Genre: Fighting, Indie
Developer: Sirlin Games
Publisher: Sirlin Games
Platform(s): PC [reviewed], PS4, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Jul 25, 2019
Price: $29.99
Fantasy Strike is an interesting fighting game for a number of reasons. Helmed by David Sirlin, the guy behind the famed Street Fighter II HD Remix, and featuring a combat system that allows newcomers to play casually while giving hardcore fans a depth of options for competitive play. It’s a little something for everyone, something which doesn’t always pan out for games that try it.
Thankfully, Fantasy Strike, silly name aside, comes through where it really counts. Combat is key to a fighting game and this one not only manages to keep thing stupidly simple but mixes up to combat styling that Street Fighter and other fighting game fans are going to be thrown for a bit of a loop. It manages to put both newcomers and fighting veterans on the same page starting out.
The game pulls this off thanks to the ultra-simple single-button gameplay style. This is the perfect sort of game to introduce newcomers to the genre without dumbing things down. Players can use what they learn in Fantasy Strike and apply it to deeper fighting games when they feel the time is right. And that’s the real beauty of the game, bringing in players to what many see as an overly complex genre of gaming.
It’s like the team behind Fantasy Strike ripped out all the overly complex and needlessly confusing mechanics that have left modern fighting games bloated difficulty walls for new players and still managed to create something unique in its own right. This is about making smart choices during a battle to outwit the person you might be playing against.
The game starts up on your first playthrough with a forced tutorial to understand the game. This is vital in understanding how to play, but it’s also fairly quick and painless. You aren’t going to be running a certain move or scenario dozens of times trying to land some weird combo or special cross-counter or anything like that.
What’s important to understand is that Fantasy Strike is very different yet strangely familiar. Gone are rolling or dashing of any kind, as well as any sort of crouch ability, which does feel a little odd in 2019. Combat has been simplified into three attacks per character that require less worry as gone is the need to remember complex movesets for high, mid, and low attacks. Seems really limiting, and it is, but the game makes up for it in some interesting ways.
Your three attacks include your basic attack and two special attacks that differ based on who you are playing with. Characters are broken up into classes which is really nice as playing each in a certain class will feel familiar. I love pressing the attacking in fighting games so jumping between the two Rushdown characters felt easy and rewarding. If you love Zoners, they got you covered, if you want grapplers the game has your back, or you can even play the Wildcard characters that really mess with your playstyle.
While there aren’t a lot of characters in Fantasy Strike, at least they give you a full cast that doesn’t require a season pass just to be able to play with core characters. I’m looking at you Street Fighter V. Each character can use their two special attacks to help mix up the combat and each fighter is pretty balanced, although some will punish others of a different gameplay style at upper difficulty levels.
Gameplay is simple with the limited buttons, you can map them to anything, but the characters do have a lot to offer, even with only a few buttons in play. Many moves will alter depending on what you are doing at any given time during a fight. The basic attack will be different depending on if you are moving, in the air, or even standing still in many cases. This works really well in Fantasy Strike as jump is mapped to its own dedicated button. No more trying to pull off a move and whiffing it because you pressed up on accident.
There are no quarter-circles here, no long combo chains to memorize, just simple combat that rewards understanding the character you are playing. Hell, combos aren’t even that huge a thing as a three-hit combo is about as intense as it gets. But don’t scoff that this isn’t some Killer Instinct level stuff as even a well-placed three-string combo can rip seventy-five percent of your life away. This is about knowing when to punish the other player, something made more feasible here because there is less to worry about.
On the topic of life, I need to mention that the life bar system is replaced by a sort of segmented life block system. Instead of a bar that depletes as you get hit at different rates depending on your attack being light, medium or heavy, blocks are removed when you take damage. This means going into a fight you know how many hits are going to fell your enemy in combat. For newcomers, this isn’t important, but higher level players will be doing the math and adjusting their playstyle depending on who they are facing.
This makes the fighting feel a lot more calculated than in other fighting games. Instead of trying to memorize a string of combos like in Mortal Kombat, or chain moves together in Killer Instant, or even preying of character weaknesses in Street Fighter, Fantasy Strike feels more balanced and made me feel I was on a more even playing level. Nothing that happened was beyond my comprehension, and the more you play the better you become at seeing moves coming your way.
