I haven't played a great Beat-Em-Up in a while, and I'm still not entirely sure if I have here either haha.. My blurb review for this was "Its like Scott Pilgrim, but not really as good", and the more and more I think about it, that holds up as true. The music is exceptional, but not quite Amananaguchi. The combat is great, but you have to buy your moves instead of just earning them through play and leveling. It has RPG stats, but they come mostly through eating random crap and you have no idea what stats go where, as opposed to just choosing them yourself. The story is funny but barebones with a dumb ending, compared to SP. I'll say it probably looks better at least, but I'm generally a fan of the 'anime' aesthetic.
That being said, this will probably be a shorter review than I generally do because this game is pretty clearly in the same vein as Scott Pilgrim, but it all basically boils down to "yeah its like that but not as good". What I did really like however were the two main characters. Kyoko and Misako are worth the price of entry here, they're the cliche pair of Girly-Girl and Tomboy, but they play off of each other so well and off of the characters they meet that there wasn't any point that I wasn't charmed by both of them. I may or may not do another playthrough as Kyoko, which will count as a new number in this gaming series.
For issues I think the only issue I had was some of the gameplay. A lot of the game is actually quite hard, and some of the bosses took me at least 5 tries until the end game. I didn't realize that stats from eating things were permanent the first time, and I did not fix that until about 80% of the way into the game. You also have to purchase most of your moves which gets a bit tiresome to go and find the dojo, and it doesn't even tell you what the move does or how to do it until you buy it already... this means you've got whole sections of your basic combo locked and you don't even realize it until AFTER you get it. Kind of a pain in the ass.
I certainly quite liked the game despite my issues, the characters dialogue and their designs were top notch and it was fun to get into a beat-em-up again after my love was sparked by Castle Crashers and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World so many years ago..
That being said, this will probably be a shorter review than I generally do because this game is pretty clearly in the same vein as Scott Pilgrim, but it all basically boils down to "yeah its like that but not as good". What I did really like however were the two main characters. Kyoko and Misako are worth the price of entry here, they're the cliche pair of Girly-Girl and Tomboy, but they play off of each other so well and off of the characters they meet that there wasn't any point that I wasn't charmed by both of them. I may or may not do another playthrough as Kyoko, which will count as a new number in this gaming series.
For issues I think the only issue I had was some of the gameplay. A lot of the game is actually quite hard, and some of the bosses took me at least 5 tries until the end game. I didn't realize that stats from eating things were permanent the first time, and I did not fix that until about 80% of the way into the game. You also have to purchase most of your moves which gets a bit tiresome to go and find the dojo, and it doesn't even tell you what the move does or how to do it until you buy it already... this means you've got whole sections of your basic combo locked and you don't even realize it until AFTER you get it. Kind of a pain in the ass.
I certainly quite liked the game despite my issues, the characters dialogue and their designs were top notch and it was fun to get into a beat-em-up again after my love was sparked by Castle Crashers and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World so many years ago..