There’s more to SD Gundam Battle Alliance than spamming your attacks and knowing what’s what will significantly increase your progression in the game and enjoyment. However, the game doesn’t help you with the advanced techniques available, which is a shame. But not to worry, as I, a fellow Gundam Meister, will help you out.
This guide will break down the Skill Meter, Chain Breakers, and Reversals.
In SD Gundam Battle Alliance, you can use your meter to perform several functions; Role Actions, Chain Breakers, and Reversals. For the sake of this guide, we’re only touching on Chain Breakers and Reversals. Both of these functions can be performed by pressing the melee and jump/recover buttons. While these are activated by using the same buttons, you will need to know when to utilize these abilities and how many Skill Meter Bars they cost.
However, if it’s Role Actions you’re looking for, you’ll find those in this guide.
First, let’s talk about the Skill Meter
Located under your Health Bar is the Skill Meter. At the start of every mission, the Skill Bar is empty. However, it will slowly build up as you dish out attacks to enemies. Once it gets past two bars, you can start to perform moves such as Role Actions, Chain Breakers, and Reversals. For this guide, we’re only going to touch on the Chain Breakers and Reversals.
Chain Breakers
Chain Breakers are pretty useful and require five bars from your skill meter, yet provide so much versatility. You’ll need to press the melee and jump/recover buttons to perform a Chain Breaker. When doing so, the screen will flash orange, indicating you have performed the move. Hitting an enemy with this ability will knock them back, stunning them while refilling your guard and boost gauges, allowing you to extend combos.
Even if you don’t manage to hit an enemy with the chain breaker, you’ll still fill up your guard and boost gauges. This is helpful when you notice you need to refill them and don’t have time to wait, especially when fighting those pesky end-of-directory final bosses.
Lastly, chain breakers can also be performed to take some balancer meter away from bosses that have them. Doing this enough will eventually cause them to be momentarily stunned.
Reversals or Chain Breaker Reversals
These are an advanced form of the Chain Breaker and will stop your enemies in their tracks. To pull this off, you will need a least 5 bars on the skill meter. To activate this ability, you much either perform this as an enemy is smacking you around or right before they hit you. Pressing the buttons will activate the Reversal, which can be indicated by a glowing blue light, knocking back the enemy and stunning and leaving them open for you to attack them. I find this works best when you’re being attacked by long combo strings unless you’re good at timing when you’re about to get hit.
If you don’t pull it off, you’ll perform a Chain Breaker instead. In addition, performing this against bosses with a balancer meter bar will be affected and lose quite a bit of that amount, which can also stun them for a short time.
SD Gundam Battle Alliance is currently playable on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Switch, and PC. It plays just fine on the Steam Deck as well, in case you were wondering.