Game takes forever to boot up. When it finally does I'm greeted with like thirty or however many blurbs about all the new features, and daily quests, and pro tour something something. (This is borderline malpractice. Who the hell is going to able to remember all this information? The messages ought to have been spread it out over a period of time, or failing that, just omitted entirely.)

Story mode is one round per battle (lame) so you get 15 seconds of gameplay per 2-5 minutes of dragged out comic book sequences, that are needless hard to skip. I'm sitting there mashing buttons and only after a while the "press Options to skip" prompt finally appears, even though I've been hitting Options like crazy the entire time.

Command lists are really sloppily done. Command lists aren't even the first or last item on the pause menu, they're right in the middle, so you have to hit dpad down a specific number of times each time you want to look at the command lists. On top of that it makes you select the character you want to see command lists for, which is something Super Street Fighter IV also did and something I'm completely baffled by. How often would you really need to see the command lists of a character you're NOT playing as that it would worth having to go through that extra step every single time? Anyway, once you do finally get to the command lists, it's this hastily put together mish mash of commands and text, like someone looked up a walkthrough of the the game and hastily typed in what they saw.

Pre fight loading screens have ads.

I bought the base game, but it still says Champion Edition. Imagine if you decided to buy New Generation, and ended up with Third Strike with a bunch of characters greyed out.

Did I mention the loading screens have ads?? They put ads on the loading screen, for fucks sake. Way to take me out of the game.

Initially, I bought this for Yuel and Yuel alone. But after trying her out in practice mode, the stuttery animations and spastic movements weren't doing anything for me. It was that moment that the irony dawned on me- That they went through all the trouble of 3D models and PS4 hardware capabilities only to mimic the look of a bargain bin anime fighter for PS2. How very typically Arcsys. Sure, I'll admit, the 3D intros are very cool. (Although kind of odd when voices are turned off, which is pretty much a prerequisite before playing an Arcsys fighter if you want to be able to enjoy the game in any capacity.) But the actual gameplay could have easily been handled by a Vita with only trivial visual compromises. So why couldn't I just have my Vita port?

So anyway, having lost interest in Yuel, I perused over the rest of the game's repertoire, which mostly consisted of bland generic effeminate males in armor. (The grappler character in particular came off as incredibly uninspired IMHO. Slap some Granblue armor on Zangief and call it a day. They probably tried to pass this off by making him metrosexual, but nothing about his actual moveset is interesting.) Found only one character that remotely appealed to me, which was Djeeta. So I took her in practice mode. Her super requires inputting 10 button combo in order to deal full damage, which I thought was shit. (Just let me have a super for crying out loud!! Other characters just get to have one no strings attached, what does having to input a phone number actually add, aside from taking minimum 1-2 hours of my life in order to learn the exact timing required for each button in the sequence??)

But that hardly ruined it for me. So I took her to arcade mode and played though it exactly once. Got my t-shirt. I didn't even think I'd finish arcade mode, but after each match I was like "what the hey, just one more" and before I knew it, I was at the end boss. Lucky me. I'll give the game credit for having a cohesive aesthetic (which is always neat for a fighter), cool music (I adored the final boss theme) and very slick command lists. (It actually plays a windowed video clip of whichever special you currently have highlighted- right in there in the menu screen!) The gameplay feels satisfying/snappy, but that's no surprise, being a 2D fighter. The characters are cute. Did I mention I like Djeeta? No idea what the blue hair's deal is, but I'll be damned if she isn't kawaii. At the end of the day though the game is still just a bunch of throwaway modes. I probably won't be playing this game ever again, but at least I enjoyed my time with it, for what it was worth.

One thing of note is that the game comes out of the box with the option to cast specials via a shortcut simply by pressing R1 and a different direction. This is available by default, so you can use the QCF method and the R1 method to perform the exact same attack, in the same battle. There's a grappler character whose 360 degree throw can be activated by simply pressing R1. Just R1. That's just busted. It takes away from both the satisfaction of doing the 360 and the strategy of doing it without jumping. (Why would anyone ever do it the normal way, given the option?)

