KONSUI FIGHTER Reviews

I am torn! Forewarning: I think indie fighting games are awesome and there should be a never ending supply of them. As long as a game has a unique point of view and strong spirit, I'm going to probably recommend it. That's just my bias. First, game play, which (for me!) is most important: I think there is a subset of fighting game player that very specifically loves games with the most unhinged combos baked into the game, and, well, while that is not me and I almost never seek out this srt of thing, I nonetheless bumped into this game's infinite protection system almost instantly: this game allows you to not just do light->light, but heavy->heavy, and when a character has a heavy that moves forward... yeah, you got ground stun corner carry infinites, and the only reason you'll drop them is either the game just giving you an artificial "you can no longer cancel" situation after 4 reps or by the corner messing it up. That's extremely not my kind of game, but I've seen enough people play MvC2 to know it might be yours. It feels like a weird identity crisis to have, though, when you consider this sort of "anything goes" combo system is paired with no crouch/no lows/no overheads that you often find in the recent trend of anti-move input fighting games. Except, this -isn't- that sort of game, though I think the designer may think it is. Every character's "simplified" special moves are either FF/BB/BF inputs, or charge moves. However, the buffer on a lot of these are absolutely massive, so I actually think to do anything more complex than the heavy pseudo infinite requires probably more mechanical training than it would have if it had a more conventional SF2 esque system, because it is -very- easy to accidentally do a wrong special when just trying to play footsies or put together more advanced combos. Also, this game treats throws like comboable unblockables, and those very often have input overlaps that can make doing some seemingly easy combos quite tricky. The game is in early access and still has plenty of time to polish out the above things, but as it is right now, I think the battle system is a lot more for combo video makers than it is for neutral lovers. Aesthetically: I love the hand painted watercolor look, and I know enough about animation to know that the choice made to go for non-pixelated 2D spritework was probably a great undertaking for (what I am assuming is) a solo dev. There are certain things I really like the look of, but I also think the between-frameless animation lets down the game's looks a little bit. The animation just looks like it needs more frames, and it's not an issue the game would've had had it gone the pixel route. So, uh, I'm glad they tried something new, I really am, but that's also an area that I think time will help with a lot. Story: An area this game surprised me in is its story. Without giving too much away, the game opens with a character that is not select-able, who has just suffered some sort of massive brain injury. I'm not through much of it yet but within the first minute there's a very strong implication that the events of the story are taking place within his comatose mind, and I just don't think that's been done much at all in the fighting game space. Events play out via a visual novel interface occasionally interrupted by battle, with a lot of lovely sketchy/watercolor art and fun writing to keep things moving. That combined with the quite nice fantasy RPG-appropriate synth orchestra gives this move quite a lot of life, and makes this a worthy novelty among other games in the genre. I'm not normally a single player fighting game guy and I'll admit my journey through this one's only just begun, but I am pretty intrigued to know where its going. I think there's a LOT of love in this project and my hope is that by the time it leaves early access, the gameplay part is ironed out to match the level of detail the story has clearly already had planned out. I'll be keeping my eye on this.