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.

I've always loved this game to death since I was a kid. I have almost 300 hours total combining endless beta and base game hours and the game's art style, music, character designs and mechanics were all incredible but I felt like over time, especially around the release of 2nd Encore, this game would face more and more changes that would really start to deteriorate the game in quality.

I always had gotten the impression that Mike Z was a giant piece of shit who was out of touch and unreasonably rude to his staff based off his dev logs on his YouTube channel (turns out I was right) and he was responsible for a lot of the ridiculous changes that game has gotten throughout time in terms of game balancing and just an overall trend of changing things that did NOT need to be changed.

But of course, an obvious factor for not being able to give this game a good review in good faith is the fact that they'd have so many updates where they would consistently keep removing things from the game, the "censorship" update that everyone talks about was just the boiling point and the changes they made with manipulating the story (The absurd changes with Big Band's story) changing character designs (Ex. Parasoul) and removing "lewd" art from a game that has always had sex appeal and its raunchiness as one of its main appeals shows how out of touch and bitter the current developers of this game are and how fucked this game has gotten over time.

I'm sure a lot of loser coomers started shitting on the game when they found out they changed the story shit with Filia and maybe they barely played at all when that update came out but I think its in extremely bad faith to defend an update that straight up removes content from a game that already has an extremely miniscule player base.

First fighting game I really got into, and I sunk around 600 hours into it.
I enjoyed my time with it, but I absolutely can not recommend this game to anyone.
The game feels very rewarding to learn, with its fun combos and resets, but it also feels extremely painful to play when these fun combos and resets are being used on you. In this game, you could get hit once and watch your character get combo'd to death for a minute straight. The only openings you have is correctly guessing how your opponent is going to 'reset' you, which is genuinely a 50/50 or a 25/25/25/25 depending on the character.
The gameplay really relies on "spam assists and try to get 1 clean hit so you can combo+reset your opponent to death" and repeat. There is no real strategic depth here, it's just a glorified training mode.
Other fighting games have a bigger focus on playing 'neutral', requiring actual thoughtful gameplay. Those games require you to fight with your opponent, and actually think 'what will my opponent do?'. You're constantly adapting and adjusting based on who you are playing, making it a very intimate experience. This game lacks this feeling entirely.

It sucks that this game has so many good, loveable characters, because they'll be stuck within this game forever.
The artstyle and animation are actually wonderful, there was a lot of effort into making everything look smooth. I also love the music.
I'll avoid talking about the big controversies this game has had, but I will mention this: this game has had numerous updates where they REMOVE content, instead of adding. Imagine paying 15 bucks for a game, and then they remove stuff. Whether or not you agree with their decision is entirely up to you (again, there's reasons for this happening that I won't get into) but I can absolutely not recommend buying a game where the product unironically is losing content over time.

Probably the single most mechanically rich fighting game on the market aside from maybe +R. I've never been any sort of fighting game purist (I started with Smash), but playing Skugs does make most other modern fighters feel kinda shallow in comparison, which is more of a compliment to Skullgirls than an insult to other games. The characters are all really unique despite the game having no shame in the games that inspired it. I really don't think there will ever be another Big Band. The tutorials are super comprehensive if a little obtuse to people new to the genre. Definitely not the best tutorials in a fighting game now but they were pretty close even a few years ago. The online is great, the visuals are great, I like how clear everything is even in a game so chaotic. It's just too bad I have no one to play it with.