The Good
1 button moves:
Loved it in Rising Thunder, love it in this, wish there were more fighting games that did this.
Interesting characters:
Some cool movesets, I like them, surprising amount of variety for specials mapped to 2 buttons.
(Some) Good visual feedback:
I like that armoured moves are blue and invincible are white.
OTG-able state is a bit hard to see at times.
Menu system:
Flows really well, very few clicks to get into a quick match, don’t have to go into a stupid menu and hit 6 buttons, ending with an obscure “Apply”, just to set my online character.
Movelist:
Having a single screen movelist is the kind of idea that makes me wonder why other games don’t do this (Guilty Gear is forgiven for not doing this.)
One suggestion: Please consider adding a “more info” type mode where you can select individual moves and find out more properties about them, I feel like that would be a nice middle ground between having basic move description to get you going and not having to leave the game to find out the complexities of a move.
The Not So Good
Graphics:
They are okay, not terrible, but they feel a bit cheap. Shader feels a bit out-of-the-boxy.
Models:
Midori looks really weird. I get that he’s meant to be bigger in stature, but something isn’t right about his proportions and the way he moves or stands. He’s unsettling to look at.
I’m glad Valerie (seemingly) stopped smiling with her teeth, that was not a good smile.
Online:
If this game had a bigger online player base, my opinion might be better as I would be paired with people closer, but so far I find it a bit lacking.
Other fighting games I’ve played perform better even when the opponent is as far/or further away than these ones are.
If the game play was fairly straight forward, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but the timing for reacting to and punishing things in this game is surprisingly tight at times for the pacing the game has otherwise.
I like that there are crossup moves etc. but when a connection is orange or lower (or flickering between orange and green), these moves can become more frustrating to deal with than they are intended to be.
Hitboxes:
This game has some janky hitboxes.
I am against hitboxes that don’t make sense with the animation.
There are various moves in this game where the hitboxes just leave me wondering why something worked.
I’m not talking about Valerie’s jB, I understand that’s made to be a tricky move, but others like Rook’s fA just seem silly.
Why does Geiger’s jC cross up? It doesn’t look like something that should cross up with the animation it has.
There are other moves where I somehow jump into a hitbox that looked like it should have disappeared half a second ago.
Frame data:
This is incredibly subjective, but some moves in this game feel like they should be punishable, but either I’m timing it really badly or they are safe at most distances (online might play a part).
Sometimes the plus frames seem a bit too generous, but again, it’s too subjective for me to do anything other than pout and say I think it should be different.
Throws:
This one is probably one of my biggest and also one of the surprises for me.
I have been following along with the games development and I thought the Yomi counter system sounded really fun.
I tried the game out during the Fig campaign and realised that I wasn’t super keen on having f/bA as the throw button because the moves you get from f/bA generally have quite slow startup, so it’s not good when you incorrectly space your throw (maybe that’s the point, either way, it’s not what I like).
Then the throw button was introduced.
Great, I love being able to trigger throw on its own so I can easily test the distance visually and it’s also really nice to see when my opponent is goes for a throw but fails. It’s even a nice bluffing tool that way.
The biggest problem with this is that I’ve spent years playing games where countering a throw means pushing the throw button in (anticipatory) reaction, and now I’ve got this game that markets itself with “You can play this with friends who play different fighting games”, but instead of my throw button countering a throw, it just causes me to get thrown.
It’s a tricky subject, I like the idea of the do-nothing counter, but with a throw button, it just feels super awkward.
Healthbar / Damage:
I really like the idea of life being in chunks that are so easily identified but one of the consequences of this is that watching a 3 or 5 hit move do only 1 damage feels really unsatisfying.
I get the reasoning, but it doesn’t have any visceral satisfaction to it.
I’d also personally like prefer if there was a more precise way of showing how long it takes for a flashing health bit to go back to safety. This game has a lot of great visual feedback, but that part is really difficult to gauge when it doesn’t need to be.
General Confusion:
Having to hold down the jump button to jump on wake up is not intuitive. I didn’t even know this was a thing until I found someone on here asking about Rook’s C. I’d probably make the buffer for detecting and acting on jump a lot bigger when a player is knocked down.
Some moves also have strange properties.
For example, I know Setsuki’s C>C can be jumped out of, but it looks weird when people do jump out of it because there are other times where it clearly hits a jumping opponent.
Presumably this is due to pre/early jump frames having command throw …avoidance properties, but it doesn’t look convincing.
The command throw avoidance by jumping but not avoiding normal throws is also awkward and goes against the lessons learnt from most other games.
Overall / TL;DR
I like the game, I think it’s got a lot of potential, but there are a few things that end up making even the good games I have feel frustrating at times (online performance/hitboxes/throws feeling weird)
I bought the game because I love fighting games, dislike spending hours practicing combos and was already a big fan of Yomi/Codex, however, in its current state, I don’t feel comfortable recommending my friends to buy it at the full price.
I will keep playing and am hopeful that future iterations will get to a place where I can confidently tell friends to get it.