due to my aversion to fighting games (read: i'm bad at them) i have not played 1 second of rivals of aether, but for some reason recently i was reminded of this thing existing post-me caring about the cringe optics of being a furry. and like, free hour long furry datesim? dont mind if i do! unfortunately, sadly, even as a furry, i can tell you this is pretty nothing. not bad! but not really good either, just nothing.

im not even really sure what this game is supposed to be, like on the surface its a gag game (maybe the premise of a datesim-lite spinoff of a platform fighter is bizarre enough in of itself), but it plays it way too straight to be a total joke, like its undebatable this was made by and to some extent for furries. pretty much none of the comedy in this is metatextual (which is what you'd expect for something like this), almost all of it is stuff that wouldn't be out of place in any other datesim divorced from the rivals name--for the most part its literally exactly whats on the box.

but also, its way too short and has way too many characters to be that good of a datesim either, you get maybe a paragraph from each character, maybe 2 if you spend any available freetime with them before you have to pick which one you wanna go out with in the end. how am i supposed to know which one of these people i want to date without knowing anything about them besides their assigned archetype?

again, im not even really sure what the goal was here. it's not much of a joke game, and its definitely a datesim but it almost feels made out of obligation, like "ok the joke is its a datesim now we gotta do a datesim" and then its just the most default thing ever. it's certainly not bad by any means, its a pretty competently made game (and let's be honest, the main reason this game was probably made was to have a reason to draw/commission furry art and in that regard this succeeds with flying colors), but it's going to evaporate from my brain the next time i go to sleep. ah well