In honor of 2024's Game Of The Year dropping in just about an hour as of this writing, I wanna go over my thoughts to the best of my abilities. I bought the game again on Steam shortly after buying the sequel, because it was five dollars, and I had lost my ability to play online after cancelling my PS Plus subscription a good few months ago.

Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r] UNICLR is, by no competition, my second favorite fighting game of all time. If not for the slight nostalgia boost that Skullgirls gets from me, I wouldn't be opposed to calling it my absolute favorite. Under Night's characters are some of the most ridiculous, out-there conceptions of every possible archetype, making no two characters feel at all alike. Better yet, they're all fun to play. For the longest time, I had trouble even deciding on a main. I would watch tournament sets and just gaze in awe of each character's toolkits, before trying them out later and attempting to put in the time to learn them myself. One of the few rosters I would call practically perfect.

This is the part where whea starts talking about how good music is. 9.9 times out of ten, if anybody is going to know anything about Under Night, it's gonna be the music. For good reason, to be fair. UNI can evoke a tremendous range of emotions with its OST, slow and soothing, loud and overwhelming (teehee), can I tell you about this eurobeat remix of Pachelbel's Canon? Not to mention the vibes it throws you into just on the character select screen, good lord I cannot gush over Raito's music for long enough.

UNIB is everything it needs to be. Fun, fast-paced competition, amplified by fun, fast-paced music. Competition that, no matter your selection, will be enjoyable all throughout. That's what I call a good-ass fighter.

and you bastards better hop on uni2, i dont wanna be matching up against the same guy over and over again to the point where they just start declining my matches

i am very unexperienced with fighters in general, even moreso with anime fighters as someone who entirely grew up with mortal kombat, soul calibur & aki wrestling games (+ DEF JAM). that said this is definitely the most fun i've ever found the core gameplay of its kind, compared with my smattering of blazblue, skullgirls & guilty gear. not sure i'm too convinced of the way it articulates its lore (though its more interesting after some perusal of the wiki makes the dialogue more intelligible), but the persona 3 reminiscent urban fantasy setting of the arcade story and arenas is very appealing. character designs are generally great, i've gone through about half of their arcade stories and all of them have been pretty fun to play, though my favorite is definitely AKATSUKI. no real interest in getting good and i can't play online anyway due to terrible internet, but i have been practicing some of the intermediate/expert combos in the mission mode and while they are somewhat tricky for my fingers to articulate it feels pretty cool when i pull them off. very fun game.

I've been playing under night since it came out along with each expansion / rerelease. With 2D fighters i've basically always played them casually or with friends rather than online, most of the time i'm playing arcade and versus against the CPU on the highest difficulty and its not much of a challenge but that's just how I enjoy it most, just messing around and having fun and under night really lends itself to that. I first played it at a booth at a comic con when I was about 16 and had fun just doing auto combos but I went on to pick it up and start teaching myself the game.

Under night is just great, easily one of my favourite fighting games ever because of how tremendously satisfying it is to just pick up and play, its a game where you can have a good time even by just mashing and the difficulty curve / skill ceiling is spot on for those that want to improve. So let's see, I love this game's design and aesthetic with its fun and creative character designs, I love its punchy and exaggerated animations and special moves, I love the hand drawn and kinda retro style and I love its mechanics. I can't really comment on the story or online play because I basically never make time for them, i'm fine just hopping into a few rounds in versus. Every character feels uniquely different but also have a lot of overlap in how they play and what types of strings are ideal for combos or pressure, meaning that in this game i'm able to pick up pretty much any character and get a feel for them and have fun playing them very quickly, but its not at the expense of characters feeling 'samey'. There's still your archetypes for characters like your grappler, keep away characters, rushdown characters etc but what's cool is I never feel too restricted by these things like i'm locked into playing a certain way - under night's speed and the way it allows for expressiveness meant I could play long range zoners like gordeau or phonon super aggressively and not feel hindered like, at all.

Mechanically I think under night is really underrated in how easy it makes it to weave random combos together. I feel like every single time I play it I find out a new way to go about getting hit confirms into combos or keeping a juggle going or something. The grd system in particular allows for practically infinite possibilities but unlike gg's roman cancels, they are tied to their own resource separate from your meter and players compete over who wins 'vorpal state' - which allows you to chain shift at any time including mid combo for combo extensions or to make an unsafe move safe during pressure. Basically its dope, I love the 'tug of war' during matches to get the advantage even in neutral and it also lets you veil off or cross cast veil off which provides even more possibilities for combos and damage potential. Once I got the hang of the system I was hooked. I also think 'assault', while probably not anything that new, is a really great option to have for quick initiation or punishes that I now miss in other 2D fighters primarily because of how easily it lets you cover distance, and pretty safely too.

Under night is over the top shouty anime ridiculousness but also comes with a certain class I think. All of its characters are tasteful, creative and excellently designed and aesthetically it sits rather neatly in its own little niche I think. This game is just great and sorely overlooked, it would be nice to see it get rollback so it might get the attention it deserves - also yes, the name is stupid and ridiculous and what little I did play of the story was just ok I guess, there's also some absolutely bonkers blockstrings and I do miss having a proper defensive / breather option like burst - but ultimately this is a 2D fighter that in 10 years has aged beautifully and I can't not have fun playing it. If you like fighting games just play it already ok!

I WANT TO BANG THE UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH TWINK SO GODDAMM BAD

Holy fucking shit. I want to bang the under night in-birth twink so goddamn bad. I can't stand it anymore. Every time I go on netplay I get a massive erection. I've seen literally every rule 34 post there is of him online. My dreams are nothing but constant fucking sex with Chaos. I'm sick of waking up every morning with six nuts in my boxers and knowing that those are nuts that should've been busted inside of Chaos’ tight boypussy. I want him to have my mutant mpreg babies.

Fuck, my fucking mom caught me with my best friend. I'd dressed him in my sister's glasses and went to fucking town. She hasn't said a word to me in 10 hours and I'm worried she's gonna take away my PC. I might not ever get to see Chaos again.

I have like 300 hours on my other account so dont let my playtime on this account sway the impact of this review but this is one of my favorite fighting games ever. Amazingly designed characters who each have their own theme which are all 11/10 which is unbelievable. Each character has their own signature fighting style and weapon and its just so fun to play. The story mode is fun and arcade mode is also fun to play through. The music is the best part about this game though. Easily in my top 10 favorite soundtracks of all time