If they were going to include this feature, I would have liked to also have the option to forward/backward dash using L1 and R1 respectively, for example, or R1 plus a direction. (like the run button in Mortal Kombat 3, lol) This would have allowed the game to be played using an analog stick instead of the direction pad- a boon for consoles where the dpad is not palatable for fighters, such as the Xbox 360, the PS4, the PS5, or y'know, the PS4. cough Not to mention it would just have been a good accessibility option to have in general. Honestly this was needed in fighting games a long ass time ago, especially back then on the 360 while the great fighting genre resurgence took place. And we have here Granblue which does the R1 shortcut thing for specials, but not for dashing. We were so close this time! Oh well. Maybe someday.

It's like they didn't know what direction to take this game so they just threw in every truly abysmal idea they came up with during the initial brainstorm session.
- gem system (pure anathema)
- the kamikaze mechanic (Honestly what does that have to do with Street Fighter OR Tekken?)
- six button fighter
- team mechanic

The entire and only draw to this game was seeing Tekken characters regimagined as SF characters. (both mechanically and artistically) In this regard they may actually have done such a FANSTASTIC EFFING JOB that none of the other tacked on garbage was even close to being necessary to make this game compelling. In fact, this could have been the most vanilla SF game imaginable or just a recycling of SF4's systems and that would probably have been much better. (And by probably I mean definitely. As they say, sometimes less is more.) I mean just imagine me playing the game for the first time, and listening to Dan drone on and on in the tutorials while he details the fifteen different ways you can tag out (honestly it's a wonder why team-based fighters still offer a dedicated tag button at this point) or how to kill yourself in order to become Tron for eight seconds. Or trying out a single match for the first time and being asked to select a fighter, then a costume, then a gem, then another fighter, then a costume, then a gem, then an opponent, then its costume, its gem, then another opponent, costume, and gem, and FINALLY getting into a game only to be bombarded with numbered squares all over the screen because apparently having your fingers on the rear touchpad is not ok!! Stop it!!

Oh hell, it's actually good. The combat feels exceptionally snappy, and the sprite animation is above average for a 2D sprite based fighter. The characters themselves are pretty fun and I like that there are plenty of colors to unlock. I'd say that almost half the roster is tied for my favorite character.

The game has thing called "smart steer" wherein you can do a long combo simply by mashing weak attack. (A fighter that can be played as a beatemup, well I'll be damned!) The gameplay can seem a bit shallow but it's fun and makes for a unique experience. On default difficulty the AI can just be steamrolled. Turn up the difficulty however and the opponent is able to pull off seemingly neverending juggles and combos while you sit back and watch while your health bar deplete to zero. But there's a bit of strategy in trying not to get sucked into one of those and just finishing off the opponent first. A thinking man's beatemup.
乁( • ω •乁)

As with all fighters the game arbitrarily throws in a lot of fringe higher skill mechanics that are meant for god knows who. For instance there's a meter that I never use, each character has a signature attack that depletes some of it but never enough to prevent you from using said attack. Meaning that I'd actually be punished for deciding to utilize whatever is that meter's primary purpose. (I take delight in the irony.) I also have literally never used the X button in this game outside of any tutorials/challenges that required it. Don't know what it's for, don't care.

There's a random encounter like situation here. I used to hate PS1 RPGs that had them, but what made it ok for Final Fantasy 6 to have it? So then it dawned on me that maybe it wasn't and that it was just something bad all along.

This is analogous to Sonic games. In Sonic Rush, your hedgehog moves way too fast, on a screen that has way too much crunch, to the point where no human can be reasonably be expected to react in a meaningful to anything that is happening. The seeming unawareness or deniability of this by the general gaming population is something that can probably be studied as a component of psychology, if not game design theory. I'd deem it "the Sonic effect".

