Recent reviews by Rhysa

The game was already "fixed" two years ago, but the 2.0 update is incredible. Combat feels fluid and satisfying, and Judy is one of my favorite characters in fiction.

It has good ideas, and graphically is an improvement over the previous game, but that's about all i can praise about the game.

Aside from technical issues, such as crashes, freezing on loading screens, and queue times being absurdly long due to how frequently the servers are unavailable, i'm mostly frustrated by how this game *feels* to play. I have 9 hours on record, but at least six of those is just me waiting in queue over the last couple days.

The game fees unresponsive, i've attempted using different controllers, but no matter what i use, all my inputs feel delayed to the point where i find myself double tapping or even mashing at times, because i can't rely on my singular button presses to perform the function i wanted to do, the control options in the game are also rather limited, and while steam big picture controller support exists, i shouldn't have to depend on it for a fighting game.

Gameplay wise i think the meter is cool, but i'm not a fan of how they've handled projectiles. I don't have anything against zoners, and in fact am a fan of some of them, but every projectile in the game is really slow, which for a character or two can be a cool tool to work with (see Laura SFV, or A.K.I. SF6), but when applied to the whole cast for the majority of projectiles, combined with the unresponsive, unprecise control of the game, it make navigating through them a nightmare. Another thing i noticed was that hitboxes feel small while hurtboxes feel large (at least for the characters i've played), which leads to this awkward combination where it's hard to land a hit when it looks like a move should hit, but it's easy to get hit when there are visible gaps. I don't know why they did it that way but it's not fun.

Overall the game feels like Flash Party with the addition of an interesting meter system. I'd still rather play the former though because at the very least that game didn't cost me $79. (i bought the dlc)

I used to test this game back in alpha and beta, and I always brought up how awful the input reader was. I ended up leaving the discord servers because they never addressed it. Years later the game launches and I get excited hoping they would finally improve how the game handles inputs but nope, still jank and clunky as always. The game looks and sounds fantastic, with fun system mechanics and lovely character designs. But actually playing it feels terribad.

Game crashes frequently, even on lowest settings at 1080p with a Ryzen9 4500HS and an RTX 3060. I understand those specs are a couple years old at this point, but there's no way they're *that* out of date. Very disappointed, was looking forward to this one.

I play a lot of platfighters and am currently a dev for one. I can say with absolute confidence that this is the first "modern take on Melee" I've played that actually gets it right.

Characters are fun with a good mix of original and familiar characters, smooth control that avoids most of the clunkiness that Melee has, and alright rollback. Not the best, but definitely not the worst.

The best way to describe this game is if smash64 had more mechanics. hitstun is high, graphics are charmingly low-poly, and there are some simplifications/modernizations that don't take away from what makes Melee fun.

Ten in a half hours in, had some performance issues but fixed them by setting my power management settings to standard and going to nVidia control panel and setting Elden Ring to run on High Performance mode and render texture quality in high performance mode as well. Have minor stutters now and then, but otherwise run a smooth 60.

Now for the game itself, it's already exceeded my expectations despite how little time I've spent with it. Streaming the game to my partner had us stopping multiple times to just stop and say "wow". The open world is wonderful and feels like I'm not wasting time to meandering off, and the combat speed is a little closer than I expected, sitting somewhere between DS2 and DS3. I feel the slower combat is actually to this game's benefit though as exploring the world is so relaxing and calm that jumping into combat is easier to transition into rather than if it had the speed of Bloodborne or Sekiro.

This is just something special.

Really disappointed.

I played a bit of the previous game MBACC and love that one to death. I've also played some UNI but not a bunch. But from what I've played it feels more like UNI than MBACC, which isn't a bad thing, but that's not really where my issues are.

I really like some of the concepts and system mechanics in the game, but my biggest issue comes from a buggy PC release and what feels like a horrible input controller.

While I haven't personally run into it, literally everyone else I know who's owned the game has said that pressing "Alt + Tab" causes the game to display a black screen and sometimes crash.

When playing online you're able to skip the intro, which is normally a quality of life thing. However, for some reason French Bread decided to make the intro the Sync Point, so if you skip the intro you're susceptible to some really bad teleporty connections. It's really upsetting that skipping the intro makes SFV rollback feel better, and that's not good rollback. That being said, if you don't skip the intro, the connections feel pretty good and the rollback does its job well. I hope more Japanese devs include rollback into their games as ArcSys and SNK have been doing. Maybe there'll be a patch soon that will make intros either not skippable, or rather have the sync point be somewhere else.

Buggy rollback aside, sometimes it'll take a while to find matches online despite the game only being a week old, and often those matches could be pretty bad, especially when coupled with the issues I mentioned earlier.

