It's a bit convoluted with a lot of Proper Noun terms that I had to look up to keep track of, but I'm invested in where the story is going, the characters are much better written than I thought they'd be, and the actual fighting game parts are fun. The highs were pretty high and the lows weren't that low.

I will say parts of the localization didn't age very well in my opinion. There are some outdated quirky pop culture jokes that did not land for me, and what feels like a lot of adding lines/changing some of them that didn't need to be for the script. As a result, some of the dialogue felt a bit bloated and the comedic timing of some jokes felt off. The prose itself reads fine outside of this, and it's a pretty impressive translation effort for its time.

There's also some slurs here and there that are definitely a product of their time and that I am sure were not there in Japanese (I played with jp voices on) so I won't hold it against the team that much, but I'm mentioning it in case anybody wanted a heads up.

All in all, it's a good time and you can get it for pretty cheap these days, so it's worth a try. It has an easy mode of sorts if you aren't good at fighting games and just want to enjoy the story. Like I said, I played it in Japanese but the English dub is perfectly fine too and has some good performances.