I had always heard that this game was A) dramatically worse than the JPN release and
B) dramatically different
And, hm, no? Besides the mysteriously missing character, if you can ignore the weird changes this is a flat upgrade. The anemic combo system is still a problem, but here there's a bit more depth by virtue of giving us an extra button to play with that has a fun debuff effect and lets more enemy interactions be relevant to play. Weird that they added so much homophobia, and the only Japanese character left is insanely racist, weird!!