Welcome to our review of Fantasy Strike, David Sirlin’s Reboot of the Fighting Game Genre.
Fantasy Strike is a colorful fighting game where fantasy meets martial arts. It focuses on depth and strategy rather than difficult execution. It’s designed for tournament play, but also to welcome you to the genre if you haven’t played other fighting games before. Online play uses the excellent GGPO networking technology. Includes several single-player modes.
Fantasy Strike looks amazing as a fighting game and in itself is quite a fun game. It is a basic 2D approach to the genre and there are quite a bit of action and options. The game tries very hard to be a fighting game and at times, it even succeeds, but your first impression of the game, it won’t be a positive one as the tutorial is one big mess.
So imagine, the narrator is telling you to hit the dummy opponent with the B-button. The screen is telling you to tap the B-button. Everything says you need to tap the B-button but on the side, it shows that B-button attacks are really implemented with another button? The legend on the side is what buttons you really need to be using. So, in reality, the game shows you B, but you need to tap X? Ok, I can see this was just a port, but damn, some editing of this part was really needed and it just shows myself the desire to put Fantasy Strike back down and remove it from my Nintendo Switch already…
Luckily I persevere and well, to be blunt, we got the review code and that does help out a lot. Full disclosure here, I would not buy the game at its current price point nor would I consider it. I think 30 is too much for this game and there are simply no reasons to grab this on a console when Smash is right there for the taking!
In itself, it is not a bad fighting game, but if you call a game redefining a genre, it better be effing awesome and that is so not the case. It looks cool, it plays well, but it is just another pea in the pod and this is so disappointing. Add on top of that the awkward tutorial as previously mentioned and you get a mediocre attempt at a fighting game.
The sole thing I really liked, the counter system, is sadly not enough to keep this game from being disappointing. When you throw an enemy, it can either hit or get countered. The Yomi counter is basically done by doing nothing at all and it does take some getting used to. I mean really, what game kicks your butt for trying to block or counterattack, right?
In conclusion, I was on a high going into this game but on a low after my first few hours of playing this game. Fantasy Strike is strangely programmed with a weird AF tutorial and some odd difficulty peaks. I had one enemy in my very first playthrough, the ninja girl, unable to even hit her in 3 out of my 4 battles. Just so many things wrong and it just did not click for me. I am skipping on giving a rating because it would be in the very low numbers and the graphics and efforts put into it do deserve more than what I am willing to give…
