5 yeas ago I played this weird little Japanese fighting made by the creators of Melty Blood. Nothing in that game made sense, but it was amazing. Well, that weird little game with its weird long title got an even weirder and longer title and is back as, um... Under Night In-Birth Exe: Late[CL-R]. Yeah, don't even try to make heads or tails of it, what you need to know is that it's an anime 2-D fighting game that looks like Guilty Gear but plays more like Street Fighter Alpha, if that makes any sense. In any case, it's really good, alright?
As with most 2-D fighters published by ArkSys, the game offers a healthy plethora of modes: Arcade, Chronicles, Versus, Online, Score Attack, Time Attack, Survival, Training, Tutorial and Mission. Most are pretty self explanatory, Mission mode being a set of combo challenges unique to each character that get tougher as you go down the list, tutorial is a very in-depth guide in how to play this game and could help you with any other fighting game. Chronicles could've been exactly what I wanted from the last game, but my wish was twisted into a boring facsimile. Y'see, it's a 22-chapter long visual novel style thing. There are no fights in these, just story and story and more story, and it's SO BORING. It's written like Blazblue, so there's a ton of inane dialogue that dwells on the small stuff and goes on and on and on. I'm no stranger to visual novels, and I enjoy text-based games, but this is just exposition with no gameplay, and they go for a very purple prose styled narrative, dwelling on what the point-of-view character is feeling or thinking all the time. I wanted a proper explanation to what was going on with the first version of the game, but not like this. Not like this. As for the Arcade Mode, the few story tidbits cover the same story that the first iteration of the game covered, although the 6 new characters get their own new bits, for what it's worth.
When I first played the game, it had 16 characters. Since this is it's third iteration I would've hoped we'd be on 24 or 25, but no, we just hit 21 characters. 20 characters is more than fine for a competitive fighting game, but considering this is an additive series, I expected more. The five new characters that have joined the roster are great, save for Maki who seems to have lost her way from a waifu-fighter like Asuka 120% or Arcana Heart. Each character starts off with 20 different color schemes, and you can unlock 20 more for each, for a grand total of 40 color palettes per character, not too shabby!
Little has changed as far as the game goes. There are a couple of new things you can do with your energy gauge, it received its mandatory balance changes, but the brunt of the game remains the same, and that's just fine, because the game is fantastic. You get four buttons A-B-C-D, the first three being attack buttons and the D button can be used for your ultimate attack or a veil-cancels. The game is fast, but not as fast as Guilty Gear, and there's a lot of freedom when it comes to making combos. It feels good and it looks good. It's definitely very easy to play, since connecting moves is simple, but it's got a very high skill ceiling if you want to really get good. Plus, if you're lazy you can just mash the A button for an auto-combo, but making your own combos is really fun in this game, so I'd avoid it.
The game's key mechanic is the GRD gauge. As you deal damage you'll fill a gauge that lies next to your energy gauge, and every few seconds the game will buff whoever had the highest GRD by the time. This means that the player that's doing better will get a few advantages. It's not so huge an advantage that whoever is losing will lose even harder, but the GRD is a good reason to do better. I like this momentum-based gameplay a lot, I thought it was a great idea back then, and it still is.
There's a very weird quirk with this game, any time you suspend the game, it will make you lose whatever you were doing. Had a good winning streak in Survival mode? Hope you didn't suspend the game, because the game will force you into the Lose screen. Heck, this goes on for Arcade Mode too. I don't know why this happens, but I don't like it.
I really like Under Night In-Birth, if you ask me, it's one of the best modern fighting games out there. I also like the fact that it's one of the very few completely new fighting game IPs that's been made in decades. Regardless, 5 years since I played the original release, I'm somewhat disappointed that so little has changed or been added to the game. I would've been quite happy just with more characters, but two iterations later and we've barely gotten to 21 characters, it's kind of a letdown, y'know?
9.0 out of 10
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