Recent reviews by DeltaParallax

First off, I would like to say this, before anything else: Rivals of Aether II is awesome. The developers have put a lot of love into reimagining the gameplay of its GMS2 pixel art predecessor into a modern, 3D experience.

• The music is amazing (Forsburn win theme my beloved).
  
• The artwork and animations are polished and expressive.
  
• The XP system is great. Each character has an XP level, and you get more XP by playing matches with that character. When you reach a certain level of XP, you level up and get an item, usually a cosmetic or some form of in-game currency.
  
• The store is great too. You can buy in-game currency and other items with money, but from what I've seen there's little FOMO, as cosmetics from events stay in the store.
  
• The characters' movesets are varied, with each one complementing their own traits and quirks. Most have solid foundations as they are based on their Rivals 1 movesets, while also adding mechanics that are new to the fighting game genre as a whole.
  
• The prospect of all future characters being free is commendable.

With all this in mind, it seems like a love letter to the fighting game genre. However, as a backer for this game, I feel like it suffered from a premature release, leading to an underwhelming player experience. Thus, I really, really want to recommend this game in its current state, but I can't.

In the original Rivals of Aether, I learned both the base and character-specific mechanics through Tutorial Mode, led by a floating purple orb by the name of Orby. He would teach you everything while testing you to make sure you understood the mechanics and were able to put them into practice. Surely, without this game mode, I would have gone into matches confused and uninformed.
Sadly, this situation has been realized in Rivals of Aether II. Instead of a Tutorial Mode, you have a New Player Guide, presented in the game as a link to a Steam News page. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2217000/view/7516036132727640639
It includes:

• A breakdown of core mechanics through one image
  
• A breakdown of character-specific mechanics through another series of images and YouTube videos
  
• A link to a wiki for the game
  
• A link to the Rivals of Aether Discord server

While they do a good job of concisely explaining the mechanics and gimmicks, they ultimately fall flat as a form of tutorialization. The images and videos inform, but they do not test the player on their knowledge and application before going into a match. I have seen this refuted with suggestions of playing Practice Mode while referencing the resources -- to which I say, it's not the same. The feedback that Rivals 1 provided with Tutorial Mode is vastly different to (essentially) giving someone a list of directions and telling them to take it from there.

Rivals of Aether had a good amount of single-player content. Specifically, Story Mode and Abyss Mode, with Tether Mode (aka "Rivals of Tether") coming as an addition in the Definitive Edition.
In the sequel, you have an Arcade Mode (sort of similar to Story Mode's progression, but with different gamemodes and none of the plot explanation) and Bot Matches (basically, versus mode against CPUs but it gets harder or easier depending on your performance).
In addition, I was very interested in the lore of Aether and that of each character, so Rivals 1's Story Mode scratched some of that itch for me. The best I think I can get in the sequel are the character trailers (even those for Rivals 1's DLC characters could qualify), which are not even in the game itself, which is disappointing.

A lot of the DI feels rigid. I am aware this is due to the fact that there are more defensive mechanics in the game, like shields -- which work in the context of the game. However, getting hit feels much more punishing than Rivals 1 as DIing moves just leads to situations that feel like you can't really do much. This problem is exacerbated by the low hitpause (aka hitstop) values on some moves and the fact that a lot of kill moves (e.g. Forsburn Back Air) have flippers that may send you backwards depending on your positioning, so it's not guaranteed that your DI will help or hurt you. This leads to kills that feel frustrating and undeserved.
The lack of whitelining (a visual indicator from Rivals 1 where a move that would kill on bad DI would create white lines coming from the edges of the screen) in Rivals 2 makes it hard to tell whether or not the move I hit my opponent with might kill at higher percents, which sometimes leads to such kills feeling somewhat delayed and therefore unimpactful. Admittedly, this feels like a bit of a nitpick, but I think it's still worth mentioning.
Lastly, floorhugging also seems to be somewhat meta-defining as it is currently very strong counterplay to certain combo moves which leads to very strong defensive strategies in a game that wants to reward more offensive play.

Rivals of Aether II is a game with stellar art, animations, music, and character design. However, its presentation misses the mark in tutorialization, world-building, and somewhat shaky gamefeel.
Despite all of this, I would encourage anyone that reads this review to still support Aether Studios and their work. A shaky release does not define the future of this game, and with a little time I think this game will be amazing.

And if you went through this review, or just want a TLDR, I want you to take one thing from this, if nothing else:
Should you buy this game? Yes, but later -- let them cook a bit more for now.

The below is my old review. I am updating this to say that with a new PC, it runs much nicer and is much more responsive, definitely better than something like MTGO. That said, the pay to win predatory practices on Wizards of the Coast is something you should still be aware of. In addition, the fact that there is no Commander / EDH format in Arena is not great either.
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Game freezes a lot and can even crash while doing so. Play MTG online with Cockatrice instead, this isn't worth your time nor calories.

Very interesting story with some pretty cool easter eggs. I've played a lot of Ace Attorney and this game really scratched that itch for me!

The only thing I think I didn't like about the game was how long the end minigame portion took to complete. While the game did have enough of the minigame stuff to feel like a mix between Sonic and a mystery novel, and not just a mystery novel game with Sonic chars slapped on, I think at the end it kind of overstayed it welcome. Maybe it was unavoidable, idk. The sound design for the missile obstacles there were also kind of hard on the ears but I think that is more of a nitpick.

Overall, really nice. I kinda wish they make more of this kind of Sonic game in the future, I would definitely buy it!