This is the game I've been waiting for ever since I really started to understand the mechanics of Super Mario Sunshine as a kid. The 3D Mario games have always been more or less unmatched in terms of movement in a 3D platformer; right from Mario 64, you have what, seven different types of jumps? Plus the slide? Other 3D platformers didn't even deign to try for that kind of complexity in their movement. Even Nintendo stepped away from that complexity for Super Mario Galaxy, and didn't really return to it until Odyssey. And as much as I love those Mario games, I've always wondered what could be if you took that movement into a different place. I wanted to see a game that really demanded you understand everything you can do with that movement, instead of just letting you play with it as a little treat. A game that builds that movement into its very being.

Pseudoregalia is basically that. Or at least, it's the first version of that I've seen; for all this game's successes, it's also a game that really opens my eyes as to what could be. And given that this is developer rittzler's first "major" release (defining "major" as "it's on Steam", I guess), I'll bet that this game opened their eyes as well. (I'm very much keeping my eyes on their next game, Electrokinetic.) But right out the gate, they got the movement—what I imagine to be the hardest part—right. Every type of jump feels good to use, the options feel intuitive, and understood exactly how I could use each option to get where I wanted to be. A few of the options are basically lifted right out of Mario 64, and they feel just as good here. The one that I really love is this game's wall jump, which is actually a mid-air kick that gives you momentum in a direction you choose, which results in a jump if you hit a wall. This lets you aim back at a wall, giving you a little more control over how you want to use it. This is the realization from Mario I'd been waiting for; countless times in Mario I would wall jump off of a wall that was slightly too tall for me to scale, trying to fade back to get that little bit of extra height to get me over the edge. Or I would try to wall jump in a corner, even though the angles weren't really in my favour. There's creativity all over Mario's movement, and sometimes the exact situation I described would actually work. But usually it didn't, because the levels weren't built for you to be able to do that. Pseduoregalia's are, and so the mechanics give you that particular kind of freedom to match.

Which brings us to the second-hardest part that this game succeeds at: making levels that enourage players to use those movement options. It's tricky; to make a Metroidvania—a 3D Metroidvania, no less—based around movement means that there are inevitably going to be opportunities where it looks like a player can do something, but they actually need a powerup. But you also want that ambiguity, because otherwise the movement's not actually any fun; it's just lock-and-key stuff without any opportunity to actually be creative. I won't say that Pseudoregalia always gets the balance right, but I think the general approach here is correct: err on the side of ambiguity. There are a few sections where I tried, without success, to get past an area I simply didn't have the tools for. But that's okay, because this game is structured in such a way that I didn't even know if something I needed was beyond there. And the game is not so punishing that I felt like I was supposed to do insane feats to complete the game, so I knew there was probably something somewhere else I could use. By the same token, there was an entire somewhat difficult area that would've been a lot easier to traverse if I had an ability I missed earlier in the game, but I still made it through by just being clever with the abilities I had. I thought that was pretty cool.

The game's lack of clear direction is a fair point of contention with some; you're never explicitly told what you're even supposed to be doing in this world, much less where to go. There's no map, and the (well-realized, non-trivially Undertale-esque) low-poly art direction results in a lot of rooms lacking distinctive features. It's very easy to get lost. But I liked that approach for this game. For one, the game's movement options make it so that it's quite easy to navigate the world (especially later in the game), so trying to get back to a familiar location to reorient yourself isn't a huge deal. It's also a relatively small world for a small game (I beat it in a little under 6 hours), so there's not that much to actually learn. With the difficulties mitigated, I liked spending the time to learn where I was and try to figure where I could go and where I hadn't been. Eventually you can start to figure out what you're actually supposed to be doing, and from there things click into place pretty easily.

