Well damn I was impresseed by this one, seriously, I am honestly suprirsed how much the MUGEN scene grew ever since The Black Heart.
I'll get the elf in the room right out of the away and say the graphics are lovely, this game is just a love letter to those SNK and Capcom fighters and it shows, more veering on the former, because of the NGPC graphics and the character design. And those background graphics, my God, the backgrounds are beautiful! they are extremely detailed and have a lot of personality put into them, there are not a lot of them but what we have here is very solid, especially because all of them have a fake 3D effect with the parallax going on, which is very cool.
The music, while I was not a fan initially because I only heard a few tracks, I became warmed to those after hearing them more, and when I heard the rest of it is very good soundtrack, which has a variety of soundfonts, from NES, to GB, to SNES, to Sega Genesis surprisingly, it is all very rich and very varied. Overall I'd say the game has a very solid OST.
The gameplay is where the game shines, it is fast paced, very responsive and very fun, the colorful cast of characters and their movesets makes the game ideal for whoever's playing, whether they want a Shoto-type character, or a puppeteer, or a mix of zoner and melee... which happens to be the case with Rina, which I had a lot of devilish fun with. Specials are fun to execute too and they all have their use and it's satisfactory to chain them with normal attacks. The final boss kicked my ass but hey! that's on par with SNK-inspired games lol.
Of course the game is not without flaws, I found the supers impossible to execute, seriously, the only way I could execute midnight slash was via button mashing left and right on the keyboard, the story campaign is very short with a whack pacing, I fight six characters, the third one being a miniboss and the sixth being the final one, which screws up the balance, and there's a lack of appropiate stages, like I'd like to see a football stadium/field for Asako.
But those cons are like little preventions compared to the rest of the game which is amazing, if you make supers more forgiving, make the campaign with 10 characters so the pacing is better(1 miniboss at the middle, a sub-final boss and a final boss), more stages and character specific endings would make this already great game into a nigh-perfect or even a perfect one.
In any case, you still earned 5 stars, I was cynical about fighting games because of the recent state of the coroporate side, but the indie scene makes me more hopeful for it and I see a bright future. I can't wait to see this one finished.
I'll get the elf in the room right out of the away and say the graphics are lovely, this game is just a love letter to those SNK and Capcom fighters and it shows, more veering on the former, because of the NGPC graphics and the character design. And those background graphics, my God, the backgrounds are beautiful! they are extremely detailed and have a lot of personality put into them, there are not a lot of them but what we have here is very solid, especially because all of them have a fake 3D effect with the parallax going on, which is very cool.
The music, while I was not a fan initially because I only heard a few tracks, I became warmed to those after hearing them more, and when I heard the rest of it is very good soundtrack, which has a variety of soundfonts, from NES, to GB, to SNES, to Sega Genesis surprisingly, it is all very rich and very varied. Overall I'd say the game has a very solid OST.
The gameplay is where the game shines, it is fast paced, very responsive and very fun, the colorful cast of characters and their movesets makes the game ideal for whoever's playing, whether they want a Shoto-type character, or a puppeteer, or a mix of zoner and melee... which happens to be the case with Rina, which I had a lot of devilish fun with. Specials are fun to execute too and they all have their use and it's satisfactory to chain them with normal attacks. The final boss kicked my ass but hey! that's on par with SNK-inspired games lol.
Of course the game is not without flaws, I found the supers impossible to execute, seriously, the only way I could execute midnight slash was via button mashing left and right on the keyboard, the story campaign is very short with a whack pacing, I fight six characters, the third one being a miniboss and the sixth being the final one, which screws up the balance, and there's a lack of appropiate stages, like I'd like to see a football stadium/field for Asako.
But those cons are like little preventions compared to the rest of the game which is amazing, if you make supers more forgiving, make the campaign with 10 characters so the pacing is better(1 miniboss at the middle, a sub-final boss and a final boss), more stages and character specific endings would make this already great game into a nigh-perfect or even a perfect one.
In any case, you still earned 5 stars, I was cynical about fighting games because of the recent state of the coroporate side, but the indie scene makes me more hopeful for it and I see a bright future. I can't wait to see this one finished.
