When I stayed with my friend last weekend, this was a Gamecube game he got for peanuts that we thought "why not give a try". It has 5 "story mode" stories to play through, but beating one of them DOES give you the credits, and given that we've used that metric for fighting games in the past on this site, I'm calling this one beaten even though I only beat 2 out of the 5 myself. I seriously doubt my opinion on it would change at all given any more play time, anyhow.

This is a fighting game by Konami based on their manga/anime Rave Master, a series I have never seen anything but adverts for like 15 years ago XP. My friend was a fan when he was younger though, and he said the story bits carried a very similar vibe from the show. There are story scenes with dialogue between fights that's sometimes funny, but ultimately pretty uninteresting to someone who knows nothing about the show like I did. Shock and horror, I know, an early 2000's licensed fighting game with a boring story :b. The only real criticism I can level against it is that these scenes aren't voice acted. For something based on a licensed property that DOES have some VA for the characters as they fight, it struck me as very odd to have literally no VA of any kind for the fairly short story scenes, not even in the Japanese version that we were playing. On a hilarious note, while the few female characters predictably have some pretty awful jiggle physics on their breasts, there's a male character how has the same physics for his BUTT, which had us absolutely in stitches with laughter when we first noticed it.

The mechanics are basically a very poor-man's Power Stone 2. It's a 4-player arena fighter with not so stellar targeting, all the stages are basically the same with no ring-outs, some characters who are obviously really poorly balanced, and a series of passives you can pick up (one of each of three kinds) as well as weapons during battle. There's a kinda cool mechanic where, instead of items, you can make characters drop the weapon they're holding, and the random usable items that drop are other characters' weapons who appear in the game. This means that ever weapon basically has two styles: a style for the person who owns that weapon, and an "everyone else" default style. It's a neat idea, but the combat is so otherwise bad and the AI is so dumb that it doesn't matter a whole heck of a lot.

The controls are kinda weird too. B is your default attack, A is a special attack, X is jump, and Z picks up and drops items (so dropping your weapon when you wanna pick up a passive happens a LOT). I haven't played Power Stone myself, so I don't know how true this is for either of those games, but for the arcade mode in this, the rule was basically that if you were one-on-one, you could combo someone into the dirt and probably perfect the match barely trying by just mashing B. But if you were fighting TWO enemies, you would almost certainly get very easily double teamed and the game would get WAY harder despite the omni-directional blocking. We only had one controller, so we couldn't play VS mode at all, although again I doubt that would've really changed my opinion on the game.

Verdict: Not Recommended. This game is a waste of your time unless maybe you're a massive Rave Master fan. There are much better Power Stone-type games on the Gamecube that came along later in its life, and if you have a Dreamcast then Power Stone is a much better choice. Given that this came out 2 years after Power Stone 2 and the year after Smash Bros Melee, it's a pretty unimpressive entry into the vast hall of licensed/cross-over 4-player party fighters on Gamecube with its unimpressive mechanics and 13 playable characters.