Before playing this game, I had only seen a few Gundam shows outside the ones played on Cartoon Network. Scrolling down the character select screen for the first time was crazy because I had no idea there were that many Gundam shows, and there are a good 90 suits to choose from. I wouldn't expect anyone other than a hard core Gundam fan to have seen even half of all those shows. I basically just picked suits from shows I was familiar with and started from there.
The core of this game is the online 2v2. If you have a friend to play with the game will not only be a lot more fun, but easier to learn. The learning curve for this game is the same as for a fighting game. However the single player mode is not worth it at all. There is no story mode, no endings, and thus no spoilers. This is not the game to get if you are playing solo, or you are playing with wifi.