a beautifully crafted game tragically held back by its lead gameplay designer. mike z's views on fighting games are just so bizarrely detached from what i find fun about them, and it's reflected in the game's mechanics to a despicable amount. to me, this game feels like a homunculus of mechanics from games that mike z played without the deeper understanding of why they worked in their respective games. it ends up playing like a game with a lot of combo/team expression, but basically no interaction between players. honestly, even mvc has a more interesting back/forth due to its fast paced and skillful movement—this game just feels like there's nothing you can do in neutral besides call assist and start pressure. there's a lot to say about whether you should strive to make a fighting game fully balanced, but i think this game is just too far off the deep end to be fun for me at any level of play. broken games are only fun to a specific extent. i like doing the combos and playing bigband trumpet but i do not want to play the rest of the game; which is such a shame because it's one of the games that really inspired me to play and improve regularly all those years ago.

if they ever made a sequel, i would definitely tone down the absurd amounts of unseeable resets the game has, tuning it more similarly to something like dbfz, maybe adding a universal defensive mechanic that has a direction agnostic input to beat left/right mix. there also needs to be far stricter cooldowns on assists in neutral or general re-tuning of their power. i will say, though—in its current state, it is a pretty fun game to watch.