So what excuse do the original Sonic games have, which also feature a fast moving character coupled with the limitations of a 2D perspective? (Mitigated only by the relatively lack of speed compared to later games.) Maybe the old games don't have an excuse? The point is however that Sonic Rush doesn't even try. In fact it does the exact opposite and goes out of its way to compound the very issues that make 2D Sonic inherently unplayable. Sonic Rush serves as a satire of Sonic games.

(There's also the soundtrack. Dear god..)

(There's also the story, which is grossly insulting to Blaze the Cat and basically female characters in general. "Scared of heights" my ass. The game has a HANG GLIDING SEGMENT.) (For that matter has Sonic ever been depicted as being "afraid" of water??)

"Technically it's not random encounters" I used to tell myself. But in practice the difference is unintelligible, and in some ways easily worse. You could finish a battle, move one pixel in the wrong direction and immediately be entered in another battle. And this could happen over and over. You could also bypass battles completely if you know how to, but it's done in a way that's indistinguishable from a bug/oversight. If that was the intent, why wasn't there implemented the ability to disable battles via a toggle or slider? (or hell an equipment! boy this game sure loves equipment)

The game's lone stealth segment is one of the FUBARed things I have ever seen. There's only one in the whole game, but its badness manages to be so notable that I've always remembered it, even back when I thought the game was good. (It was one of the first ten or so PSP games I've played mind you.) If you fail it too many times the game just forgoes it completely without asking you first. (Like a mandatory Super Guide) Whenever a game does that it's like cowardice for its bad design. Slippery Square Enix.

The game's idea of value is to spam fuck thousands of side missions that basically can be finished with your eyes closed. I think they what they actually were going for was something like a side mission generator that puts you on a random map with random enemies and loot based roughly on your current level, that you can crunch on during commutes without having to tackle heavier investment story missions, but they either must have not thought of that or decided that this was better? One of the caveats is that if you were to go for 100% completion you'd be wasting your time playing hundreds of these thoughtless side quests. The other caveat is that it's unclear how much you're supposed to ration them out across the story. Even if you were to always pick all the "Very Easy" and "Easy" missions and save the "Normal" for later on, you'd still easily be wasting more time doing this crap than playing the main story, until at one point you might become so fed up and bored from the tedium that you decide to give up and just focus on the main story more or less from now on. Given the way the game is structured, this actually seems like the intended outcome. "Wear the player out, make them learn the hard way to properly manage or outright ignore our bad design implementations."

The battle system is hilariously broken. There is literally no reason not to spam normal attack 99 percent of the time, even barring MP or AP gauge requirements. AP attacks are often just bad normal attacks that require more windup and consume AP. And the fact you can regularly exceed max MP means, that in effect, you never actually have "full" MP. The distinction of full has no meaning. What good is 121 MP out of a max 121 if it's less than the 165 you had just minutes before? Hell what good is 165 if you can potentially have even more the next time an MP payout rolls out. You're thereby discouraged from ever using damage dealing spells except during the invincibility star esque all-spells-cost-0 state, during which I'm like "aww yess time to spam projectiles!!" until it goes away at which point I'm like "oh crap I wasted MP when I didn't mean to" because it goes away completely without warning.

The materia melding system is also completely a joke. The gist of it is you can combine two of the same to get a more powerful one, any other combination generally results in a dud, or just the same. I remember being so experimental during my first playthrough, and trying out all the combinations, but looking back now, I really don't know where I got the energy/enthusiasm. There is really nothing here. Same with steal ability. I remember me going out of my way to check out all the cool shit you can steal. (which ironically is like me helping the game along, and even back then I kind of understood that) There is nothing worth stealing. All the loot in the game is the same shit over and over.

For the whole game you have only two equip slots and the game loves to award you with the same redundant pieces of equipment over and over, of which there seem to be an unnecessary amount of, seeing as, as I said, you can only equip two. "This prevents poison" Ok but this other one prevents poison and burn? So why would I equip that? sells it Then I get another one later from completing a quest, and I'm like "oh cool an equipment and this one is new!! Oh wait a second.."

