天下制覇

The spiritual successor to Glove on Fight, which has the best opening movie of any game ever, and boy howdy has it ever been upgraded.

Graphics look better, the engine is far more transparent (though the Engrish is hilarious… "Back stub" indeed), the character movesets are vastly expanded, and there’s a far greater variety in the fighting styles. While it is a lot of fun to button mash, counter attacks and parries are where the vast majority of your damage is going to come from, so slamming the keyboard like an epileptic ape will only get you so far. Of course, if you miss a parry, then it counts as a counter for the enemy, and if you think you can just turtle, many characters have a throw that can break guards and everybody can guardbreak by entering the "infight" mode, done only when an opponent is guarding that instantly drops the guard (though you can just put it right back up) and gives the character a speed boost for a few seconds to pummel the crap out of the turtler. It’s not that complicated though, there are only three buttons, light attack, strong attack, and defense. Most commands are your normal fighting game motions and/or double taps. Most characters can’t even jump. 

Thankfully, I really like using Kanae (since you’re forced to use her in the Story mode) for her general all around balance. I thought I’d like super speedy ninja Madoi, but a lot of her attacks require quite a bit of distance between you and the enemy (or at least, the two of you and the wall so you can actually make use of her backstabs), and her anti-air grab (22A/B) is pretty much worthless against everybody but other Madois and maybe hoppy genius acrobat Futaba. Sometimes you can chain it off her j.22B, but just as often, I seem to whiff on that. Ruki is a lot of fun to use because her attacks come out laser fast, though she has some power, range, and movement issues. Her parry is also timed a bit weird compared to most other characters. She also has a few attacks where she makes a motion, and the slash appears a moment later which are just ripe for being parried.

If you’re wondering about the mystery character in the OP video, it’s Kanae’s sister Negai. Unfortunately, she’s not unlocked when you beat the oppressively long and unskippable Story mode. Instead, arcade mode is unlocked, so I’m sure beating that with someone will unlock her. She fights like Ecoco did in Glove on Fight (based around flicker jabs), only with less range and more speed. I haven’t really played around too much with most of the other characters yet, but Makoto and her cheer squad, and Papeko’s abusive puppet boxing gloves both make me laugh, even if Makoto is slow as a glacier.

The game’s still a ton of fun to fool around with for awhile, just be prepared for the oppressively long and irritating story mode, complete with unskippable gigantic narrated wall of text to kick things off. Why did you do this to me, French Bread? The system requirements also veer towards pretty steep. My poor laptop went at about half speed when it tried to use the wrestling ring background and recording was pretty much out of the question. Even on the much faster desktop, you can still see where the FPS drops quite a bit during the fights and then things pick up again.