In every post about fighting games, I always note how awful I am at them. Well, I still am but I picked this one up specifically because it’s said to be beginner-friendly. Indeed, not only does it have simple buttons so that you don’t have to learn complex technical inputs but it also includes one of the most comprehensive in-game tutorials I’ve seen. Not being familiar to the franchise, the characters are all new to me and feel like generic rip-offs of better established characters. But the gameplay seems solid and the art looks nice enough. I’d planned to learn this better but unfortunately I’d hurt my hand recently and that cut my time with it shorter than I might have liked.
The story follows from Cygames’ previous titles so I just had to infer lots of things from context. It’s set in a world called the Sky Realm in which the inhabitants live on large, floating islands. The plot is centered around Gran, the captain of the flying ship the Grandcypher, whose life is linked to that of a girl, Lyria, with mysterious powers. In this game, they’re surprised when one of their crew members Katarina is seemingly loyal to the previously defeated Erste Empire again. They discover that many other allies have been affected after coming into contact with strange constructs. They trace the plot to the fallen angel Belial and Beelzebub, a so-called Astral who invaded the Sky Realms long ago. Travelling to confront the villains at Pandemonium, they end up resetting the world, causing an alternate female version of Gran, Djeeta to be present in reality. They must repair reality, bring the angels back to the world and somehow keep all of their loved ones alive.
Obviously the story doesn’t matter that much to me as I don’t know the setting, but having the alternate versions of the main character enter the picture did catch my attention. In the end, this is still a fighting game so you beat up everyone in sequence and the story bits are just to showcase small details of each character. I do note that the story mode is extremely easy with the exception of some boss battles which involve some special mechanics. This mode might help you gain some quick familiarity with what each character can do but it’s not real training because its rules are too different. For single-player vs CPU, there’s also Arcade mode which is just a short series of fights, and that’s including the not-so-secret secret bosses, and there’s a 100-fight challenge mode in which your health carries over. Unusually, I found it necessary to raise the difficulty level quite high in order for the CPU to give me a decent challenge.
A large part of that is likely due to the ease of use systems. There are dedicated buttons for blocking, specials, a unique power and even dashing. All special moves can be made by combining just a direction and the special button for example, so you can get them out faster and more reliably. Auto combos mean that even newbies can do simple combos for decent damage. You can still choose to do things the hard way, as inputting the full sequence manually does slightly more damage. But I noticed that being able to reliably use fireball-type attacks wins you so many fights against the CPU. Plus it’s so satisfying to finally be able to do moves that usually require 360° or 720° directional inputs. The in-game tutorials are really good as well as they cover all of the usual mechanics of fighting games and allow you to practice as many times as you want to get it right. You can also set it up to show exact frame data so you can understand how some moves have a frame advantage versus blocking or other moves.
The two main characters of the story, Gran and Djeeta, have almost identical movesets and are recognizably the game’s versions of Ken and Ryu from Street Fighter despite the vastly different designs. There are more so-called shoto-style characters as well with some variations. But you can also recognize variations of other characters so the flamboyant Ladiva is this game’s Zangief equivalent, Seox is similar to Wolverine from the Marvel vs. Capcom games and so on. But there are also novel characters with more unique mechanics such as Zooey who fights alongside her dragon and the very weird joke character Lowain. The game uses an anime art style that looks okay to my sensibilities but isn’t particularly striking either. I’m also so bothered that many characters use famous names such as Lancelot and Siegfried but their backstories in the game seem to have nothing to do with their legendary equivalents. It adds to the feeling of this being very generic.
All things considered, I’d say this really is an ideal way to learn fighting games in general. It’s not too fast-paced so even someone like me can tell what’s going on and what I’m supposed to do. The simple button inputs do away with the frustration of not being to get out the moves that you know you need and the simple combos and comeback mechanics ensure that you can do decent damage. The cost is that the characters aren’t as iconic or instantly recognizable as those from other franchises, so most players will likely feel little connection with them. It’s a fair enough trade off that I think I’d have loved to properly dig into it and give it the time it deserves. Unfortunately I’ve hurt my hands recently so it’s just not the best time for me to try to get good with fighting games. Maybe I’ll come back to this one day but it’s more likely that I’m going to be distracted by the next new thing.
