tamertouya

Easily the weakest entry in the entire Rumble series, and one of the worst video games ever made. Where Rumble Arena was easy to play and hard to master, All-Star Rumble is obtuse, limited, and lacking in serious depth. Everything about this fighter is phoned in; the battle system is a shallow attempt at a free-roaming fighting game that takes on the trappings of the Rumble series without having any of the tight control or polish of its predecessors. The "depth" to the game involves finding all the infinite combos, infinite stuns, and perfect trapping maneuvers that the dev team clearly never did; it's designed so that whoever takes the lead first in multiplayer will maintain that lead for the entire game. Character movement is ambiguous and slow, making it hard to judge what you're doing at any given moment. The roster is small, and incredibly unbalanced. Shoutmon, Wormmon, and Impmon dominate in multiplayer, forming a unique triangle of strengths with little to no openings for the rest of the cast to sneak in. If you've been spoiled by good fighting games like Super Smash Bros. or SSFIV, you'll hate this game. If you've ever played a video game before, you'll hate this game. And if you've never so much as touched a video game before in your life, this will give you an exceedingly negative impression of the medium. $60 wasted to support a petition. The voice acting is cringeworthy, as is the generic soundtrack. One of the game's few redeeming qualities is the ability to use custom OST, giving you the ability to block out Bandai's Worst Hits with a flood of your choice Wada Kouji songs off a USB drive. The storyline consists of the same stages repeated for every character, with slightly tweaked boss fights, and a handful of cutscenes told in still images. Game balance is no better in single player than it is in multiplayer; single large enemies can often take out your character in just two or three hits, while whole mobs of smaller foes will come apart like tissue paper. The poor controls and disproportionately weak playable cast makes it so that a game over can come out of nowhere, forcing you to restart an entire stage over from scratch--it's not a matter of skill, but of spamming the taunt command before walking into a battle, so that your evolution meter is maxed out and you can evolve on the spot to wipe out the opponents before they can get a single attack in. I genuinely enjoyed grinding my party to 999 stats in Digimon World DS more than I enjoyed any part of this game.