On top of that, I was worried that it was a personal issue only I had, but according to some members in the Discord, the way the game handles inputs is pretty horrible. Everything from dropped inputs, to weird restrictions to the terrible auto-combo system, it's pretty rough. The game doesn't allow hold buffering like KoF or Guilty Gear, and it doesn't allow doube tapping like in Street Fighter and some other fighters (thanks to the auto-combo system).

The auto-combo system was added presumably to help ease new players into the game, something I'm not really a fan of for a couple reasons. Reason one being that it's not something you can turn off, which if designed well, isn't really a problem as it'd feel like a natural extension of one's combo game, or it would at the very least not be much of a hindrance. I really feel they should have done what BlazBlue and GGXrd did in which they had "Technical" (standard) and "Stylish" (Simple) input methods. The latter having directional specials ala Smash Bros and auto-combos for new/casual players, and the former having the standard. The second reason that the auto-combo system is terribad is the fact that all three attack buttons will perform it. Even in KoF XIV, which has an auto-combo system you can't turn off, it's delegated to just the Light Punch button, meaning it's pretty simple to avoid doing it on accident. DragonBall FighterZ also has auto-combos on all three attack buttons, but the difference there is that Light, Medium, and Heavy all do different combos, which you can go between and use to create more interesting and intricate non-auto-combos. Type Lumina doesn't do this. All three buttons will launch you into an auto-combo unless you hold either back or down while pressing the button. The only difference seems to be how many hits each auto-combo is, but still using the same exact moves per combo, no new unique combo routes open up from there.

A lot of people have issues with the shield mechanic in the game, but honestly I think that's one of the more fun aspects. The "shield wars" you're able to have remind me a lot of Eternal Fighter Zero's "Recoil Guard" mechanic, which is essentially an extension to SFIII's parry or Garou's Just Defend in which if someone parries your attack and responds with a counter attack, you can cancel what you're doing into a Recoil Guard of your own and have these fun, tense, and hype feeling Recoil Guard battles, which feel especially good because..... You're able to do any of the moves in your moveset out of them. Type Lumina's shield doesn't allow you to do that. In Type Lumina, landing a shield is as simple as pressing or holding down the button (which takes pretty litlte skill honestly) and then pressing either A/C, B, or B+C. A or C do a launcher, B does a cross-up, and B+C does an invincible option. Like in Eternal Fighter Zero, if you get an attack shielded you're able to cancel into a shield of your own and have a shield war. I think these are pretty fun, tense, and exciting... But they feel like they lack expression and the gigantic window you have to shield make the mechanic feel shallow and lacking depth, not to mention how laggy it feels when you choose to not do a counter out of the shield.

I don't do numbers because I find them kind of meaningless and very few games are a perfect 10/10 as every game has its own issues. But what I will say is that if you haven't bought the game yet (which I hope is the case becuase otherwise this review wouldn't be very helpful), you should hold onto your money.

THAT BEING SAID

I want to support French Bread and Type Moon, especially since this is the first entry in the Melty Blood series in roughly ten years-ish. So if you *have* bought the game and aren't liking it for the same issues I'm not, I think just keeping it in the library and waiting for some patches might help. These aren't things that are impossible to fix through updates, and I think that if they're willing to, they definitely can fix these issues. But currently I'm incredibly let down and would recommend those who haven't played it to keep an eye on it for updates and maybe buy the game when either fixes come out, or when the game goes on sale. I'll update this if the changes ever come.


***EDIT***

Inputs are still wack, but the netcode was dramatically improved, good job French Bread!! :D

This game is very floaty and loose feeling, controls pretty slippery and worst of all: Constantly disconnects. Not that great, try other games like Rivals of Aether or even Super Smash Flash 2 instead.

. It is a sad attempt to ride off the nostalgic coat tails of Street Fighter II. The game advertises fast gameplay and combos, but does not deliver. As a fighting game enthusiast and coming from games such as Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, King of Fighters, The Last Blade, Samurai Showdown VI, MK 9, MK X, Marvel Vs. Capcom, Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, Super Smash Bros Melee, & Project M. I can say that this is anything but. Street Fighter III was a fighting game for it had fast gameplay and a dynamic parry mechanic which could change the tide of a game if a player was SKILLED. Here however it encourages players to spam command grabs and projectiles, has a six hit combo count as "amazing" and with the exception of about three characters, plays at a snail's pace in comparison to any of the games I mentioned above. If you are hardcore about fighting games or simply an enthusiast DON'T get this. The only person I could recommend this to would be the casual gamer because this simply does not deliver what it promises for it is simply not a worthy successor to the excelent Street Fighter III, and you can not recommend this as an entry level game for this will get new players acustomed to the slow gameplay, meaning that if they were to try any other fighting game, the speed would be too fast for them to comprehend. Don't get this, instead play Either BlazBlue, Guilty Gear or Street Fighter.