Haliax87

Look here, proof that game reviewers are shills looking for advertising dollars! Boy I remember the old gamespot review where they played this game naked without equipping armor then continued on to dump all over it. Well if you can find that review. Unlike the critics here they tried to cover up their tracks. Or at least that's what it looks like, when you don't even attempt to fairly review a game. But then again, no one was paying for adds here is the USA. Now look at the absolute monster of a franchise that spawned from this title. And I know its a bad joke to call something "Dark Souls like", but man Dark Souls sure was a lot like this game. Where are all the I-Frame dodge rolls and giant two handed weapons before this title? I cant say for sure, but this sure feels like the spiritual grandfather to a whole lot of games. This was a genre defining game, and most reviewers were just not (monetarily) incentivized to give it the time of day. Those reviews sure didn't age well!

Arc System Works made this game with a lot of love, even though their known for making the guilty gear series they branch out and make games in the genre with love and respect outside of their own IP. Watching the influx of fighting game players after the popularity of the Dragon Ball series getting a modern fighting game has been a breath of fresh air in the genre. It is fair to point out the major failing of the game is the netcode. They use delay based netcode and that is a common failing in many major fighting games. Recent competitors like Mortal Combat have much better online play for this reason. There is an option in the game to set your delay that can greatly improve your experience and makes playing with others who do the same much better. Other than that one major failing, the blending of 2d and 3d pioneered in this title has brought back the anime inspired look of fighting games that I personally really enjoy. As a player who has never liked 3d fighting game from an aesthetic or technical perspective (3d models have open and closed stances that are not symmetrical and may give benefits to being player 1 or player 2) I really enjoyed this art style. There were easier and less expensive ways to make this game. (Im looking at you Jump Force). Mechanically the game is solid and has depth. I know this from playing this and dozens of other fighting games. There are reviews on Metacritic that claim some characters feel the same and this is mostly because there are dynamic combo paths and you can feel those similarities strongly until you really get into the depth of what each characters paths lead to. I would say the base mechanics for Saiyan's and very similar to a large tree but they do branch out gradually. Other characters and races just plain start out very different. Its an interesting approach to making characters and one that allows players to swap between the most popular main characters with less difficulty. In fact much of this game seems to be designed with the intention of being easy to learn. The auto combo system will allow new players to focus on the rock paper scissors aspects (attack, grab, block) that make fighting games what they are without having to put in dozens of hours learning the muscle memory of the combos up front. But there is a deeply rewarding combo system that allows you to control important factors like ending a combo in a corner for a mix up, or instead getting more hits in to build meter, or focusing on ending with a special move that swaps in a character and lets you recover health. The continued addition of new content behind a paywall is normally not something I like to see. But considering how heavily discounted you can find this game for (today its up to 85% off) and that this developer puts love into every character released and mostly done a fantastic job balancing and responding to community feedback, I am willing to consider this an exception to the rule. I am also willing to admit my score might be affected by not overly caring about the story mode. I played it when the game first came out. I imagine any new players might be disappointed that only the core... 13 or so characters are playable in the story arc. Story modes have never been the primary draw in my opinion and this one is probably only just decent. The real fun for me is surprisingly in the many other game modes and even largely in the training mode. (its an excellent training mode as well) To wrap things up, I honestly believe that the Metacritic score is not very honest. Im tempted to give the game a 10/10 to balance out the people who got stuffed online and instantly gave this game a 0 and pretended that this was a bad game and that's why they lost. If you don't understand that superdashing is asking to get stuffed by 2H that's probably how you would feel. But the only Honest criticism is that the online netcode should never have been delay based, and there is a very good alternative in rollback netcode. I am not sure why ASW ignored their community in that regard, and maybe there was good reason, but it is what it is.