But where the really cool stuff happens is with the counter, or the Yomi Counter as the game calls it. Fighting games handle counter differently, and Fantasy Strike is no exception. Street Fighter loves its parry system, Tekken and the like love side-stepping, Blazblue does the counter-assault thing, but Fantasy Strike does nothing. That’s not to say that a system isn’t in place, rather you don’t do anything to perform a counter.
This sounds crazy but it makes sense in practice and ads a whole new player to the fighting experience. Once you learn to Yomi Counter effectively, you’ve moved up into the serious level play the game offers. It works by not moving at all. Now, this only works against throws, but if an opponent initiates a throw and you don’t press any buttons at the moment of impact, you’ll automatically counter it, do damage, and earn yourself a full special meter.
This can turn the tide of a battle in some spectacular ways. Because combos are small, understanding them is easy. This means your opponent might love pulling a small combo that ends in a devastating throw, but you can counter it by doing nothing at the right moment. You might be taking damage and your instinct if you hold back to block, or you might be blocking only to get caught in the throw after the distance is closed. But if you understand the Yomi Counter, you can shift the balance in an instant and press the attack on a moments notice.
This means that while the gameplay is laid out in a simple manner, what you can do with that system runs fairly deep, especially for an indie fighting game. More often than not indie fighting games are paying homage and using dated combat systems, so it’s really nice to play a fighting game that really feels like it’s offering a new playstyle that is fun to learn. You don’t need to master the Yomi Counter to beat the game in single-player, but learning it really opens up the game and lets you know you are ready for the more competitive cross-platform play online.
But his is where we jump into what isn’t so great about Fantasy Strike. While the basic tutorial is great, I really would have loved something a little deeper as it’s only done from the perspective of one of the main characters. You can go into a practice mode and spar, but I wanted something deeper, especially as the game does offer up a lot of videos on each fighter and their movesets. I just don’t like having to watch a video and then trying to recreate what I saw from memory in the practice mode. I wish these weren’t video and instead of actual tutorials.
Another thing I don’t like, and I might get flak for this, is the character designs. You get two generic story heroes, which I can forgive as every game tends to throw a Ryu and Ken for players to start with, but the rest of the cast just doesn’t feel memorable. There’s a ninja girl who looks bland outside the rainbow playdough hairstyle, a World of Warcraft Panda reject that loves money, the bland fire archer and water dude, none of which are memorable.
But there are a few standouts as Valerie, generic name aside, uses a cool paintbrush, DeGrey and his ghost girlfriend, and a dude that looks like that fish thing from The Shape of Water. What’s strange is that the disparity between the cast is so large. They don’t all feel like they should be sharing the same universe let alone the same fighting game.
The story mode is also just plain trash as it’s only one step above Street Fighter V before it got its story mode. There are no stakes to be had, no reason for me to become invested in any characters interests or anything of the sort. One character wants to fight because he’s the Ryu archetype, another the Sakura shtick, and one because guards took her lesbian lover and murdered her. See what I mean about being all over the damn place. And the lesbian thing doesn’t even come up in her ending as she wins and just becomes the town painter or something.
Graphicly everything looks nice and colorful and characters don’t ever get lost inside animation effects or the environment. What I don’t like is the plastic look everyone has and the different shaders being used on faces. Guys get shaders and girls are peach smooth. It makes everyone just feel that much more out of place. As if a clock repairman fighting a literal dragon doesn’t feel out of place.
The best way to describe the look is like playing Street Fighter IV without the paintbrush overlays and any of the filters. Sure, it’s smooth and looks okay, it just feels a little cheap, something not helped by the mostly lackluster character designs. I’ve played for a few hours and I can’t tell you half of the names of the game’s roster.
Still, Fantasy Strike has a lot of offer both new players and seasons vets. It’s an indie game so it’s a smart move to focus on the fighting mechanics and less on the visuals, and even less on the story. This is a great start to a new potential series, but I just hope the next outing gives us a more unique roster and a story worth writing about.
“Fantasy Stike strikes the perfect balance that allows newcomers to easily learn and veterans to dive deep into its gameplay”
Final Score: 4/5
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