I don't even remember how I managed to beat the game in the first place. During my last playthrough, I got stuck at Nibelheim. I have to wonder if I never actually beat the game the first time around and actually used a guide. Whatever the case I have no memory of how I got past it. Maybe I was never stuck in the first place? But it arguably doesn't matter as the game is an incredibly sad grind either way. I'll admit the ending was good, assuming you even get to see it.

For what it's worth, I thought the game was amazing the first time I played it, minus one stealth segment. The slot wheel system (which probably nobody fully understands the mechanics of but you're not meant to anyway) is also used to good stylistical effect, and at times unpredictably mind blowing.

Imagine having the talent/resources to create such gorgeous sprite animation, and wasting it on something this horrible.

Every kick and punch in the game is competing with each other to be the most off the wall, creative thing you've ever seen. The end result is a gawky mess. There's a character who walks backwards by using prehensile hair as legs. (even though she walks forward using her own legs... yeah) There's another character who can make her skeleton leave her body and fight with her skeleton instead. Because.. why not I guess. What's wrong with just normal punches and kicks? No, that's boring, every attack needs to be like, "her tits become snakes and the snakes grab a chair and whack you with the chair".

Aside from the sheer tryhard aesthetic his is an by-the-numbers 2D fighter. All the same pitfalls that apply to Japanese made games are unapologetically copied here. Tutorials (with lots of reading. "Read, bitch!!" That you can skip through and just fulfill the objectives.) and I guess "main" modes that you can use to recite all the phone numbers you've memorized in training modes. If you want to, that is. Did I mention this is totally one of those games where your character's color is determined by what button you pressed to select them? (and obv X is not the default color, and O certainly does not cancel / go back)

The Vita port is plagued with additional issues like tiny text and stupidly blurry menus. Therefore wading through the tutorials is made a hassle. There's one that requires you block nine mixup combos with increasing difficulty. Umm, no. Guys. If you already told us how to block high and low, we can figure out the rest on our own. The tutorials don't need to make us masters of the game. (Except in the sense that, a properly designed game is essentially an extended tutorial for whatever the final level/boss is. But that obviously doesn't apply here, since we're talking about a standalone tutorial mode included in the game, like some PC CD-ROM game released in the eighties.)

The backgrounds are also completely static. Like, the game is saying, omg check out how oozing with personality I am!!11 Oh you want animated backgrounds? no, no, stupid, as long as the gameplay is accurately recreated that's all that matters. Don't be superficial, idiot.

The degeneracy and aesthetic tackiness of V Pokemon almost turned me off until I began to realize that they don't function any differently. Overpowered basic pokemon always existed. And certain V Pokemon can actually evolve. So it's still Pokemon TCG at the end of the day, you just may need to squint a little to read what the cards do.

Inputting codes though... man. It's simulated poverty. "The codes are so cheap on Ebay!" I initially thought. "What a steal!" But you're technically paying an additional price with the time and effort to punch in those codes, and crossing them off. It does not get better.

You can choose from 112 shirts! You actually have to wait the game to load each individual shirt as you toggle through them! Imagine someone actually going through all of them before picking one. Har har... >.>;

Hair and accessories are preloaded, thankfully. But while moving from the left column which has the shirts and stuff, to the right column where the color sliders are located, doing so moves one the sliders to the right a little, slightly changing your color whether or not you intended on it. So each time you make an adjustment, you have to choose which of your fine tunings to 'sacrifice'.. and that's assuming you remembered to move the cursor up/down to the least important color.

I start the game and walk into town. Every door is locked. There is just one NPC and he says "I don't know you. Why are you talking to me?" Honestly, I don't know either.

Time in-game moves forwards 10 minutes every literal five seconds. Tick, tock. Hurry up idiot!

