forms of hitstun, the normal one and the long one where the gundam spirals itself around 180 degrees because it got hit so hard it went off balance. There's a few others but those two are the most important.