Recent reviews by Xilos77

Cant recommend. It's not what I wanted out of a Tenkaichi game. Wanted a nostalgic arcade fighting game that I could casually play and just have fun rewatching old stories and new whatifs. The difficulty ended up being very wonky, where some enemies just stand there and let you beat on them, even ones that should be "stonger", but then there are enemies that are supposed to be "weaker" that just start perfect inputing and taking half your HP away in a few seconds. It doesn't help that the "progression" system is jank. There is no clear progression. Which would be fine if it was just about gaining utility, but it's not. In addition to all of that, while not a dealbreaker, the menus are terrible—all of them. Navigating the main menu is clunky and terrible, taking noticeable amount of time for animations to play to move from one screen to the next. In addition to there not being a consistent way to move through said menus, hit A or hold A, hit B or hold B. Navigating the episodes for arcs and characters is equally terrible. Since you are forced to play a single character rather than play arc to arc, you play sporadic fights, skipping most of the arc and then jumping to the next fight. Which is fine for certain characters and their arcs, but even then it can still be sporadic. Then actually navigating the menu to select the fights is bad; the "pretty" visual style to select a fight where it shows the arena you will fight on is clunky. Navigating and playing fights that are whatifs isn't better. There are unskipable cutscenes, so if you fail to meet the whatif requirement, it forces you to the next available story fight in the arc rather than letting you retry, so you have to go all the way back out to character select then back in navigating slow menus and unskippable cutscenes. There is more that is disappointing and frustrating, but these are the major sources of frustration. If you think these won't bother you, you should be fine, but it just kept taking me out of the moment having to deal with all of it.

Edit: Learned that there is effectively no progression, it doesn't affect episodes at all. Which means there is just inherently very inconsistent difficulty for the story missions. Also it turns out that the CPU difficulty in story episodes are the hardest CPU's in the game. The battle CPU even on the highest difficulty is considerably weaker than the CPU in episodes. The story CPU can and will perfect chain combos on you while input reading and performing multiple perfectly timed inputs in a row. Which the hardest battle CPU gets none of that.

With the way the mechanics are implemented, the game gave me little to no enjoyment. While the graphics and designs are fantastic. The combat is paradoxical and counter-intuitive. It's described as a 3rd-person shooter, but guns do moderate to no damage, have little ammo, and can be easily punished by the swarm of enemies you are fighting, forcing you to enter melee for most of the mission. In melee, its bare bones and what was added made no improvement over what the first game had. The mechanics that are cookie cutter shoved in with little to no thought are distracting and give little or no perceived impact on the game. Specifically the Batman: Arkham mechanics from a 15-year-old game with no improvements or innovations, basic parry, blue parry, and red unblockable. The major flaw with this style of combat is that it gives little room for you to concentrate on smaller enemies if there are elite enemies around, allowing both grunts and ranged units to burn your health. While the grunts can be taken care of in melee, the ranged units get free reign to just do damage with little to no retaliation because you are surrounded by elites and grunts. I just find no fun in this gameplay loop where it just makes me feel like I'm being punished for trying to play a game and just have fun when it feels like it wants me to play a very specific way to not die on repeat. It just ended up being a game that is either not for me or just feels shallow for what I wanted out of it. This pertains to the single player experience.

Obligatory if you review bombed this, even if you changed it afterward. You're an idiot.