The rest of the game's aspects—combat, story, whatever—didn't really impress me, but they're also not given much priority in this game. I certainly didn't come here for them, and as it stands they most exist to break up the rest of the action. Fine by me! This game succeeds at something we should have gotten literal decades ago, and it does so in a way that doesn't feel perfunctory. It's not so simple as "Mario 64 Metroidvania", and you can feel dozens of very specific design choices that went into this. I'm so happy I got to play this, and I can't wait to see where rittzler goes from here.

It's fine, you know, whatever. It's a slim, action game Final Fantasy XIV quest line that's slightly cheaper than a month's sub costs. Chase some jagoffs around, do a dungeon with exactly three (3) bosses and some trash mobs in between. Whether that sounds compelling is entirely up to you. But man, a little bit of distance makes this gameplay so much less compelling. Too much of this game relies on liberal usage of a generous dodge and managing a handful of cooldowns, done in the exact same way for every enemy. By the end of my main playthrough, I'd chosen a set of abilities that I thought were fun. (Basically revolving around using Lightning Rod and Zantetsuken to make the most out of a stagger.) There was really no point in me trying to iterate on that for a 2-3 hour DLC, and I just kinda did the same thing over and over. Coming to this after recently playing through Kingdom Hearts II, where you have to constantly change your strategies even for some basic encounters, really puts this into focus.

The biggest buzzkill was the first time I staggered the DLC's main boss. I had a Zantetsuken locked and loaded, a Lightning Rod there to cause extra hits and damage, and a Diamond Dust ready to juice up the damage multiplier. (It can go higher in the DLC than in the main game!) I pulled those off, then used Gungnir to prep a second Zantetsuken. But as I watched the animation play out, I realized that I wasn't actually doing any more damage. I'd forgotten! There's hard locks on how much damage you can do, because the fight has to transition to the next phase, make sure you see all the dramatic set pieces.

They are cool set pieces, no doubt. The fluidity and spectacle of some of that boss's animations did leave me awestruck in a couple of cases. But the animators' hard work gets highlighted over the work that I'm trying to put into to enjoy this thing; that all the effort I'd put into doing extra damage meant absolutely nothing. I had to play by the game's timeline, and I just don't know why I'd even bother trying to have fun with the game's mechanics at that point.

There is a lot to like about the main game, but this DLC mostly dragged into focus the things I don't like about it all that much. It's just an extra dungeon with a not-particularly-good story and a boss that cost a lot of money, but doesn't feel very different from any other boss in the game. It feels slightly like an obligation, just something they did because that's what you do with AAA games these days. Presumably the second DLC—which I will play, because I'm an idiot—will be a bit bigger, a bit tastier, will at least have a few new abilities to play with. This just kinda felt like a waste of everyone's time.

Also—small spoiler here—can I just say that rearranging the Omega theme from FFXIV is kinda tacky? They've used it enough times in its original game alone, don't really need to use it here, too. Not even a particularly good arrangement. Bleh.

Disclaimer: I’m no pro, but I’m also not total trash. I hover around Platinum in the ranked mode, for whatever that’s worth. Basically means I'm not an idiot, but I'm nowhere near being able to make the most of the game's mechanics. So take my opinion accordingly.

Anyway, this is likely the closest a non-Smash platformer fighter has come to being a great game since Rivals of Aether. Well, Rivals is a great game; this isn't quite there, but it's close. It’s got a lot of the same audiovisual issues that plague literally every platform fighter other than Smash, and ultimately its balance and characters doesn’t feel quite as tightly-knit as Rivals (to say nothing of the level of developer support). But things are a little dire out there for platform fighters right now. The last two big attempts at this, the first NASB and MultiVersus, were (at best) well-intentioned messes that very quickly fell apart. Smash Ultimate’s meta has gone to some rough places. Brawlhalla has found plenty of success, though I’m not convinced anyone actually likes the game. Any other would-be contenders like Rushdown Revolt and Fraymakers are having trouble getting off the ground. NASB2 is the first time in a while that one of these games has felt like it had a bit of juice, managing to feel good and successfully push some new ideas into the genre; it’s good, definitely scratching that Smash itch in the way that other games have not. Until the likely-excellent Rivals 2 releases next year, I’ll happily take this.

