Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes - Played through this with each of the 23 characters + 1 unlockable boss (launch version sans DLC and balance patches) and I still don't know what the title means. It's fighting in anime style (not cel-shaded polygons, big sprites!), so you got more movement options than a 90s fighting game and everybody got some normal attacks that look like specials or even super moves of a 90s fighting game. You gotta catch your opponent somehow when they are dashing around, so these two gameplay aspects logically go together.
The confusing
story is told (or rather alluded to) in the arcade mode's cut-scenes in visual-novel style, fully voiced, with. A lot. Of. Dramatic. Pauses. (I like the voices, especially during fights: The humming of Phonon, Wagner sometimes saying SCHEISSE when hit.) You get thrown into a bigger story that is nearing its end. I read that the prior iteration did have a non-interactive story mode with hours of VN content. Couldn't they have cobbled together a recap for newbies? Hrmpf. Night in Tokyo, opening to another dimension, evil guy tries to bring on the apocalypse. It's all very serious and mature, except for all the anime uwu humor (which I'm mostly OK with) and the guest character from another game who is aware she is a guest character from another game (bit too much for my taste).
All our beloved anime tropes are there: woman with big breasts, pretty boy with wig made of a slain Pikachu etc. The
characters not only look diverse from cute to monstrous, there is also much variety in how they feel to play. Chaos controls a beast, Merkava can fly, Carmine has attacks that drain his own life (very cool).
The
controls are 3 buttons for light/mid/strong attack + special button for various things (throws, shield, extra movement options, super move). Specials are easy to do Hadoken inputs (and quite often the result is a projectile) and Dragon Punch inputs (and quite often the result is a DP). Except for Vatista, the charge character. Down, down + button is another common input for specials. Holding a button for a bit can also have an effect (Mika hard punch deals more damage, Eltnum angles her shots). You got an ex meter to buff your strong specials. You can pause and look at a list of your specials, which also displays if they got ex properties, if you can do them in the air, and if they have specific follow-up moves. You can hammer light attack for an easy combo with anyone (that combo can be buffed as well). A lot of lolrandom inputs will also combo, but many of the specific combos you are shown in the extensive training modes have rather strict timing. This isn't Killer Instinct.
The signature thing of this game is the
GRD (grid) system, which is another meter that fills up by moving forwards and other shit. In regular intervals, the fighter with more GRD gets buffed.
Anybody can beat the boss on low difficulty, which I'm fine with, but the
AI is kinda limited in general. If you increase the difficulty level (5 in total), you will see some very impressive combos, but other skills don't improve as much. Pick highest difficulty and play as Carmine, keep your distance, spam projectiles. You don't need to understand the finer points of the system and you still got a 90 % chance of winning a fight. Hehe.
I know that as a
single-player experience you shouldn't expect much from fighting games, but even with my properly lowered expectations for the genre I have to say, thorough training options aside, this is basic. I don't like the superficial choice between arcade mode & time attack & score attack, since they could have fused these concepts into one mode tracking everything. Alternatively, they could have made these modes more distinct (like opponents only dodging and fleeing in time attack instead of fighting as usual, score items appearing in score attack). There is also a survival mode: You keep your accumulated ex between fights and even get your health back. Call me strict and narrow-minded, but I feel in survival mode you should not get
any health back between fights. But Carmine complained that a strict survival mode is "racist crap", and the developers at French Bread gave in to his demands because they are woke. (Hmmm, if you only kept ex by default and you could exchange that for a slither of health, would that be interesting?) Oh and: WHERE ARE THE MINI GAMES? I WANT TO DISASSEMBLE A BUS WITH MY FISTS. Playing gets you some virtual currency. Even if you only win one fight and then the game beats your ass and you rage-quit, you get some currency, which is nice (…ahem not that I would know from direct experience, somebody told me that uwu). Succeeding at a combo challenge, just one combo, gives currency as well. You use this currency to unlock options for ogling at drawings and listening to the music (very good music by the way). You can also fiddle with the colors of the characters. That's it.
This game gets the highest praise from the people who play fighting games competitively at the highest level. I imagine if I had a deeper understanding of how the parts interact I would see the beauty of it. Though I do have an intuitive dislike for how damage dealt can be affected so much by combo & distance penalty so that an attack by itself can yield less damage than a 2-hit combo with that attack as its second hit. I suppose it all makes sense in the big picture.
https://inbirth.wiki.gg/ - lore-heavy wiki
https://mizuumi.wiki/w/Under_Night_In-Birth/UNI2 - mechanics in depth
I just read there that the diagonal-forward hard normal of Phonon got updated. Like five minutes into the game I instantly noted that move is fucked up because that was a whipping covering 90 % of the ground.
Surely this will get a balance patch. They changed that to 100 %