Honestly really disappointed by this game. I'll start with the few things I liked before delving into the negative.
First, this is probably one of the last well made sprite based games made by a non indie-game company before Nintendo fully shifted away from that style of games, I really gotta respect the effort and dedication here, it's very fantastically done and looks beautiful. Second, Monolith really did their research with references and making all the cast faithful to how they are in their games. While I only know a handful of characters starring in this game, I got most of the references and felt they were pretty consistently written with how they were from their base games, so kudos to Monolith there too. I was a bit interested in seeing where this crazy story went which kept me going for a bit.
But...that's where my praise for this game completely ends. The gameplay is ridiculously repetitive, and struggles to strike a balance between too easy and too much padding/way too drawn out, and I say this as someone who loves grid-based strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem which this game is similar to.
A lot of early chapters are a cakewalk, but then they pad out the latter mid game chapters I got to with a million enemies that take forever to kill, and even the ones that don't take forever to kill you're incentivized to take longer to kill them anyway to use all of your moves to get more experience to make your party members stronger, so the game punishes you for getting fights done quicker. Not to mention it takes forever to move across the whole map to get to all of the millions of enemies the game throws at you. I literally used cheats to give myself infinite movement to make it faster and it STILL took forever.
Also, this game is very obviously when Monolith Soft entered their "Let's give up all of our writing integrity to cash in on otaku bait fanservice with big boobs to win over a fanbase!" phase which culminated in Xenoblade 2's horrific oversexualization of its cast, and it's clear that garbage started with Monolith's work on this game in full force. It's disgusting, plain and simple. The animations really focus hard on overexaggerated boob jiggle and they picked a ton of women with very slutty and ridiculous anime designs (and as usual in these sorts of things, the men are all dressed fine and not sexualized, it's all the women). Honestly made it really hard for me to stomach this game at times and I got really sick of it quickly.
I pushed through to Chapter 16 where the game decided to just black screen me and not respond, even after I reloaded several times, and I honestly breathed a major sigh of relief. I found out this game has another 30 chapters of this garbage and I didn't wanna put up with it any longer, so I'm happy to finally be free of this trashy game.
Honestly, I'd had higher hopes for this game given it seemed like such a cool cross over fighting game made by Monolith whose Xenoblade games I adore, but I was sadly mistaken. Very disappointed with their work here, and I hope 2 is a much better improvement in a lot of ways.
Final Playtime: 11 hours, 41 minutes.
First, this is probably one of the last well made sprite based games made by a non indie-game company before Nintendo fully shifted away from that style of games, I really gotta respect the effort and dedication here, it's very fantastically done and looks beautiful. Second, Monolith really did their research with references and making all the cast faithful to how they are in their games. While I only know a handful of characters starring in this game, I got most of the references and felt they were pretty consistently written with how they were from their base games, so kudos to Monolith there too. I was a bit interested in seeing where this crazy story went which kept me going for a bit.
But...that's where my praise for this game completely ends. The gameplay is ridiculously repetitive, and struggles to strike a balance between too easy and too much padding/way too drawn out, and I say this as someone who loves grid-based strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem which this game is similar to.
A lot of early chapters are a cakewalk, but then they pad out the latter mid game chapters I got to with a million enemies that take forever to kill, and even the ones that don't take forever to kill you're incentivized to take longer to kill them anyway to use all of your moves to get more experience to make your party members stronger, so the game punishes you for getting fights done quicker. Not to mention it takes forever to move across the whole map to get to all of the millions of enemies the game throws at you. I literally used cheats to give myself infinite movement to make it faster and it STILL took forever.
Also, this game is very obviously when Monolith Soft entered their "Let's give up all of our writing integrity to cash in on otaku bait fanservice with big boobs to win over a fanbase!" phase which culminated in Xenoblade 2's horrific oversexualization of its cast, and it's clear that garbage started with Monolith's work on this game in full force. It's disgusting, plain and simple. The animations really focus hard on overexaggerated boob jiggle and they picked a ton of women with very slutty and ridiculous anime designs (and as usual in these sorts of things, the men are all dressed fine and not sexualized, it's all the women). Honestly made it really hard for me to stomach this game at times and I got really sick of it quickly.
I pushed through to Chapter 16 where the game decided to just black screen me and not respond, even after I reloaded several times, and I honestly breathed a major sigh of relief. I found out this game has another 30 chapters of this garbage and I didn't wanna put up with it any longer, so I'm happy to finally be free of this trashy game.
Honestly, I'd had higher hopes for this game given it seemed like such a cool cross over fighting game made by Monolith whose Xenoblade games I adore, but I was sadly mistaken. Very disappointed with their work here, and I hope 2 is a much better improvement in a lot of ways.
Final Playtime: 11 hours, 41 minutes.