The first NASB fell victim to, well, a lot of things (namely self-sabotage from their own publisher). But purely from a design perspective, the big problem was that it tried to implement a few too many original ideas, most of which seemed to be just thrown in there without a larger design philosophy in place. The RPS mechanic where certain strong attack directions beat others didn’t actually introduce much strategy; cargo throws are inherently janky; blocking just felt awkward; airdashes quickly led to Rivals hitfalling with extra steps, resulting in a high-APM 0-death fight that wasn’t particularly fun for anyone. All of those options (except for the quite good teetering mechanic) have been walked back to more standardized options akin to Smash, and the game feels much better as a result. (No coincidence that some of the unique options in Rivals are also moving towards the same Smash baseline; Sakurai had a lot of this stuff figured out from the beginning, and has had a lot more time to iterate on the rest.) In the first game, it too often felt like I was fighting against the mechanics; the more standard baseline here gives me a natural baseline where I can better figure out how the rest of the game works. If you’ve played any amount of competitive Smash, regardless of which entry you play, you can hop in here and figure things out pretty easily. Everything feels like it should, with enough unique ideas that the game feels like its own thing.

This game’s big “innovation”, of course, is the slime meter, a mechanic they just borrowed from fighting games. (Which, unoriginal as it may be, it’s surprising it took someone this long to do it. I’ll certainly take it over most of the ‘original’ ideas I see from most platform fighters!) The parts of it that work feel great. Canceling attacks allows for a lot of variety in combo game and advantage state, opening the doors for creativity; meter also builds fast enough that you don’t have to feel like you’ve wasted something if your attempt at improv doesn’t quite work out. The game feels well designed around using the slime-boosted special attacks for recovery, letting you out of sticky situations for a cost. (Some of the unique effects on slime specials are really neat, too; having two variations on each one feels great.) The game really encourages proper use of meter while also leaving a lot of room for experimentation; I walk away from each play session with new ideas to implement for the next time I hop on, and that’s what I ask for more than anything from a fighting game.

That said, there are two elements of the slime meter that I don’t like, both kind of lazily borrowed from fighting games. This game includes a burst mechanic akin to Guilty Gear, managed by the same slime meter as the rest of the kit. Burst works in traditional fighting games because odds are, if you can land the combo once, you can find another way to get damage that still gets you to the same result. In NASB2, burst tends to come out in critical situations that would normally lead to a character dying; you burst when the kill move comes, which can often come out of a confirm that was difficult to land and might not come across as easily, especially if the character fell out of the window for the confirm. It feels too much like a get-out-of-jail-free card, especially because it’s so much harder to bait in this game. You often can’t just pause and block the burst like in a traditional fighting game; confirms are generally more committal, especially if you’re in the air and can’t get back to where the opponent is. Slime presents so many more unique ways to get out of bad situations in this game that burst feels a little cheap, a little too easy compared to the other things you can do.

Similarly, the supers you can do with three bars of slime meter too often gets used for cheese. Like in traditional fighters, these are invincible super attacks that deal a lot of damage (and can lead to kills in this game; basically Final Smashes if they were standardized across the cast to just be cutscene moves that do the same damage and knockback). The key difference is that it’s far more difficult to confirm into them effectively, since startup is slow and there are no moves that would cancel into it without using the meter you need to actually perform the move. What results is a lot of wake-up supers or supers randomly thrown out to punish attempts at spacing a move. It also seems like whiffed supers are basically unpunishable? Lots of invincibility and you can act seemingly immediately after. When someone has three bars and the other person is at kill percent, it feels too often like the game revolves trying not to get hit by that specific option. It feels bad robbing and it feels bad getting robbed.

