Absolutely goated flash game. Some of the jokes and references are pretty dated and it was no graphical powerhouse, but this was one of the most engaging and smartly designed browser games you could find at the time. You're looking at a turn-based RPG where the combat loop revolves around stacking and interacting with many, many different status effects, rather than dealing direct damage. My absolute favorite was the one that inverts healing and damage; there are few things more satisfying than tricking a boss into killing himself with a heal spell. The story was interesting enough for kid me, and the minimalist, heavily shadowed character portraits looked cool as hell.

I miss Adobe Flash, man.

A long time ago, someone installed this on every computer in my high school - not all heroes wear capes!

Playing it again now I'm surprised by how addictive it still feels. The controls are rudimentary (one block button, one attack button, one jump button) but there is a surprising amount of distinctiveness between different characters' playstyle and movesets. The simplicity of the controls and special moves make the game very easy to learn and relearn (on my most recent replay I started on 'hard' mode and got slaughtered a few times, but within half an hour I was kicking ass and taking names like the good ol' days again). Given the simplicity of the basic controls, the many different game modes and the multitude of ways to customize them, it might not be entirely off-base to liken this to an indie parallel to Super Smash Bros (which came out in the same year!)

Depending on how you customized your battles, you could end up with eight fighters plus upwards of 40 mooks all onscreen at the same time! This gave a really chaotic but fun feel that few other games at the time could match. However, it was also these gigantic free-for-all battle royales that exposed and accentutated the flaws in the control scheme. The game didn't "store" inputs for you - if you wanted to do a special move, or even dash, you needed to be standing still to do it. Furthermore, the sheer glorious chaos onscreen came at the cost of pretty substantial slowdown - and missed inputs. This meant that it was exactly when the onscreen action was at its most hectic - and when I needed to pull off a powerful area attack, like Henry's Sonata of Death - that the game was most likely to lag and drop an input.

There are certainly better brawlers, better indie games, and better mindless party games. But this is still fun today and was worth the nostalgia trip.