Very similar to the previous game despite the leap in console generation. There's a few new mechanics, like hyper beast drive, an extra super move per character and some kind of sway dodge, but none of them are explained in game. Presumably they're in the game manual, but if you don't have that gotta look it up online (and I could still never get the sway to work consistently).
It even suffers that extremely horrible difficulty curve the previous 2 games have had. Placing the game on the medium difficulty will make the first fight insanely easy, and the 9th and final fight plays like a pro. I don't get why they bother having difficulty options when a single arcade run differs so damn much.
Story mode is gone, now arcade mode tries to take its place, except instead of having a fully fledged story with each character, we instead get a few "cutscenes" before the first battle and after the last. These cutscenes are just like in 2, where they're still images with text overlayed, which was already cheap feeling in 2, but now that they've got a brand new powerful hardware to work with AND they reduced this story to two small segments, it's far less forgivable. Also not gonna lie but the story lost me on this one, it felt like there was tons of new lore and terms being thrown around that were never in the second game.
There's a lack of new characters too, going from 6 or 7 in the second game to only 3 in this one. And of those 3 one is a robot clone of another. The other two characters are a chimera and "unborn". These are all cool concepts in theory, but when the draw of your game series is being able to play as humans who transform into animals, it'd be nice to get new real animals to play as instead of 3 "special" forms.
This game did improve training a lot, input display is now back from the first game after being mysteriously gone from the second, but they now also show whether each hit in a combo is high, middle or low, so if you want to get really indepth the training is very accommodating to that.
Overall it feels more or less like the last game with better graphics. I gave it a slightly lower score because making the story near non-existent really hurt how much characters were able to stand out.
It even suffers that extremely horrible difficulty curve the previous 2 games have had. Placing the game on the medium difficulty will make the first fight insanely easy, and the 9th and final fight plays like a pro. I don't get why they bother having difficulty options when a single arcade run differs so damn much.
Story mode is gone, now arcade mode tries to take its place, except instead of having a fully fledged story with each character, we instead get a few "cutscenes" before the first battle and after the last. These cutscenes are just like in 2, where they're still images with text overlayed, which was already cheap feeling in 2, but now that they've got a brand new powerful hardware to work with AND they reduced this story to two small segments, it's far less forgivable. Also not gonna lie but the story lost me on this one, it felt like there was tons of new lore and terms being thrown around that were never in the second game.
There's a lack of new characters too, going from 6 or 7 in the second game to only 3 in this one. And of those 3 one is a robot clone of another. The other two characters are a chimera and "unborn". These are all cool concepts in theory, but when the draw of your game series is being able to play as humans who transform into animals, it'd be nice to get new real animals to play as instead of 3 "special" forms.
This game did improve training a lot, input display is now back from the first game after being mysteriously gone from the second, but they now also show whether each hit in a combo is high, middle or low, so if you want to get really indepth the training is very accommodating to that.
Overall it feels more or less like the last game with better graphics. I gave it a slightly lower score because making the story near non-existent really hurt how much characters were able to stand out.