Doesn’t help that the supers look and sound kind of ugly. Part of the appeal of a super in any fighting game is the pure visual spectacle that goes with it, and that’s hard to convey in a mid-budget game like this. Even landing my own supers, I find I’d like to just hit the “skip cutscene” button. This is of course a problem that spreads across the whole game, but also the entire genre; Smash is to this today the only one of these things to be given a proper AAA budget, and its enormity and attention to detail makes newcomers feel like they have to play catchup and stretch to make their game a little bigger than it really should. The details suffer as a result. Animations don’t line up clearly with hitboxes, moves look like they’re done when they’re not (and vice versa), strong moves don’t have enough impact, it’s difficult to tell when you’re out of hitstun. There’s not a ton of variety in the sound effects—a lot of softballs hitting foam padding—and they generally sound limp and underwhelming. (In fairness, the sound thing is one I’ve only seen Smash excel at.) These presentational things make a noticeable impact on the gameplay; more clarity means it’s easier to intuit what’s happening on the screen, and too often I find myself saying ‘wait, what happened?’

Of course, a game based on Nickelodeon properties also comes with the added burden of appealing to casuals, which inevitably draws away the money into other ventures. The first game completely whiffed that, with a terrible arcade mode and no voice acting at launch. (And when they did add voice acting, I kinda wished they hadn’t.) This game does a much better job with the presentation, and even includes a roguelite campaign mode featuring newly-recorded dialogue from all of the characters. It’s not a great campaign, but how many fighting game single player modes are? This is a problem that plagues the entire genre, and even giants like Capcom fumbled with their well-intentioned-but-kind-of-miserable World Tour mode in Street Fighter 6. Literally the only platform fighter with good single player content is Melee. (Subspace Emissary sucked.) So I will say that I wish all of the money funneled into the campaign was instead spent on fully polishing the sound and visuals, but I understand why the money meant where it did. Though I wonder how much that actually translates into sales? Are a lot of people picking it up mainly for the single player content?

Ah, whatever, not my business. I don’t even really care about representation in the roster; I’ve only ever spent much time with two of the properties represented here, and I don’t feel particularly strongly about either one of them. (Though I get the sense that some of the weirder ‘90s output might be worth looking into.) I’m just interested in how they play. I do wish that some moves and entire characters weren’t so obviously pulled from Smash characters (Granny/Falcon, Nigel/Puff, Garfield and Tigre shines), though I understand why they do that; Smash has taken most of the good ideas for moves already (and even it’s plagiarized itself a few times now), and trying to come up with something fresh at this point often means coming up with something inferior. And ultimately they use those stolen moves as window dressing for more unique core ideas. Most characters have a hook that makes them fun or interesting to play as, and ultimately feel distinct from characters in other games. Mecha-Plankton has Terry’s Burn Knuckle, sure, but his hybrid heavy/zoner/grappler approach is a concept I haven’t seen before. Donatello has Cloud and Sephiroth’s upairs, but otherwise doesn’t zone the way a typical swordie in Smash does. Even Korra—a fairly straightforward brawler who borrows moves from Fox, Mewtwo, Ganondorf, Bayonetta, Joker, and Terry—keeps things fresh between the various elemental effects her kit provides. (She’s the character I’ve been playing the most.) There’s definitely some issues across the roster—some of the high-concept characters are underwhelming in practice, heavies are a little too annoying to fight—but those are the kind of things they can iron out in patches.

Inevitably, such patches will eventually render chunks of this review will become irrelevant. Likewise for the development of the game’s meta, although at this point I’m skeptical of any platform fighter that isn’t Smash or Rivals having a meta that lasts longer than a few months. But I do think this is the first time that a new contender has the juice to last long enough to leave an impression. Until these past few years, it was weird how no one was even trying to get a proper platform fighter going; since then, it’s been weird how hard it seems to get one to even feel like a full game. But with this and the forthcoming Rivals 2, things are looking up. Maybe we can finally get a few others to earnestly throw their hat in the ring.