I started a new game with the intent of picking a slower rate of time passing. (And this time I made my pants brown instead of blue!) Only to realize there is no such setting when starting a new game and that I must have imagined it. (My mind must have gotten mixed up with a different game that has such a setting, or one of a similar nature?) Thankfully, starting a new game didn't overwrite blue pants, so I went back to him. I find the stores are unlocked because they don't open until 9:00 AM, which frankly, is quite a bit too long for a videogame to ask me to wait while I doing nothing. The game has a skip intro option when starting a new game, which I checked off when starting brown-pants. I have to say, it's pretty nifty, but I wonder why it doesn't fast forward you to 9 AM on the first day.

Also, really funny, one of the loading screens when starting a new game has an illustration of the Vita, with explanations for what each button does. But there is no way to view this screen manually. I guess I could take a screencap but the Vita doesn't have a capture button, and hell, does anyone remember how to take screencaps on a Vita? It's probably a pain in the ass, and requires holding the system sideways or something. (I suppose I could Google it, using the Vita's built in web browser. gasp awe Take that, Nintendo Switch!!)

Every now and then, while I am in a particularly meditative state, I wonder if I should give the game another shake, and at least see what the hell is in those stores. But I figure that, most likely, nothing substantial will come of it, and I'd just go back to playing Puzzle Quest. (Not to mention I'd have to force myself away from Puzzle Quest.) And after all, it's an indie game, which means that the chances of it being good are basically zero, if all the other indie games in my Switch and Vita purchase histories are any indication.

I never thought this was a bad game per se, just very low budget, and very sobering to a young X series fan who had a much higher impression of the series. The vehicle stage for instance is just a closed loop that repeats until you finish your objective. SO disappointing. Another example: the final boss suddenly has you fighting in outer space with no explanation.

Given what they had to work with the bosses are actually quite varied and creative. Also the game design is deceptively smart in some respects- running speed is absurdly slow so you don't run into whatever you're trying to shoot, and while jumping Zero swings his blade on an X axis instead of a Y, making it easier to connect attacks in a 3D space.

The idea of an X game where X is not at the forefront is so highly intriguing to me that I wish it was done in a better game or remade. It's clear that Axl was meant to be stand-in for X if not replace him altogether. His armor design is less simplistic than X's and therefore looks like the more natural partner to be paired with Zero. Although it's not clear what Axl's armor design is actually supposed to say about him. ("Let's add racing stripes." "Okay.")

It's also apparent in retrospect that you're meant to toggle between Zero and Axl liberally as the situation calls for it, but that isn't how I actually played the game and I imagine I am not the only one. Usually I tried to stick to one character throughout the entire stage. Maybe the game ought to have had it so saber and buster attacks were available at the same time and have your onscreen character automatically switch to reflect whatever you were using that instant. But then again, maybe that would've still been broken albeit for a different set of reasons.

Anyway I did actually beat the game so that's something, at least.

Zero charm.
Generic characters.
Gaudy overuse of particle effects.
Makoto still not fixed.
Jin severely nerfed. (why?? Is it so wrong that playing as him was fun??) (Also, if he's not with the Librarium anymore then why is he still wearing his uniform? Show me him in tattered Jedi robes or something.)

Ragna is great, though, isn't he? Be all like "Tch!" and "Whatever!" and "You bitch!". What a deep, original, and likeable protagonist! (And I know he's the protagonist, because the game says so.)

EDIT: Added a star bc Makoto is great. Such a unique and fun mechanic. It's a wonder why there aren't more characters like this in fighting games that come with their own UI elements. As for why I was hung up on the size and location of her meter before, I was playing the PSP version, so maybe that's why. On the Vita's bigger screen/resolution it's not so bad. (And in general the timing comes more naturally to me the more I play. Well, aside from her supers- Those definitely still require looking down.) I just wish the game offered more to do. There's arcade mode, and everything else is more of the same, only harder. (and if arcade mode lets me increase the difficulty then why even bother with the other modes..) Abyss mode still does this annoying thing where it interrupts the fight with "here comes a new challenger" every so often. It seems to only happen after I deal a certain amount of damage, so there IS some point to playing out that fight (as opposed to it being a meaningless fight that's going to get inerrupted anyway, as was the case in a previous installment), but it's still kind of off putting.