

Rather than following your character, the camera floats freely around the arena allowing your fighter to move out of focus or even all the way to the background, making it difficult to keep track of what you’re doing. The best defense may be Kill la Kill The Game: IF’s incomprehensible camera. Putting stat boosts and a match-winning attack at the end of a minigame separates the prospect of winning from your skill in combat, and undermines the fight as a whole. I’m not a fan of injecting random, tide-turning game mechanics into fighting games. There’s little incentive not to try it as often as possible, especially if you’re outmatched, which breaks up the flow of the fight in an unwelcome way.

If you can win multiple challenges in a row, you’ll charge up a match-ending super move called a Lost Fiber Secret Art.Īnd if you start a Bloody Valor and lose? You lose a little health. If you initiate Bloody Valor and win, you do it again to gain an even larger advantage. It's a rock-paper-scissors-style power-up mechanic, letting you spend half of your special meter to gamble for a battlefield advantage (such as healing your wounds or recharging your super meter) and raise your Ketsui level, which makes you generally more powerful. If you don’t know it, or recently used Bloody Valor already, then trading strings of hits doesn’t feel particularly enthralling when dishing it out, and can be exasperating when you have to take it.īloody Valor is ostensibly a “comeback” tool, offering some recourse when you’re in a one-sided fight, but it does more harm than good. You can spend half your special meter to burst out of combos using the Bloody Valor system, a mid-match minigame-style mechanic, but it doesn’t do a great job of teaching you this. There’s a system in place where blocks beat attacks, guard breaks beat guards, and dodges beat guard breaks, but with an air dash that can reach your opponent from any distance and a lot of single-button combos, it still feels like just rushing in and mashing an attack button is the optimal strategy. Though the attacks and fighting styles distinguish one character from another, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that you’re just mashing your way to victory.
