First fighting game I really got into, and I sunk around 600 hours into it.
I enjoyed my time with it, but I absolutely can not recommend this game to anyone.
The game feels very rewarding to learn, with its fun combos and resets, but it also feels extremely painful to play when these fun combos and resets are being used on you. In this game, you could get hit once and watch your character get combo'd to death for a minute straight. The only openings you have is correctly guessing how your opponent is going to 'reset' you, which is genuinely a 50/50 or a 25/25/25/25 depending on the character.
The gameplay really relies on "spam assists and try to get 1 clean hit so you can combo+reset your opponent to death" and repeat. There is no real strategic depth here, it's just a glorified training mode.
Other fighting games have a bigger focus on playing 'neutral', requiring actual thoughtful gameplay. Those games require you to fight with your opponent, and actually think 'what will my opponent do?'. You're constantly adapting and adjusting based on who you are playing, making it a very intimate experience. This game lacks this feeling entirely.

It sucks that this game has so many good, loveable characters, because they'll be stuck within this game forever.
The artstyle and animation are actually wonderful, there was a lot of effort into making everything look smooth. I also love the music.
I'll avoid talking about the big controversies this game has had, but I will mention this: this game has had numerous updates where they REMOVE content, instead of adding. Imagine paying 15 bucks for a game, and then they remove stuff. Whether or not you agree with their decision is entirely up to you (again, there's reasons for this happening that I won't get into) but I can absolutely not recommend buying a game where the product unironically is losing content over time.

I've always loved this game to death since I was a kid. I have almost 300 hours total combining endless beta and base game hours and the game's art style, music, character designs and mechanics were all incredible but I felt like over time, especially around the release of 2nd Encore, this game would face more and more changes that would really start to deteriorate the game in quality.

I always had gotten the impression that Mike Z was a giant piece of shit who was out of touch and unreasonably rude to his staff based off his dev logs on his YouTube channel (turns out I was right) and he was responsible for a lot of the ridiculous changes that game has gotten throughout time in terms of game balancing and just an overall trend of changing things that did NOT need to be changed.

But of course, an obvious factor for not being able to give this game a good review in good faith is the fact that they'd have so many updates where they would consistently keep removing things from the game, the "censorship" update that everyone talks about was just the boiling point and the changes they made with manipulating the story (The absurd changes with Big Band's story) changing character designs (Ex. Parasoul) and removing "lewd" art from a game that has always had sex appeal and its raunchiness as one of its main appeals shows how out of touch and bitter the current developers of this game are and how fucked this game has gotten over time.

I'm sure a lot of loser coomers started shitting on the game when they found out they changed the story shit with Filia and maybe they barely played at all when that update came out but I think its in extremely bad faith to defend an update that straight up removes content from a game that already has an extremely miniscule player base.

This game has more style than any other fighting game I played (Marvel Vs Capcom 2 probably being slightly over it).

The fighting feels smooth and the each character plays unique and different. The only probably would be the balance-- (which I often don't complain about in fighting games. I love my fighting games broken) but Annie and Peacock are so clearly a tier above the rest.

Solid game. 4/5.

I'm not a fighting game expert, and I'm pretty bad at them, but this game has hooked me. I think one major plus that has gotten me to stick with this game is the extensive but easy-to-grasp tutorials that the game provides. Though I'm still not at the level I want to be, I've made major steps, and my progress has been noticeable and meaningful.

The biggest reason I have stuck with the game has to be its style. The character designs are fantastic (though not always appropriate), and the animations are amazing. I think the big band, jazzy, music does a lot to help push the old movie style that permeates a lot of the game, including the supers, which are called "Blockbusters".

I'd highly recommend checking this game out. It's a spectacular time. (I play Peacock, by the way.)